Gunmen the Product of Poverty, N.Y. World Says

That racial connections have nothing to do with gunmen gangs so prominent recently in New York, is the opinion of the New York World which refers editorially to the recent killing of Kid Droppor by Louis Cohen.

“Ethnologists who observe the boiling and bubbling of New York’s melting-pot find unusual interest in the fact that many of the metropolitan gunmen gangs are organized on the basis of one race, one gang”, the World asserts.

“Sometimes, as in the case of the youth with the skinny wrists who killed the rival gang leader near the Essex Market Court, the outlaw groups are of Semitic origin. In other instances they are Irish, Negro. American Italian – any and all of the branches of the families of man.

“The answer to the involved question is not that there is any more or less inherent viciousness in one race than another. It does not yield to an argument based on the distance of a race from the dawn of civilization, for if it did, the Jews, most ancient and orderly of civilised peoples, would produce no gunmen.

“The answer is to be found in the formula of numbers plus concentration plus poverty plus modern city politics. No foreign colony in New York has produced gangs of gunmen until the numbers of that colony became vast in living places concentrated and shabby When those conditions were realized the natural evils of crowded city life produced bad characters and politics instantly began to make use of these.”