This is an opinion column.
Murder for hire, the police say. Over a beef, maybe, that led to a week of terror in Birmingham and on its streets. One killing after another, inside and out.
Timeline: Calls for action after State College student’s deathTimeline: Calls for action after State College student’s death
Four dead and 17 injured in a horrific Saturday night. The news hit like this violent town has never, to my knowledge, seen before.
An execution in Birmingham’s Five Points South entertainment district. For money. With no regard for collateral damage, for men and women standing in line to simply enter a club.
Collateral damage. What a euphemism.
We’re talking about people with families, friends and neighbors and innocents dead or injured because they stood in line at a cigar bar owned by a former cop in a public place in their city’s oldest living entertainment district. Killed, shot, scarred and scared because they were standing – who knew – in the vicinity of a target.
The target of hit men, they think. Of contract killers. Of killers without honor or opportunity for redemption.
You’d be tempted to say it was like a movie when executioners, as police believe they were, rolled up in the night, stepped from their vehicle in the shadow of the Methodist church, and opened fire outside Hush hookah and cigar lounge.
It was like no movie. In movies the bad guys have a code, if not a conscience, a sense of consequence or karma or at least the discretion to know that indiscriminate violence is sure to lead to scrutiny and unwanted attention that – if nothing else – is bad business and bad for business.
There was none of that in Birmingham Saturday night. Just blood, and death, and automatic weapons or weapons made automatic with so-called Glock switches that far too often have a way of turning rash decisions into mass killings.
We talk a lot about who to blame in these situations – though I still believe this one is unprecedented in this town. Who do you blame? The mayor? The police? The City Council? The Legislature? A culture of fear and anger and despair? Parents, peers, people who would protect the killers rather than rat them out to police?
No.
Blame the people so empty and unfeeling they’d fire 100 rounds into a crowd of people with a weapon made so imprecise it is fit only for terror.
More than 20 people shot. In an ambush to kill one, or two, or a few. Blame these shooters. Shame them and turn them in. They deserve no grace or respect.
Such is the case with those who know who they are or where they are and do nothing, say nothing. Blame them, too, for lack of conscience or constitution, for a warped sense of ethics. For cowardice. For complicity.
You can indeed blame politicians if you want, though I’ve never, in my half century in a tough town, seen a city official stop a killing. Even the cops can rarely do that, because it is virtually impossible to predict when rage or fear will take hold of a person, when evil will step out of a car and spread in a wall of bullets. Police could damn well do a better job solving the killings, but detectives in Birmingham are like CPAs in eternal tax season.
You could certainly blame a Legislature – a nation, for that matter – that lets gun dealers set policy, that won’t address the absurdity of automatic weapons on the streets or the crazy Glock switches that turn streets into war zones. Many of those politicians are as cowardly as a witness too afraid to snitch. They would rather count bodies than roll back any check on the insanity. They forgo reason in the disingenuous name of freedom.
Freedom is of course what we all want. But at some point the public’s freedom from the threat of automatic gunfire ought to trump a gun wielder’s right to unleash it.
Birmingham, as I say often, has long been a violent town in a violent region in a violent nation. It has ranked among the most deadly cities often since the early 20th century.
But not like this. Not like what we saw Saturday night. Not like we’ve seen through a year that has produced at least three mass shootings, a year that is on pace to end with more than 160 murders.
I don’t know that we have seen more shootings. I don’t believe we have. But we have seen more bullets, more victims, more deaths. We count bystanders wounded and killed time and time again.
Collateral damage.
It is the disregard that seems so foreign. Disregard for people, for each other. Disregard for consequences and community. Disregard for decency and honor. Disregard for reason.
What this city is going through is not just a crime wave. It is a distress call.