Keep This Out of Libraries. Build Us Up Better.

 The suspect, Deshawn Thomas, was arrested as he tried to enter a nearby library a few hours after he had fired one shot at the head of a man who was sitting on a curb in downtown St. Louis, Detective Marco Christlieb of the St. Louis Police Department said in a brief interview on Tuesday night.

...

The police said that Mr. Thomas and the victim had been fighting that morning at a nearby Shell gas station before the shooting.

Mr. Thomas ran off after the shooting, and the police caught up with him about 2:40 p.m.*, the authorities said. 

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* Right before school's start letting out...

Couldn't we invest at least a few billion to build drop-in places, or meal-and-cot-and tv-and-computer-community-centers for adults, rather than making libraries the public places of refuge for our unhoused needing places to recharge?

Libraries should be escape places for those using their minds;  if we take that away and make it unsafe to visit our public places for readers, we'll slip even further into worshipping Weapons over developing Brains.

Keep this madness out of the libraries by providing more desireable public places for our mentally ill adults to retreat?  You see it everywhere now.  And as the financial inequality grows in our shared country, and the affluent are ceding more of our public spaces to shelter in their own private digs,  their own worlds are getting smaller and smaller and smaller....

Pretty soon, they won't recognize America as we once were at all.  Sad.