I shoot, therefore I am (not)

It's not OK to shoot anyone once late at night anymore - it's not enough.
In Newark, a gun battle between a teenager and a man broke out this Sunday in broad daylight. A total of 18 shots were exchanged between the two, with the teenager running and cradling his wounded arm while continuing to pursue and shoot at the man. The teenager, incredibly, fell to the street right next to his assailant, but kept right on firing, 12 shots in all, before staggering to his feet and collapsing again a few feet away. Both of the the shooters died.
I know what some people are thinking (if you're out there at all): Let them rot in hell together. It was in Newark, both guys were into the drug economy somehow, and both had long criminal records. It's a societally-designated free-fire zone, though only three blocks from the mayor's home.
But while I was in Boston last summer, a teenager got up from his seat one afternoon on a subway car, walked out to the platform at a stop, then turned around and fired at the teen he had been seated next to. In Philly someone was shot on a crowded bus, and deliverymen and utility men have been shot and killed as well. All in front of sometimes dozens of witnesses.
Some Penn professor explained that the shooters are exacting revenge, in 60s-style language, on "the establishment" or something like "the social order."
Since when are delivery and utility men anybody's idea of the top of the socio-political pyramid? They bring delivery of the basics to people who can't afford them. At least Obama, in his remarkable speech on race, acknowledged that legitimate fear of the underclass should not be labeled racist.
But it is the intimidation of witnesses that is most worrisome. At least The Times got a witness employed by a grocery store to give a description of the scene. The reporter also got "'a resident" to comment without his name. "If you open your mouth around here, someone will shut it for you," the nameless man said.
If this kind of urban terrorism is allowed to go unchecked, it ultimately results in a severe diminution of the very idea of democratic law enforcement, as people barricade themselves in apartments and profess to have seen nothing about a crime to police, though it obviously happened right in front of them. People living in constant fear will understandably accept any kind of law, so long as it frees "decent people" to live and go about their business unafraid. I've often wondered what people who call police fascist or racist would do if they encountered real state-sponsored terrorism. Drug dealers would be shot on site by police or the army, with no questions asked. Addicts would be rounded up and sent to concentrations camps, they way the Nazi's did.
Ultimately, as Jane Jacobs noted, it is not for the p0lice to truly control disorder. In a functioning urban area, the shopkeepers patrol and clean the area in front of their stores. Tenants look out their windows and upbraid rowdy or disruptive people (like I was in college), with the sense that police will back them up. Jacobs called this self-policing system "eyes on the street' in close-knit urban neighborhoods.
As for the police, they must get out of their air-conditioned or heated cars and walk the beat on foot, so that they get to be a known, benign presence. This is in contrast to what is called "stranger policing," where the cops only respond to emergencies and success is measured in response time to a crime, not on preventing it in the first place.
It's difficult not to lay some blame at the feet of video-game makers, and games like Grand Theft Auto. Most people can simply call it fantasy, but in the inner-city it's more like target-shooting practice.