Back in nineteen ninety something, juvenile violence was such a hot topic in the Twin Cities that I was tasked with writing a very dense story about it for the Sun Journal headlined: “Under age: under attack.”

Oh, the local population was shocked, all right. There were home invasions that left old folks tied to chairs, the contents of their jewelry boxes ransacked.

There were stabbings, including one where a cab driver’s throat was slashed by a group of teens he had driven to a church parking lot in Auburn.

There were even hints of gang activity, with tales of initiation rituals and organized violence that swept the area.

And when it was time for those young culprits to be led into court, we in the media had no misgivings about covering the affairs because, after all, these were kids 16 and 17 years old, which is plenty old enough to face public consequences as well as legal ones.

“Most juveniles who were involved with guns or shootings or violent crimes were bound over and tried as adults back then,” former probation officer Pauline Gudas tells me. “There were few exceptions.”

Back then, it was shocking to see some 16-year-old dragged into court for slashing a cab driver’s throat, sure enough.

So, what to think about the news that the suspect who opened fire on Pierce Street last week was all of 14 years old? Or to learn that this wasn’t the first barely-pubescent kid to be brought to justice for violent crime here in recent years?

When it comes to Lewiston’s current problem with frequent gun violence, it’s not unusual to see kids as young as 14 involved in the fray.

One woman, who lives along Pine Street, insists she sees children even younger than that — as young as 10 or 11 years old — hanging with the rough types at all hours on the corners near her home.

It’s shocking, oh yes. And disturbing.

And yet over the past year or so, plenty of people who live smack dab in the middle of Lewiston’s most troubled area have been whispering in my ear about this trend.

“Many of them seem to be preteen,” one woman tells me, from her apartment down in the area of Pierce Street.

She doesn’t know what to make of it, this lady whom I’ll call CJ. Maybe, she muses, gang members who populate the city are pulling younger kids into the lifestyle. Maybe they recruit these children to use as foot soldiers in their turf wars because younger folks generally see more lenience when they enter the court system.

But watching them from behind her curtain, CJ also wonders if some of these kids are gravitating to a criminal lifestyle on their own because they don’t know any other way to survive on the mean streets.

“I get the impression that a couple of them are trying to make names for themselves,” CJ says.

For some, though, that’s a tough sell. It’s tough from the get-go to believe that children of such a tender age are naturally developing criminal behaviors on their own, in spite of what we’ve learned from reading and re-reading “Lord of the Flies.”

Another woman I’ll call Emma says it’s hard to imagine kids that young are engaging in “bang-bang, shoot-em-up violence with the intent to kill” without the approval, or perhaps direction, of someone older.

Emma, like many others who stay alert to all the nuances of city violence, has heard the stories about warring gangs in Lewiston.

On one side, you have an organized group that centers around Knox Street in the heart of the residential area. On the other side is a gang concentrated at Hillview Apartments on the outskirts.

When these two gangs get into conflict, according to the scuttlebutt, the result is gunplay in one of those areas or the other; often in broad daylight and where people are congregated for community events.

There are rumors, more widespread than you might imagine, that death vows have been made, with members of one group promising to kill members of the other by the end summer.

Does it sound so outlandish, in view of what we’ve experienced already in this embattled city?

One woman who works in the field of youth justice doesn’t discount gang activity as a possible cause of recent violence. But she has caveats.

“It’s possible that organized groups and individuals are influencing youth here,” she says. “There are certainly adults who prey on younger adolescents. That said, organized gangs in Lewiston don’t operate in the same way they do in larger cities, so it’s important not to overstate their role.”

According to the same woman — who provided information only on the promise of anonymity — public perception of youth in Lewiston may exacerbate the problems within that demographic. It becomes, she implies, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

“What feels almost as shocking than the violence itself,” she says, “is the misleading narratives and hateful comments circulating about our youth.

“When those narratives are repeated often enough, they begin to feel real, and eventually, our young people may start to believe them. We need to shift the narrative to recognize their potential, resilience and worth.”

Police, tasked with hauling in younger and younger children for adult crimes, are plenty aware of the influence of gangs, in particular those centered around Knox Street and Hillview Apartments. One of their officers in particular is assigned to investigate such matters.

“We have an officer assigned to the Safe Streets Task Force, which is overseen by the FBI,” says Lewiston police Lt. Derrick St. Laurent. “They do a lot of gangs/organized crime work. Our school resource officers are also working on identifying groups of youths who are at high risk for violent behavior.”

The kids that tend to be associated with those known gangs, St. Laurent says, are between the ages of 12 and 18 years of age.

We fret often, many of us, about the possibility of kids getting caught in the crossfire when this kind of unrestrained violence thunders across the downtown. But what do you say to the fact that kids themselves might be the source of much of the violence to begin with?

It feels to me that Lewiston is having its watershed moment when it comes to the public violence that has plagued it for so long. There are certain matters that are seldom discussed by a society that wants to be sensitive and restrained instead of forthright and brutally honest about its problems.

All those years ago, the newspaper produced that “Under age: Under attack” story as if the young offenders themselves were the victims of all this violence rather than the perpetrators of it.

Now they’re under age and we’re the ones under attack, and man, it’s time for some frank talk before Lewiston makes national news again for something that is currently only whispered about.

It’s pretty shocking, all right, when 14-year-olds are arrested for lighting up streets with gunfire.

What will be even worse is when this kind of thing becomes so commonplace, it doesn’t shock us at all.