Gunshots

I normally like to blog about happy things, the cheerful sights and events in my city and beyond. I was actually just writing some lighthearted piece about the neighborhood when I heard what happened last Saturday just down the block from me.

The story and news video clip is here, but to sum it up, a 19-year-old student at Kansas City Art Institute was shot 8 times after refusing to buy drugs from some guy who confronted him on the street. The student had been walking home from work at the time, down the same sidewalks I walk or ride by several times a week.

While trying to find out some more information about this, I came across the blog of one of the nearby residents that heard the shots and screams and ran out to help the victim. The dude (I recognized him as one of the guys who builds and rides around on those freakishly huge bikes) gives a pretty harrowing account (link no longer live) of the sensory intake surrounding the event.

It's easy to be cynical about crime in the city, to either ignore it or invent some justification about why it must have happened. And I know innocent people get messed with every day in this town. But this happened down the street to one of the kids I see walking by all the time. Just imagining that dude getting shot so many times and being tended to by a fellow student while bleeding half to death is pretty distressing.

I suppose I could follow fellow twenty-something trends and buy up in Waldo, Brookside or across state line, but I live here because it's a liveable balance between crack zombies and dog-walking suburban drones. The art students, however, are sort of limited in that most of them need to live near campus. It's a strange contrast, really -- you've got this idyllic little pocket of Kansas City with KCAI, Southmoreland Park, the Nelson, and the Plaza just to the west, but stray north a block or two and all of a sudden you've crossed into a zone where someone might shoot you 8 times because you don't want to buy drugs.

You've also got to wonder what goes through a shooter's mind when they decide to do something like that. In a few seconds you can end or seriously mess up someone's entire life as well as bring a lot of grief to their family and friends. Thankfully the kid didn't die in this case (if he had, I suspect it would have been a much bigger story), but he sustained some pretty heavy injuries and lost an eye.

Most message board posters on stories like this will either a) blame the victim for being out so late at night b) advocate gun control and/or carrying concealed weapons -or- c) turn it into a racial issue, point fingers and cite the downfall of society as we know it.

The (sad) thing is, these kinds of things happen all over town. I doubt people in other neighborhoods feel any less upset by a shooting down their own street than I feel about one in mine. You have to wonder why it is -- beyond socioeconomic and racial factors -- that one neighborhood gets stuck with the stigma of being a bad neighborhood while another gets a reputation for security. I'm not talking Leawood vs. KCMO, either, I'm talking block-to-block, Hyde Park to Ivanhoe, any juncture of space that could be labeled a community.

For people my age, the word "community" generally conjures up associations of meetings, signs, volunteer work, boring luncheons and tea parties and other things we feel there will always be plenty of other and/or older folks to take part in. But community as a concept is actually a lot more basic and integral. To build and be part of a community, people have to look out for each other.

I can't say I do much, but I try and do what I can to be a good citizen. I've given people rides home before in the rain (yes, strangers, and of different ages and races). I'll hand out the odd bit of change, food, beer, etc. if someone asks nicely. I even bought a soda for a kid at the QuikTrip the other day when he realized he didn't have any money (not a monumental deed, but I doubt he'll be shooting at me anytime soon at least).

I'm not about to suggest that we all wear name tags, but we could certainly stand to be a bit friendlier or at least more respectful to one another. If we viewed each other as fellow citizens and not anonymous adversaries in some high-stakes urban drama/video game, this kind of thing will be less likely to happen.

In the meantime, I'll just spell it out simply for those of you trolling through local blogs while polishing your firearms:

Stop. Shooting. Art. Kids.

Please.