A quiet street in Roselle, New Jersey, became the front line in a disturbingly common American conflict last week, a scene where the fragile fabric of community safety was stretched to its limit by the threat of unchecked firepower.
It was just before midnight on Thursday when Roselle Police officers, responding to reports of a large group preparing for a fight, descended upon the corner of West 1st Avenue and Locust Street.
What they encountered was not merely a disorderly crowd of juveniles, but a gathering that would quickly yield a cache of weapons more suited to a battlefield than a suburban parking lot…