But Mullins shrugged when he thought about recent random attacks by teens on unsuspecting victims.
"I feel where they're coming from," he said, "but I wouldn't want them to think that about me."
A spate of seemingly random and violent attacks by juveniles - including savage beatings of senior citizens and an unprovoked attack on a college student in a Center City cab - has again forced Philadelphia to look in the mirror and ask why our kids are filled with such rage.
Blaming their parents
Vietnam veteran Edward Schaefer, 64, was walking last month along 5th Street in Olney, a few blocks from his home, when a group of young thugs jumped him, pummeling him hard enough to fracture his face.
"There's information we got from a friend of those kids that [showed] the whole thing was planned. They were going to 'go f--- somebody up,' " a police supervisor with knowledge of the case told the Daily News. "It's a sad thing these a--holes picked on an elderly war veteran."
Two suspects in the case were sentenced to the maximum of four years in a juvenile detention facility yesterday.
Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University professor who studies adolescent behavior, attributed the attacks to the teens' upbringing - or lack thereof.
"Individuals who behave that way typically have been very poorly raised," he said. "Most individuals learn through the course of being socialized by their parents to control their aggressive impulses and to not hurt individuals."
Everett Gillison, the city's deputy mayor for public safety, describes the Schaefer attack as a "complete breakdown" on the part of the attackers and the job that their parents did raising them.
"While some would say I'm being hypercritical of people who are overburdened and overworked . . . we need to put the onus of responsibility squarely where it needs to be - and that's on parents," Gillison said.
