Real men use their fists, not guns

Real men use their fists, not guns

Todd Maisel/New York Daily News

Police search for clues in the shooting of Lorenzo Simon and his 2-year-old son, Quadire, in Herbert Von King Park in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on Friday.

Sometimes kids come to the park to shoot hoops.

Sometimes one comes to shoot a father and his 2-year-old baby boy in broad daylight.

On Friday at 11:30 a.m., Joelle Dempster, 21, was playing a basketball game called Horse against Devere Mitchell, 20, on the hoops court in Herbert von King Park in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

“You never gonna make this shot, watch,” Dempster said, bouncing the ball high in the air and then head-butting it toward the 10-foot high steel hoop. It bounced off the rim. “Damn,” said Dempster.

Damn lucky for Mitchell, who at a foot shorter than Dempster would’ve had to duplicate the Globetrotter-style shot to keep pace with the game in which you have to match the oddball shots of your opponent.

I asked them if they’d heard about the shots fired from a handgun 26 hours earlier that wounded Lorenzo Simon, 38, and his son, Quadire, 2, as they played about 50 yards away â€" where yellow crime tape still fluttered under a bullet-colored sky.

“Yeah, heard about that,” said Dempster. “Shooter said the guy shot his brother or something. But even if that’s true, you don’t shoot a baby, man.”

Dempster shook his head as Mitchell stood at the foul line, leaned backwards and flipped the ball over his head at the basket. Right through the hoop.

Little guys learn to master such indefensible outside shots. Guys of even smaller manhood often use guns.

I told them that when I was growing up in Brooklyn in the late 1960s and 1970s a guy who packed a gun was thought of as a punk, a coward with no onions. A creep afraid of getting his butt kicked in a fair fistfight. But that even the guys who lost a “fair one” in a schoolyard gained resounding neighborhood respect for having the heart to duke it out Brooklyn-style. The most respected guy in every New York neighborhood was not a hood, gangbanger, gunslinger. He was the guy with a pair of gleaming Golden Gloves dangling around his neck.

The second-most respected guy was the one who lost in the Gloves because he had the guts to climb those brave three steps to the squared circle of truth.

Guys with smooth hands who packed a rod or a blade were considered total wimps.Real men don’t need guns.

This Wayne LaPierre of the NRA who came out talking tough about the glories of guns in schools two hours after a national moment of silence for the shot-dead of Sandy Hook is a two-bit gun punk who would faint for a 10-count at a Golden Gloves weigh-in.

So two weeks into 2013 I was explaining to these two kids shooting hoops just yards from where a baby was shot the day before that in my Brooklyn of old guns were only for punks.

“Still that way today,” said Dempster. “I hate guns. You got beef, kick his a-- or shut up.”

Authorities says that Lorenzo Simon was playing with his boy in the grass inside the fence when a punk with a gun named Jamal Ali, 19, appeared on the pathway, feeling big aiming his gun at a father and 2-year-old baby.

Then he opened fire with .45, hitting Lorenzo Simon in the right side of his torso and grazing his toddler’s arm.

Less than a month after 20 kids were killed in a blizzard of bullets in an elementary school in Connecticut in the middle of Brooklyn there are still gun punks evil enough to shoot a kid five years younger than the oldest victims in Sandy Hook.

And we actually have a debate going on in this gun sick country?

Excuse me, guns are a plague loose in the land that doesn’t even spare toddlers.

Saying there are two sides to the gun argument in America is like saying there was two sides to battling polio and AIDS. There can’t be halfway measures for the small and inadequate people who feel like they’ve bought manhood in a can by cocking a gun in their wimpy hands.

Both are in stable condition in Kings County Hospital.

Jamal Ali, who has three priors for assault, gun possession and menacing, has been charged with two counts of attempted murder, two counts of assault, and two counts of possession of a gun.

“You could understand gang beef,” said Dempster. “But shoot a baby? You belong in a cell till you’re an old man.”

“They gotta crack down harder on the guns,” said Mitchell, shooting a left-handed hook in plain view of the scene of the shooting of a father and a baby.

dhamill@nydailynews.com