Philadelphia Mayor John Street made a remark today which I think says a lot while appearing to say very little. In exasperation over recent shootings near Philadelphia's dysfunctional Olney High School, he once again echoed the familiar theme that "arguments" are at the root of the problem:

Yesterday's violence outside the school comes at a time that the city's pervasive gun culture shows no sign of flagging. For the first four months of this year, Philadelphia's homicide tally is keeping pace with 2005, when the total was 380 - the biggest since 1997.

And 10 youths under age 18 have been killed by guns in Philadelphia this year, six of them in April.

At a hastily called news conference last night, Mayor Street addressed the matter.

"We need to raise the level of civility," Street said. "The slightest indignity should not be resolved with the use of a handgun."

(Emphasis added.)

With all respect to Mayor Street, though, I think it does a disservice to the innocent victims of shooters when the problem is characterized as a lack of civility, and a murderous state of mind is reduced to "the slightest indignity." (Right now, I'm just cranking out another blog post on the gun issue, but if someone I loved had been shot and I read that the cause was "incivility," I'd be upset beyond words.)

We all face indignities in life. Lack of civility is a problem, and I have condemned it many times in my blog. I say this knowing that I am not perfect, and I am not always as civil as I would like to be.

At the risk of being repetitive, however, the indignities of life and the lack of civility are a far cry from pulling out a gun and shooting someone.

Pulling out a gun and shooting someone is not an indignity, nor is it incivility. It is pure, unmitigated evil.

Shooters should be prosecuted and sent to prison or executed. But that's easier said than done. For starters, the police work involved in identifying and arresting the shooters is an enormous, uphill battle, and it's hard, hard work locating witnesses -- much less getting people to testify. In Philadelphia many of the shooters get off Scot-free because of witness intimidation, and there's a well-orchestrated anti "snitching" campaign by criminal gangs. Juries are understandably afraid to convict. Judges do not like handing down stiff sentences. Prisoners often end up on parole.

Like it or not, there is a tendency to run away from facing up to the existence of evil, and a strong impulse to forgive and excuse evil doers. In my view, minimizing the evil by calling it "incivility" actually helps enable it. But I understand the motivation. When something is difficult to do, none of us really want to do it. And blaming something external and tough to define -- a "gun culture" -- offers an easy way to avoid the hard work that needs to be done.

But the "lack of civility" of which Mayor Street complains is much easier to define than "gun culture," because it is everywhere. Almost everyone is less than civil from time to time. If, as the formula goes, incivility plus guns means shootings, then our only hope is to get rid of guns, because incivility is a fact of life we cannot change. I suspect that Mayor Street knows that incivility will not go away, and that his call for civility will be ineffective.

Logic, of course, has nothing to do with it. If Mayor Street wanted to be logical, he would urge citizens to stop shooting each other. But that would be seen as ludicrous, because evil, criminally-inclined people do not listen to the pleas of law abiding people that they be good. I think it is tough for the mayor and people who think like him to recognize that because shooting people without legal justification is evil, that the people who shoot others without justification are by definition evil. They might also be bad mannered, uncivil, "slightly indignant" -- whatever we might call it. But there are plenty of other rude and indignant people who are not murderers.

I'm sorry, but focusing on manners in the face of murder makes about as much sense as asking Miss Manners to weigh in on Charles Manson.