Nothing positive can be said about the May 2 shooting death of a 17-year-old in the Baertown Park in McComb. But, other than a Saturday balloon launch, I am glad there was not a community gathering immediately afterward to proclaim that the killing must stop.
I don’t write that to sound indifferent or unsympathetic to everyone who has been affected by this shooting. Had there been such a gathering, like the one Saturday, we would have covered it and reported what the speakers said.
But these events only speak to the people who already know the shootings are immoral. The young people who need to hear this message are not listening yet.
Teenage shootings have been going on for several years now. Everyone knows they need to stop, and that Black kids who get together at a public park shouldn’t have to worry about being killed.
Everyone knows this — except the few kids who will not stop firing at their peers.
The real challenge is to reach them, and nobody has hit on that formula yet.
In fairness, this is not limited to McComb. Cities all over Mississippi and America are dealing with thoughtless young killers.
In the movies, we sometimes see characters who say they shoot first and ask questions later. That doesn’t work so smoothly in real life.
In my opinion, this is the second period in seven decades that McComb is going through truly dangerous times.
The first was the civil rights years in the 1960s, when whites were bombing Black homes and churches in an attempt to intimidate them from voting.
This produced plenty of property damage, fear and national media attention, but at least in Pike County, nobody got killed. Other counties in Mississippi and the rest of the South were less fortunate.
Mississippi still carries a lot of baggage from those years. Some people in other areas of the country think things are still like that here. If you don’t believe it, just ask them.
Most of the Pike County troublemakers from that era are long gone. But it has always been a wish of mine to interview one of the 1960s bombers or Klansmen from this area and ask them, as politely as possible, “What were you thinking?”
I’ve always thought the response would have included lots of hemming and hawing, and grumbling about defending the Southern way of life, with the inevitable states rights defense, since individual rights didn’t matter as much back then.
But none of that answers the question. Put more bluntly, what made them decide to become 1960s terrorists?
And 60 years later, here we are again, in another truly dangerous time, but one that is so different from the civil rights years.
Back then, white guys were committing all the crimes against Black people. The society of that era was designed to treat minorities unfairly. If they wanted to live in a different neighborhood, put their kids in a different school or get a better job, they’d have to leave the state. Many did.
None of that applies today. It’s a better world. Yet now it’s young Black men, mostly minors, who are making our city dangerous by opening fire and killing people. As bad as the civil rights years were in Pike County, nobody died. It is the exact opposite today.
We are living in a modern “What were you thinking?” moment. If any kid who killed or wounded somebody in the past five years was asked that question, he probably would say that somebody insulted him, that he was carrying a gun, and he used it. It’s a sad, sick answer, but it’s pretty truthful.
A white, 63-year-old newspaper editor is poorly qualified to offer solutions. But I do have some good questions:
• Where are all the guns coming from? I’ve been told that kids steal some of them, and also that older people are providing them. If we could figure out ways to reduce these supply lines, it might reduce the gunfire.
• Where are all the bullets coming from? They’re not free. I assume that the same two supply lines of theft and adults are at work here, too. Can nothing be done about this? You can’t fire guns if you don’t have bullets.
• Who is modifying the guns to make them fire rapidly? Have young people learned how to attach a “switch” and other devices? Or are they getting guns with such add-ons already in place?
• Should we insist on a greater and more intimidating police presence? There are obvious risks to this idea in any free society, but we may be heading that way unless young people learn how to settle their differences without opening fire.
That, I suppose, would be one more unfortunate result of living in a truly dangerous time.
