This is an opinion column. Get my weekly newsletter, The Barbershop. Sign up here for free!

Fourteen lives shattered in the night, two of them extinguished.

We all want the same next: Justice, and for deadly gun violence to end – in Montgomery and beyond.

We want real solutions, and that’s not a quick fix.

It’s not the National Guard.

Now, let me make this clear, for the people in the back, for former U.S. House member Jerry Carl and other Republicans frothing to flood Montgomery with troops: Demanding viable solutions to gun violence does not absolve, excuse or in any way diminishes blame.

All of those who sprayed gunfire on a crowded downtown street last Saturday night should be found, charged, tried and prosecuted to the fullest extent. And then some.

Carl wants to storm Montgomery. “If they want to send the troops to Montgomery or Birmingham, we will take them tonight,” he blared during a candidates forum in Mobile County Monday night. “So please send them….We need to clean our streets up where they’re safer.”

Sir, this is for you: If the perpetrators fired with police 50 feet away, what makes you think they wouldn’t do the same with National Guard troops nearby?

Sending camouflaged men and women trained for war into the state capital won’t fix anything. Sending troops, untrained for law enforcement, for engaging communities, and certainly not for solving crimes, won’t fix crime in Montgomery.

Just as it hasn’t done in Washington, D.C. or Chicago. As it won’t do Memphis. Or any place Donald Trump claims.

A bazillion National Guard troops will not fix what’s broken in Montgomery. It won’t fix what’s been broken and brewing for generations in America’s largest cities. What’s now boiling over.

Their presence won’t fix broken families, broken neighborhoods, and certainly not broken children. Broken hopes.

A bazillion jobs would do far, far more.

Another point for clarity for the folks trying to sneak out: While claiming to quick-fix crime, while colluding to stem violence by threatening more violence, Republicans should glance in the mirror. What they’ll see is a party whose policies helped trigger the conditions that have us here.

I could go back centuries, but I’ll confine this to my lifetime and start with the so-called “war on drugs” ignited by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1971. (I was in high school.)

While the aim was initially touted as “prevention of new addicts, and the rehabilitation of those who are addicted,” years later Nixon’s chief policy advisor John Erlichman confessed that it was a ruse, a concert smoke machine that obscured the truth about the administration’s intentions.

Speaking to Dan Baum of Harper’s magazine, he said: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

Criminalize. Disrupt.

Chew on those words. And what they wrought.

Certainly, Democratic policies and actions bear equitable blame for the aftermath, for the damage. Nixon unquestionably struck the match, but both parties fanned the flames over decades of “tough on crime” policies that torched — er, “disrupted” — Black communities nationwide. That left families, neighborhoods and children smoldering like the residual ashes of an unrelenting California fire.

In eight years under President Ronald Reagan, the U.S. prison population almost doubled — from 329.000 to 627,000, with the growth disproportionately impacting the targeted Black communities. (See: Criminalize. Disrupt.)

Then came the gawdawful bipartisan 1994 “three strikes” crime bill that imposed mandatory life sentences upon anyone convicted of certain felony offenses if they had two prior convictions. No matter if those convictions were for nonviolent crimes. Nothing was too petty for prison, and the impact on Black communities, on Black families, was swift.

By 2016, 78.5 percent of those serving life sentences in federal prison were people of color — most of them Black men ripped from their families in communities where those seeds for their criminalization and destruction were planted decades before.

Enter the decline of industrialization that sucked jobs from our urban cores and left families unable to afford goods and services from merchants who ultimately abandoned those communities, too. Or simply failed.

Oh, and about those Republican policies that only put more guns on the street and make them as accessible as bubble gum.

A bazillion National Guard troops won’t fix that.

Having our Republican-led state government “flex” on Democratic-led cities with camouflaged troops, as Alabama’s frothing Republican leaders (and wannabe leaders) want to do, won’t fix that, either.

In blocking Trump’s deployment of federal troops in Chicago, U.S. District Judge April Perry said the National Guard troops are “not trained in de-escalation or other extremely important law enforcement functions that would help to quell these problems.”

They won’t fix generations of shredded families and depleted neighborhoods. Nor will it pour humanity into children who never had humanity extended to them.

They won’t resurrect communities where residents once believed they could get up, go to work and come home every day and provide for their family; where they could buy a home or a car and even afford quality medical care.

The kind of community I grew up in.

The deadly consequences of what was sown decades ago, and is still fed by lax gun policies, are being reaped now: Gunfire raining over petty beefs that used to be resolved with a bloody nose and few bruises. Too many caught in the crossfire of ignorance and hopelessness.

Young people shattering a Montgomery night and lives.

One of the most vociferous critics of Montgomery Mayor Stephen Reed is Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall. In the immediate wake of the mass shooting, the U.S. Senate-chasing Marshall said: “Though the blame lies with those who carelessly pulled the triggers, I continue to be troubled by the city leadership’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that they have a serious problem.”

Reed fired back: “If the attorney general ever wants to talk with me about what we’re doing, I’d be more than happy to sit with him, and I’ll go to him, tell him exactly what we’ve been doing. But I don’t need anybody lecturing me about crime.”

Marshall’s and Reed’s offices sit about a mile apart. Is it too much to ask that those who truly want to address crime convene?, To speak to — not at, or about — each other and commit to a real, multi-faceted effort to address the root causes of crime? An effort that ensures our youngest today and those yet to be born do not shatter the night or lives in any city?

Yet, people in the back: What we have is not a Montgomery problem or a Birmingham problem or a Memphis problem or a Chicago problem or a Portland problem. We have an American problem.

As long as our leaders keep pointing fingers, people will continue to point guns.