SMOKING GUNS

ARKANSAS’S PRO-GUN, ‘TOUGH-ON-CRIME’ POLICIES ARE KILLING US.

BY AUSTIN BAILEY

OLD SCHOOL ANGEL: William Graves reads a book he wrote to help steer children away from trouble.

BRIAN CHILSON

ARKANSAS’S PETRI DISH OF SYSTEMIC INEQUITY AND NEARLY NONEXISTENT GUN LAWS OFFERS A PERFECT ECOSYSTEM FOR VIOLENCE TO SPIKE.

William Graves — who, if you know him, you know him as Uncle Willie — doesn’t want a gun. Not at all. An ex-felon who spent more than 30 years in and out of prison and now mentors, mediates and does whatever else he can think of to keep people from following his path, Graves is banned by law from owning firearms. Which is fine by him for lots of reasons, one being that his arthritis would make it hard to even pull a trigger.

So it agitates Graves that he could get a gun so quickly and easily because that’s proof that anyone else could, too. Lately he’s been frustrated by Governor Hutchinson’s plan to drop $100 million on new prison cells, which Graves said won’t deter anyone from anything.

“A 500-bed prison? That’s not the answer,” he said.

Walking, talking proof that it’s never too late to turn things around completely, Graves proselytizes against pessimism. He aims to make believers out of the fatalists, the ones who think guns and fighting are entrenched and there’s nothing to do but stand armed and ready for it.

“A lot of people won’t believe this, but one of the reasons the crime rate and violence goes up, comes down, goes up is because there’s not enough concerned citizens getting involved,” he said. “You ain’t gonna never stop violence, but you can break the cycle.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see how pessimism took hold. Arkansas’s murder count more than doubled over 10 years — from 146 in 2010 to 310 in 2020 — all while the state’s population remained nearly stagnant.

You might not have known these exact figures, but you certainly know some of the stories behind them: a student shot in the arm across the street from North Little Rock High on a Thursday afternoon; weekend gunfire in the Park Plaza mall parking lot; a murder unspooled in front of an early Saturday morning crowd at Pizza D’Action, long a Little Rock institution. A 1-year-old in surgery at Arkansas Children’s hospital for a quarter-sized bullet wound to the leg, suffered in March when Dumas became the scene of the country’s largest mass shooting of the year.

Conservatives squawk over crime in Chicago and San Francisco, but a thinking man would take his chances in Illinois or California over the more sparsely populated Arkansas any day (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put their 2021 homicide rates at 11.2 and 6.1 per 100,000 respectively; Arkansas’s is 13).

It’s the fellow rural Republican state of Mississippi, that evergreen example of how it could always be worse, that claims the highest homicide rate of any U.S. state (20.5 per 100,000). But Arkansas follows close behind, squarely in the top 10.

Arkansas’s petri dish of systemic inequity and nearly nonexistent gun laws offers a perfect

ecosystem for violence to spike; pandemicinduced job losses, isolation and breakdowns in normal services and routines cranked suffering higher, and the line charting violent crime followed right along.

Local law enforcement scramble to meet a problem they’re pretty well equipped to mitigate but utterly powerless to solve, while the politicians who could chop murder rates without even leaving the air conditioning, with just some well-placed social spending and nobrainer gun regulations, prefer to mine the panic for partisan gain instead. Such is the state of Arkansas in 2022, drowning in the blood-red murder wave washing across the South.

CAPITAL CRIME

In Little Rock, a city made infamous in the ’90s as a poster child for gang violence, 2022 homicide rates are flirting toward their 1994 peak. To their credit, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. and Police Chief Keith Humphrey don’t shy away from the bad news. Their approach, a touchy-feely acknowledgement of the problem combined with a pledge to keep a boots-on-thestreets police presence in high-crime areas for now and invest in prevention and intervention for later, aligns with what many experts say are best practices to bring violence to heel. So far, though, the plan hasn’t cured the city’s collective anxiety.

Mayoral challenger Steve Landers is latching on to the angst, making it a key tenet of his campaign. “The mayor saying all cities are experiencing these problems is not what citizens want to hear. Little Rock is one of the worst crime-ridden cities in the nation,” Landers said in a video he posted to social media, in which he goes on to suggest Scott should shuck his personal security detail and send those officers out to protect the city at large instead. A white businessman challenging Little Rock’s first Black mayor, Landers seems to be getting some real mileage here, despite not offering many specifics on what he would do differently.

“Little Rock is not alone in this spike. Cities across the country, as well as right here in our state, are all experiencing an increase in crime,” Scott said during one of his regular crime updates from the lobby in City Hall. Scott and Humphrey started them in February when city directors declared crime a public health emergency after 10 people were shot in the city over a single weekend.

Despite Landers’ criticisms that no one wants to hear it, Scott’s not wrong. What Little Rock, North Little Rock and the rest of Pulaski County is experiencing is higher than the national average, but still mirrors the national upward trend. Pulaski County as a whole logged 34 murders in 2010, but 89 in 2020, a year when homicide rates leapt dramatically after a nearly 30-year lull.

There’s one stat in which Little Rock excels in 2022 so far, and that’s in solving murders. “When crime happens in Little Rock we catch the individuals, point blank, period. We catch them,” Scott said.

As of April 15, Little Rock police arrested suspects in 17 of the 19 murders committed within the city limits so far in 2022. That’s an 89% clearance rate; the national average is around 60%.

The department could always do with more officers, Chief Humphrey said, but has steadily been filling out the ranks since a 2016 low point. In 2022 the LRPD is operating with almost 90% of patrol positions filled. Ultimately, Humphrey said, good police work alone won’t solve the problem. Parents need to nose in on their children’s business, digging through backpacks and monitoring social media accounts for signs of trouble, he said. “This is a community issue, not just a police issue. We need your help.”

SMOKING GUNS

Three weeks after gunfire at a community picnic killed one person and injured 26, Dumas Mayor Flora Simon remained in mother hen mode. Arranging group counseling sessions and comforting shell-shocked constituents took up most of her attention since the March 19 mass shooting in the parking lot of an abandoned Fred’s store. That’s as far as she’d gotten.

“As far as actually trying to get city leaders together to actually talk about it, this is not the time for that yet. We’re still trying to heal from the bad image that was brought to Dumas,” Simon said.

A shrinking town of only 3,881 people, the population of Dumas is mostly Black. And in Arkansas, Black people are 8.4 times more likely to die of gun homicide than white people, according to figures from the Giffords Law Center. Skin color offers correlation, but not causation. For that, look to the usual suspects behind violent crimes, which Desha County has plenty of: a punishing poverty rate, few educational opportunities and plenty of easyto-buy guns for anyone who wants one. It’s a lot for a small-town mayor to take on alone.

Pushing nightmarishly weighty and complex problems onto the shoulders of people without the power to solve them is an Arkansas specialty. With the coronavirus, a vacuum of leadership from the state left local school boards holding the bag on mask policies for students and sick leave for infected staff. It didn’t matter that school board members lacked medical degrees or a direct line to the state health secretary, or that stopping the virus was always going to take a far bigger effort than any school board could orchestrate on its own. The ire for making inevitably controversial decisions fell to them.

When it comes to guns, Arkansas’s local law enforcement and government officials are in a similar spot. Guns are the weapon of choice, used in about 75% of Arkansas homicides. Powerless to stop people from buying, owning, carrying or using guns, it still falls largely to people working on the local level to try to somehow prevent gun violence and then clean up after it inevitably goes down.

“I probably shouldn’t say it, but I’m getting sick and tired. We have a gun issue in our state,” Little Rock Mayor Scott said at an April meeting at Second Baptist Church downtown, where he lamented a relatively new state law that allows people to bring guns to public parks and sports venues. State law also prohibits cities from opting out, meaning the unhinged little league softball dad can bring his gun to Saturday morning games, and there’s nothing anyone

SICK AND TIRED: Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said Arkansas’s gun laws feed crime.

BRIAN CHILSON

can do about it.

“We’ve allowed all these gun laws in our state, and we’re wondering why we see an increase of crime as well? It has to stop,” Scott said.

Gun laws in Arkansas and other high-crime states are a mishmash of nonsense designed to be ridiculous so that gun extremists have the excuse to erode them further. In Florida, scene of the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that killed 17 people, anyone hoping to buy a handgun has to be 21 or older. But anyone 18 and older can purchase an AR-15 like the one the 19-year-old shooter used at Stoneman Douglas. Is this an example of why gun laws don’t work and should be done away with? No. It’s an example of how lawmakers bow to gun industry lobbyists and firearms zealots at the expense of your right to live, shamelessly passing nonsensical regulations or none at all.

Florida looks pretty stupid in the above example, but Arkansas is worse. It’s become a free-for-all out there over the past decade. As of Arkansas’s 2021 legislative session, no permits are required to either buy or carry a gun. Background checks to purchase guns are optional in Arkansas, too. While federally licensed gun shops and big box stores have to run background checks on purchasers before making a sale, Arkansas law allows anyone else to sell without the paperwork. Misleadingly known as the gun show loophole, this legislative gap allows guns and money to be exchanged at flea markets, via classified ads or from the trunk of some random guy’s Corolla.

Even as the number of people being shot to death in Arkansas has been climbing each year, state lawmakers push ahead with making guns easier to come by, not harder. In 2021, they passed a “stand your ground” law making it legal to kill anyone you feel threatened by, even if you could have walked away peacefully instead. The majority of state lawmakers voted for the bill despite knowing other states that adopted similar laws saw homicides go up.

POLITICIZING THE PROBLEM

Presented repeatedly with data-driven fixes to make the streets safer, conservative Arkansas politicians mock proven solutions, choosing a pro-gun idealogy over the very lives of their constituents. More guns and fewer restrictions, more freedom to shoot but less freedom to live without fear of being shot.

That sticks local law enforcement and city and county officials with a tough job. More police patrols help, but not the ones in riot gear or behind the wheel of military surplus armored vehicles. Known as “the sentinel effect,” a feeling of being watched over tends to keep people in line. The eyeballs involved can be those of police, but community watch and nosy neighbors work, too.

But why fix problems when you can blame your enemies for them instead?

Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton practically foams at the mouth over the prospect of throwing you, me and anybody else he can get away with into the clink. “We have an underincarceration problem,” he famously said, and pitched locking more people up as a cure-all. Of course, he knows better. The Department of Justice, an institution for which law-and-order Cotton can surely muster some respect, found that threats of death penalties or life in prison do next to nothing to deter crime. Their 2016 study also suggested that decades-long prison terms can do more harm than good, since most inmates age out of the urge and energy to break laws, and prolonging their terms behind bars makes it harder for them to reenter society. Tough-on-crime approaches like Cotton’s don’t make anyone safer, but they absolutely heap extra punishment on poor people who are already suffering. That punishment is the point, a common thread that runs through Arkansas’s and other Southern red states’ divisive laws that make life more miserable, but only in certain parts of town.

Raw numbers also illustrate the futility of building more prisons. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and we’re still blowing it big time. Pretending that what we’ve been doing works, and in fact doubling down on it, would be dumb.

It would also be lucrative. Crime waves are a good excuse to, say, allocate $100 million for a new prison in north Arkansas. The only people to benefit will be the companies that win bids to build and run it.

How long will Arkansas voters support “tough-on-crime” politicians whose policies actually make crime rates worse? The outlook is bleak. Leslie Rutledge, the Arkansas attorney general and frontrunner in the lieutenant governor race, in April signed the state on to a lawsuit seeking to reverse the Trump administration’s bump stock ban. That ban came in the aftermath of a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, where the killer used guns rigged with bump stocks to fire more bullets more quickly. He was able to kill 58 people and injure more than 800 in less than 11 minutes. The right to wield weapons that can mow down nearly a thousand people in minutes shall not be infringed, per Rutledge.

On the ground, though, law enforcement and local officials are trying to move us in the right direction, forfeiting political blame games to focus on the arduous work of crafting long-term plans that might actually save lives. Even Republican-aligned Little Rock mayoral challenger Landers agrees that Scott’s patient plan to put money into youth programs now in hopes of potential payoffs a decade or so down the road is a good one. Landers has even publicly praised Scott’s holistic approach. That hasn’t stopped Landers from blaming Scott for Little Rock’s high violent crime rates, though. When a weapon is right there at hand, people tend to use it.

WE’VE ALLOWED ALL THESE GUN LAWS IN OUR STATE, AND WE’RE WONDERING WHY WE SEE AN INCREASE OF CRIME AS WELL? IT HAS TO STOP.

HIT THE DIRT: Police scan the ground for bullet casings after a shooting incident near Little Rock Central High.