Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 5, 1991                   TAG: 9103061111
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DRUGS & GUNS/ ROANOKE'S PATTERN OF MURDER

They don't come as a surprise because they fit a pattern. The strength of that pattern was documented Sunday in a package of stories and other information by Roanoke Times & World-News reporter Laurence Hammack.

What's shocking is that the pattern continues. By and large in Roanoke, as in America generally, murder is predictable. Yet Americans accept the information, and file it away. Despite the city's and the nation's knowledge of how murder is likely to occur, nobody knows quite what to do about it.

Not every murder in Roanoke over the past two years fits the pattern, of course. But you'd have a high batting average if during that period you had predicted that the next murder would (1) be of a young black man by a young black man, (2) be committed with a gun, (3) involve drugs or alcohol, and (4) occur in a small wedge of inner-city Northwest.

Indeed, you could have been far more precise and still hit .200: About a fifth of the killings in Roanoke over the past two years, it was reported, involved members of one loose-knit group of teen-agers.

Drug-related killings may not top the list of things that worry most Roanokers, black or white. But it raises worrisome questions.

Why for some young black men does the long-term future seem so dim that they're willing to trade that future for short-term drug profits?

Why is there enough of a demand for illegal drugs, from people with the money to pay for them, to make drug trafficking lucrative?

Why do deadly weapons fall so easily into the hands of people who demonstrably should not have them?

And, the most important question of all: How can the drug-and-death cycle be broken?

Much as we all would like to find a solution, a magic bullet that cures rather than kills, none seems to exist. Perhaps the first step toward proving that the problem is soluble is understanding that it has no single answer.