St. Louis Alderman Charles Quincy Troupe, a Democrat representing the First Ward, is urging his constituents to start carrying firearms to protect themselves and their property. The St. Louis Police Department, he proclaimed, has lost the trust of the ward’s residents.

Mr. Troupe points to nine homicides this year in his north St. Louis neighborhood and notes that St. Louis Firefighter Leonard Riggins was shot last month (albeit in North St. Louis County) by a motorist he thought needed aid. He says he and his neighbors “are being terrorized by this criminal element out there.”

Mr. Troupe’s frustration and anger are understandable and are shared by many citizens. But the public has a right to expect a more thoughtful, more level-headed and better-informed response from public officials. To blame the police department for gun crime is like blaming the fire department for forest fires.

The 148 homicides committed in the city through October are heavily concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods, including those in Mr. Troupe’s First Ward. But there have been steady declines in other kinds of crime. If the police are as inept as Mr. Troupe alleges, why is crime down overall?
Indeed, with the city’s population higher than it was in 1990, why are homicides themselves down substantially from what they were a decade ago and from the high of 267 homicides in 1993?

Undaunted by difficult facts, Mr. Troupe — a longtime critic of the police department, both as a state legislator and as an alderman — wants more guns and is trying to recruit members of the community to train and apply for permits to carry concealed weapons.

If citizens want concealed-carry permits, that’s their right. But before they do, they should consider that most of the city’s homicides are gang- and/or drug-related; in many cases, both the victim and the shooter were armed. It is relatively rare for a person to be killed by a stranger.

Missouri already has experienced an explosion in applications for concealed-carry permits. The Missouri Highway Patrol reports that background investigations (necessary before the permits are issued by local authorities) rose statewide from 5,072 in 2005 to 14,038 in 2008 (through November). In the city of St. Louis alone, 1,485 concealed-carry permits already have been issued — and homicides are up anyway.

Mr. Troupe is part of an aldermanic majority that wants control of St. Louis’ police department returned to the city. Along with Mayor Francis Slay, the aldermen support legislation that would abandon the current system, which dates back to the Civil War, by which the department is overseen by a five-person Board of Police Commissioners, four of whom are appointed by the governor.

If Mr. Troupe’s outburst is indicative of how public safety policy would be made under a city-run operation, St. Louisans might want to think twice about the movement toward local control.

Mr. Troupe says that his constituents’ “No. 1 priority is trying to keep their children alive. Their black, male children. And that’s a Herculean task.”

The priority, however, isn’t the problem. The problem, as University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld put it, is that Mr. Troupe’s proposed solution relies on the same “logic of young people on the street who are involved in gun violence: Everyone has a gun; I want one too.”