FAYETTEVILLE — Newsrooms can sometimes be home to some gallows humor.
On slower news days, it’s not unusual to hear a journalist joke about how a dramatic shooting would liven things up a bit.
In reality, none of the journalists who have made such an offhand remark mean any harm. When it comes to our newsroom, staff members live in this community and want it to be what we believe it to be: the best place to live, work, make friends and raise families.
When you’re part of a venture that deals with life’s tragedies, though, humor can be a way to let out a little stress. It’s similar with emergency rooms, police departments, ambulance services, funeral homes and the like.
One of the reasons we’ve been able to joke about it in Fayetteville is such violence doesn’t happen often. Yes, it happens, but Fayetteville isn’t Memphis or Little Rock when it comes to gun violence.
With Thursday’s exchange of gunfire on Boxley Avenue as the latest of four recent neighborhood shootings in town, the humor is quickly dissipating.
Police say they are isolated incidents. Perhaps they aren’t directly linked. But they certainly appeared related in one way: Individuals or groups (we’re not supposed to say gangs, right?) decide to settle their differences by turning Fayetteville streets and neighborhoods into their personal shooting galleries.
At this writing, police had arrested three men in connection with the Boxley Avenue incident, which officers described as a dispute between “rival groups.” The people involved fired many rounds, but none of the intended targets suffered major wounds.
What does that tell you? It’s a bunch of guys packing heat who have little to no training on firing handguns and who believe they can just point guns in the general direction of their target before they pull the trigger. It’s a recipe for tragedy when the gunfire is happening in neighborhoods.
One man, police said, was busy collecting the spent bullet casings from the ground when officers arrived. He tried to casually walk away with them before the officers demanded he stop. He was arrested. He was charged, among other things, with tampering with evidence.
That these guys had guns to begin with, and that one spent time reportedly trying to cover up evidence, suggests the gun violence was a premeditated response. These rival groups have determined this is an acceptable way to settle their disputes, so they come prepared for it.
Perhaps I should be a bit more compassionate, but I could not care less whether two or more guys who decide to settle their business with handguns manage to kill each other. I wish they wouldn’t, but if they insist, I wish they’d be skilled enough to hit each other and nobody else in the process.
When bullets fly indiscriminately, the sad reality is some innocent bystander is, sooner or later, going to get hit. In one of two recent shooting incidents on Curtis Avenue, bullets zoomed through the home of a guy who had nothing to do with the dispute that led to gunfire.
There’s no value in blowing things out of proportion, but would it be doing so by suggesting Fayetteville has much to lose if it doesn’t crack down on perpetrators of such unwelcome violence? We have much at stake.
Anyone who has invested his life in Fayetteville wants this to be an unquestionably safe place to live.
Fayetteville spends more than half a million dollars a year to promote itself as a great place to visit and live. It doesn’t take many indiscriminate shootings to erode the work accomplished through that investment of tax dollars.
The University of Arkansas has to sell Fayetteville as a great, safe place for parents to send their kids for continuing their education. If I’m a parent in Vilonia, Fordyce or Mount Ida who’s thinking about my kid heading off to the Ozark hills, I’m not sure I’m comforted at all by police saying a string of shootings is unrelated. Randomness does not make these incidents easier to accept.
Nobody can stop all violence. Police have made arrests, however. If the evidence supports conviction, here’s hoping prosecutors find a way to send those guilty of damaging our town and frightening our neighbors a clear message: This behavior is not welcome here, and you’ll pay a hefty price for it.
Greg Harton is editor of the Northwest Arkansas Times.