by Terry Golway

About the author: Terry Golway is a columnist for America, a weekly Jesuit publication.

The corner of 105th Street and Amsterdam Avenue on Manhattan’s West Side seems an innocuous enough place as urban areas go. It has its immigrant-run shops, its working-class families and its ever-present vagrants. Children wearing backpacks scamper across the busy street every morning on their way to the local public school around the block. In morning’s light it seems an unremarkable, workaday urban neighborhood.

Danger Even in Normal Neighborhoods

So it is. But even unremarkable neighborhoods are fraught with hidden dangers these days. A few weeks ago, 9-year-old John Valentine was on his way to school when the sidewalk turned into a free-fire zone. Little John had walked into the middle of a gun battle between two gangs...