Word: bensons
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...used Remington semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun. He was pleasantly surprised by its heft as he slid it into a canvas bag and scurried back to his truck. At 16, Doug was finally a force to be reckoned with at Father Flanagan High, in his white, working-class neighborhood of Benson and on the streets of Omaha. "If you have a gun, you have power. That's just the way it is," he says. "Guns are just a part of growing up these days." Doug felt older already. With the radio blaring heavy metal, he smiled all the way home...
...crackle of gunfire echoes from the poor, urban neighborhoods to the suburbs of the heartland. Omaha, with a population of 340,000, is just an average Midwestern city, which is why the story of its armed youth shows how treacherous the problem has become. The Omaha neighborhood of Benson, a tidy grid of suburban-style homes on the northwest side, has been taken by surprise. Three dozen shaken parents and troubled teenagers gathered on a rainy Tuesday night in May at the Benson Community Center, bracing for summer's onslaught and groping for solid ground in a world where cruising...
Doug floors his Ford truck through a yellow light, turns sharply and then slows, carefully checking out the other cars as he cruises the largely white working-class neighborhoods of Benson. He points to a light blue, wood-frame house. Dozens of pellet holes from two shotgun blasts scar the wall on either side of the front door. In the driveway, an elderly man tinkers with a blue Chevy Caprice, which is also riddled with holes. Doug drives by slowly, confident he won't be recognized. "We did that three months ago. Monday night about...
Most Omaha residents used to dismiss teenage gunplay as a problem confined to the north side of Omaha, which is largely black and poor. That comfortable notion was shattered last August by a seven-minute fire fight among mostly white teenagers in Benson. "I've lived in this area all my life, and now boys are shooting at each other for the hell of it," says Bonnie Elseman, a single mother in the neighborhood. "I now realize that I owe the blacks in Omaha an apology for ignoring all the shootings because I thought it was just their problem...
...practiced, the virtues of restraint and of linking sex to emotional commitment and marriage. "It used to be easy to say it's just wrong to have sex before marriage. You could expect churches to say that, adults from many walks of life to somehow communicate that," notes Peter Benson, president of Minneapolis-based Search Institute, a research organization specializing in child and adolescent issues. "We went through a sexual revolution since the '60s that poked a major hole in that. And nothing has come along to replace it. What's responsible sexuality now? Does it mean no sex unless...