THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Whether it is New York, Boston or New Orleans, these cities have paid their dues and they won't let trouble keep them down. The latest example comes from New Orleans following the shooting and wounding of 19 people dueing a "second line" parade.

The police have released no motive, but people here by and large figured that it was the same old story: a young man with gun and a complaint spotted a rival and attacked.

When shootings like this happened in the past — and they have, sometimes deadly but almost never as brazenly — they often prompted a debate about street culture and violence, about the rolling crowds that form on such occasions and how much they may be to blame for what goes on in their orbit.

Several years ago, prompted by one of those shootings, the New Orleans police raised security fees for marching clubs so high that it seemed the tradition of these parades, put on for more than a century by black working-class New Orleanians, might be seriously curtailed, or end for good.

This time seems as if it will be different. Since Sunday afternoon, the mayor and the police chief have repeatedly and emphatically divorced the shooting from the occasion that it ruined. They have called the parades a crucial part of the city’s culture and even a bulwark against its seemingly ceaseless violence, an argument marchers have been making for years.

“The layers of this thing are really important, and that’s to understand what the origin of the violence is, what it’s connected to and what it’s not connected to,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who has long made a case for what he calls the city’s cultural economy. “This didn’t have anything to do with second lines, and it didn’t have anything to do with the rich cultural heritage of New Orleans.”

Sunday’s event was a so-called second line parade, the “second line” referring to all those who join in along the route and follow behind the band, making more of a rolling party than the kind of parade one simply watches. They take place nearly every Sunday between September and May, in the poor and working-class back streets of the city.

No, one mook with an NRA approved manhood isn't going to stop people from trying to bring some good into their lives.