Most towns and cities below a certain population size, or possessing a low enough historical homicide rate, start out each new year hoping no one will be murdered.
For Jonesboro, that hope for 2019 lasted a mere few hours. It would have bordered on wishful thinking anyway.
There hasn't been a zero-murder year in Jonesboro going back before 2002, although there have been a couple of years with only one homicide. In the latest FBI data, based on data collected in 2017, Jonesboro's murder rate averaged a killing a month.
This is shocking to longtime residents, and rightly so. The comments on news feeds following reports of a murder New Year's Day in a downtown neighborhood evoked images of people shaking their heads in bewilderment.
"W[hat] is happening to this town?"
"Wow. Those streets used to be friendly."
"Sad times in Jonesboro."
"This is becoming a regular thing."
"What is wrong with people?"
"Wow ... can't believe these same streets I used to walk down daily as a kid this is happening on."
"SO SICK OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE."
A 29-year-old suspect was taken into custody around 8:30 that same evening, his capture aided evidently by security cameras at the scene.
Incredibly, screenshots taken by news outlet NEA Report of the suspect's Facebook page show that he had posted photos of himself wearing a bulletproof vest and posing with a handgun and shotgun that very morning. One of the captions said, "I was high off gun powder when I went to jail," presumably referencing a hip-hop song, "High Off Gun Powder," by the late Fredo Santana.
The lyrics to that song are insightful. There's a popular understanding that rap music is full of profanity and violence and racial and sexual slurs, but most readers probably haven't analyzed any particular tune.
This song features quasi-rhyming verses depicting a barbarous, life-is-cheap mentality: drugs, guns, sex acts, killing, money, all in the crudest, coarsest, most curse-laden language possible.
Santana's music apparently reflected his life. He died at 27 from complications attending longtime drug abuse.
It's not surprising to see someone who spends much time listening to, and perhaps internalizing, the sentiments expressed by songs like that winding up neck-deep amid life's "harvest of thorns," to quote Goethe.
Words matter; they convey beliefs, values and convictions. What one hears, and what one says, is often a precursor to what one does. If kids aren't learning that truth, we must do a better job of teaching them.
Crime isn't some virus that mysteriously infects a community; it's a series of willful human behaviors for which the individuals responsible must bear accountability or civilization falters.
When reading statistics it's easy to forget that violent crime is typically an intimate personal act, carried out in close quarters, within touching distance. It creates rippling consequences of real destruction across local families.
Separate, disconnected criminal acts cannot be corrected with blanket solutions; only 44 of Arkansas' 502 towns and cities, for example, reported a murder in 2017.
We must fully understand our modern crime problem's genesis before we can solve it. Just as that hip-hop song lyric and others like it are utterly foreign to most working folks, so is the lawless, criminal subculture that frequently runs beneath the civil community surface. Fidelity to both is incompatible with productive citizenry.
If you went sale-shopping on New Year's Day in a city of any size, you likely passed a car carrying armed thugs. You may have walked by a robber or drug dealer packing heat. We live in an age of commuter crime, which brings criminals and illegal guns to all parts of town.
Politicians and pundits dominate the gun-control debate, but where gun control is needed most is among the poorly educated, profane, and low-earning or unemployed petty criminals. They're on a path to violent crime, but haven't arrived yet.
Those more interested in misdeeds and misdemeanors than education or employment have always been with us, even in colonial times. Their influence, however, was generally considered to be bad, and rarely were they given the privilege to cast ballots.
If the prevailing wisdom today is that the nation can be advanced through the increased political involvement of wrongdoers, then we have progressed to the point Benjamin Franklin famously warned about. Without a national wake-up call, we risk becoming the generation that couldn't keep the republic we were given.
Tuesday's shooting in Jonesboro ought to be one local epiphany. Other towns and cities will have their own 2019 versions soon enough, too. Random gunfire is routine in far too many neighborhoods, and it's perpetrated by irresponsible miscreants and malefactors--not responsible gun-owners.
Section by section, block by block if necessary, it's time to get serious about disarming criminals and illegal gun owners before they actually shoot someone. Arkansas is way above average in property crime rates, and today's gun-toting small-time thieves and burglars often wind up involved in tomorrow's big-time firearm violence.
Gun-control advocates seem gung-ho about taking guns away from law-abiding citizens. Taking them away from young lawbreakers ought to be an easy sell.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 01/04/2019