A Little Rock man is enjoying a lovely early spring day with his daughter. They're in the drive-through lane at McDonald's near Markham and University. They hear the clear sound of gunshots seeming to come from right over there at Park Plaza. They drive quickly away.
"Little Rock has a problem," he says.
A Little Rock man posts sarcastically on social media that it's getting into the afternoon and he hasn't yet heard of the day's shooting. Soon he updates. Still in broad daylight, a couple of people get in a fuss outside the Waffle House on Shackleford and end up with gunshot wounds.
It's as if people who used to argue with each other, or maybe even come to fisticuffs, now shoot each other, be it daylight, be it the neglected downtown neighborhoods, be it the city's midtown, be it the city's near-west.
The racial nature of what I'm about to write is obvious. That's because race remains our time's issue, nowhere more than in Little Rock, from 1957 to Interstate 630's destruction of Ninth Street to a city starkly divided today by color, neighborhood, school, church and income.
This is what I'm getting to: It is one thing in a community-wide political sense to lament gun crime occurring in the darkness of night in isolated neighborhoods that are in your town only in a corporate-limits sense, not a practical day-to-day one.
Those are places you don't go. They're places you're sorry for. You have the luxury of becoming jaded by the decades to the hopelessness affecting others. But it's a different thing entirely in a community-wide political sense when shots ring out in broad daylight near a busy midtown intersection.
Little Rock seems to be near or already into a crisis over gun crime that threatens to impair its ability to hold the status quo, much less thrive and grow. As a man put it the other day, Little Rock always seems to be walking a tightrope between a livable progressive city and a town rendered dysfunctional and decaying by race division and gun violence.
We may not have fallen off the tightrope. But we've slipped and we're hanging by a weakening grip.
This gun-violence epidemic is the story of the year in Little Rock, and should be. It will dominate our mayor's race--productively, we can hope, with new ideas and new commitment.
But it's always possible the political dialogue could get reckless and worsen racial resentment and division.
The mayor's race four years ago was about three positive, talented candidates talking unity. This one will be about two men, and possibly more candidates, arguing about crime and depending not on unity, but on bases of support produced by neighborhood and sectional alienation.
The man of the moment in Little Rock politics--win or lose--might be Steve Landers. He's the retired car-dealer mogul who says he is running for mayor because he lives here and has grandchildren here.
He's essentially and unapologetically the nominee of the police rank-and-file. The cops tell him the mayor and his police chief don't seem to care about them and hamstring them with misplaced priorities, stand-down policies and insufficient or poorly deployed manpower. These police officers may not live here, but they defend here. It's a sad tradeoff.
Landers told me when I called Tuesday that we're not going to get the guns away from the criminals. And that's true. The only benefit of new serial-number and background requirements for "ghost guns" is to control them better in the future. It's no remote remedy for the existing arsenals for the looming summer.
Landers said that Mayor Frank Scott's "holistic approach" is valid, but only for the long term. Right away, he said, we need dozens more police officers, more patrols, more common sense in targeting of resources, and a mayor who gets out of the office and into the neighborhoods to ask the people what they need to feel safer, and to deliver as much as he can of what the people say they need.
Landers is not much versed in policy detail. He's not running with a many-pointed blueprint for crime reduction.
He's essentially saying you need less of that than personal mayoral obsession. He runs to be the obsessed.
What may work in his political favor is community frustration and backlash. If we look up late this year to find him mayor-elect, it almost assuredly will be the result of votes from people saying, "Man, I don't know if Landers has the answer, but we've got to do something different, and at least he's going to get in there and try."
Victory margins often come from vague hopes like that.
Make Little Rock Safe Again--that's going to be the public mood, and we've seen the power of moods phrased similarly.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.