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The older brother of one of my students was the target of the "altercation" yesterday afternoon. Five bullets were fired from one car towards another at the intersection of our school. One bullet grazed the brother's head, causing him to collide into a cement truck. A suspect (I'm unclear whether this was the brother or the shooter) then jumped out of the car and started running through the neighborhood and into the project housing, where police quickly caught him. Luckily no one bothered or attempted to run towards the school. A few teachers who glimpsed the scene saw the car's transmission fluid all over the road and instantly feared it was blood.

It's amazing that no one was seriously injured. My student was not at school today. I wonder how he's dealing with all this. I wonder how he deals (present continuous tense) with all this.

Two points. 1) Daniel, you may be right that this is a way of life, but it gives me pause and causes me to question how much do I want this to be part of my life, even tangentially. 2) At lunch, a few other teachers scoffed that it was clearly gang related. A student teacher (a social studies teacher, one who gets worked up about all the right social causes) began asking pointed questions: how do we know it's gang related? He's right. Suburban schools haul in psychologists whenever there's a school shooting and delve deeply into underlying causes of the violence or possible trauma of the victims, but when it's in a poor, minority neighborhood, everyone always assumes it's "just gang violence."