Gunshots are the soundtrack of America

A shooting range features at Elvis's Graceland.
Adam Fagen via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

'Tis the season for gunshots and sirens.

The last weekend in October, I spent the night at a Memphis hotel near the airport to catch a 5 a.m. flight homeward. I pulled up to the hotel on Elvis Presley Boulevard in the Whitehaven neighborhood to see people running and chaos at the restaurant across the street, Tha Table. Before long, police came streaming in, sirens blaring. A fire engine and an ambulance followed.

Two men were shot and killed. One was the owner of Tha Table; it looks like he came out into the parking lot to confront would-be car thieves, one of whom shot him with an automatic weapon. The other person killed was a bystander "in the wrong place at the wrong time," Fox 13 Memphis said, merely driving by with his three young children in the car on the way to a park.

A man arrested in the shooting, police say found with weapons including an AR-15 and a Glock with switch (converting the pistol into an automatic weapon), blames his companions for firing the fatal shots, Fox 13 reported.

When I left the hotel later that night, to go to a gym in West Memphis, I had to ask police to let me drive out and back under yellow tape that had cordoned off the block.

That shooting occurred as I arrived at the Red Roof Inn at about 3:30 p.m.  Just eight minutes later, two-and-a-half miles down the same road, a 15-year-old was shot at an Exxon station. According to WREG, he was selling water at the side of the road at the time. He was transported by a private car to the hospital and reported in critical condition.

When I came back from the gym, I fueled up at that Exxon, to return my rental car full the next morning. I didn't know about the second shooting until I got back to my room and checked the news about the first shooting.

About 60 hours later, a 19-year-old sitting in his car at a gas station in West Memphis was fatally shot multiple times by another customer, KARK reported. I was long gone, but that shooting took place 500 feet from the gym I had gone to, just around a corner. I learned of that third shooting when I checked the news to see if anyone had been arrested in the earlier two.

It happens that while I was in Memphis and Arkansas, I visited an old friend and mentor I had not seen in many years. He retired in recent years from work in Memphis and told me he wants to move away. He's tired, he said, of having to worry every day about being car-jacked.

I also visited my aunt and uncle at their home in south Little Rock. They've been renovating, and their place looks great, homey. They're very happy there, my uncle said, except only for the unwelcome ring of gunshots at night. Sometimes the shots ring so close to the house that they fear they're being targeted. My uncle, a Vietnam vet, lamented of the contemporary life of youth in the Little Rock neighborhood: "I'd rather be judged by twelve than carried by six."

When I boarded my plane home from Memphis, I overheard one flight attendant telling another that she's looking for a new apartment. She was working through the calculation of finding lower rent, but having to hear gunshots at night.

As I rejoined the world that Monday, I learned about the Lewiston, Maine, shootings, and that the suspect was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had killed 18 people and injured 13 just before I left home for Memphis. Ensconced as I was in my business away, I had not known the details. It was a kind of blessing, I figured, that I didn't know what was happening. While the suspect was at large, I did not know to worry about my wife in Rhode Island or a friend's son at university in Vermont.

I'm not a gun control advocate. I believe the Supreme Court got it right when it said that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. I'm informed by the Second Amendment analysis of my constitutional law professor, William Van Alstyne. I believe that the Second Amendment anticipated the possibility that revolution might one day again be necessary.

At the same time, I don't want life cut short for me, my family, or my friends just because I drove to the park at the wrong time, or a stray bullet pierced the walls of my home. The price of the Second Amendment cannot be that gunshots and sirens are the soundtrack of American life.

Sorry, if you read this far thinking I'd have the answer; I don't. 

I want to be prepared to revolt when the time comes, because I think that corrupt politicians already have aggrandized an excess of power; that they now represent corporations, not constituents; and that the federal legislature has become perhaps irretrievably dysfunctional.

I also want the people I love to be safe against meaningless violence. I don't want to live in the Wild West of the movies.

I want my tres leches and to eat it too.