Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Snap, Crackle, POP!

It's Tuesday, the 3rd of July, and I find myself relaxing in my house on a pleasant summer evening. If you live in South Baltimore, by July 3rd you've probably grown accustomed to the snap and pop of illegal fireworks. They started up a few nights ago, far enough ahead of the 4th that at first I thought I'd heard gunshots. Now, as I often complained, mine is not the lowest-crime neighborhood in Baltimore, but there certainly aren't shootings going on, so I was concerned. After a few more pops, I realized that it was summer and that those must be firecrackers.

Tonight outside my window I caught a bit of conversation between some children. A girl's voice, it couldn't have belonged to someone older than 12 or so, said "...and the po-lice, they can't even tell the difference between them and gunshots," in reference to firecrackers.

Which leads me to wonder, can she? Isn't it kind of sad that it's a possibility?

1 comment:

Greg Eckenrode said...

Which would be worse: if she couldn't tell the difference between gunshots and fireworks, or if she was so familiar with gunshots that she was able to identify what type of gun it was from the sound?