We know who is committing gun violence across America at a rate almost comically disproportionate to their percentage of the overall population: black people.
Now in one town in Mississippi, the United States Navy has put up a wall of shipping containers to stop random gun fire from hitting service members inside the base.
No, this is not a joke: the boxes were put up because a nearly 100 percent black subsidized housing development near the base is home to so much gun violence, ultimately requiring the extreme measure to maintain the safety of those living and working inside the Naval Construction Battalion Center.
A spokesperson at the Navy base says the barrier is meant to be a “temporary solution” as the city addresses gun violence.
— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 18, 2023
The Navy is also considering building a permanent concrete wall. https://t.co/5VrGdssSu0
This base is home to the Atlantic Fleet’s decorated Navy “Seabees”.
More than 20 shipping containers line the south side of a Navy base in Gulfport, Mississippi. They’re not there to transport goods, but instead stand as a silent marker of the gun violence afflicting the state’s second-largest city.
The hulking boxes were put in place last fall, after gunfire at a subsidized apartment complex across the street damaged five homes inside the Naval Construction Battalion Center; no one was hurt. The base responded by increasing patrols around its perimeter and making one of the most fortified areas of Gulfport even more so.
“The optics of that are very bad,” said John Whitfield, a pastor and the CEO of Climb CDC, a nearby nonprofit focusing on workforce development. “The practicality of it, I understand.”
A spokesperson at the base said the barrier is meant to be a “temporary solution” and that the city had offered assurances that it was addressing the gun violence issue. Still, the Navy is considering building a permanent concrete wall.
“The force protection of our base, personnel, and families is our highest priority,” Becky Shaw, the spokesperson, said in an email.
The shipping containers are just one indicator of the grinding toll of gunfire afflicting parts of Gulfport, a vibrant beach town of about 72,000 on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.
Residents and workers in the city’s most impoverished areas detailed the recurring snap of gunshots, incidents in which apartments have been struck by stray rounds, and the increasing frustration of the young and old alike having to scramble for cover when someone opens fire. They also described the dual tragedies of teens losing their lives at the hands of their peers, who end up facing lengthy sentences in prison.
A decade ago, Gulfport, where more than half of residents are white and nearly 40% are Black, reported two or three homicides a year. Since 2019, there have been at least 10 killings per year.
In a city where about 26% of residents live in poverty, many see a link between economic hardship and gun violence.
“Some of our children and some of your young people are just helpless and hopeless,” said Sonya Williams Barnes, a former legislator who lives in Gulfport and is the Mississippi state policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Gulfport is three hours south of Jackson, the capital, where the homicide rate is more than six times higher than in Gulfport. But while Jackson has had a more visible struggle with public safety, residents and community leaders in this coastal town say they, too, have grappled with gun violence for years.
Late Thursday evening, two people were injured in a shooting at a birthday party a few blocks from the Navy base’s shipping containers, and shortly afterward a 20-year-old man was shot and killed in a separate incident nearby.
On April 30, a pregnant 16-year-old, JaKamori Lake, was shot and killed in another part of Gulfport; police charged a 15-year-old in her death. A few days earlier, Gulfport police arrested a seventh suspect from a New Year’s Eve 2021 shooting that left four people dead.
“It may not be as bad as Jackson, it may not be as bad as Memphis, Tennessee, but we’ve got that problem,” said Louis Gholar, president of the West Gulfport Civic Club, who helped organize an upcoming community meeting about violence prevention. “I think not just in Gulfport—the whole coast has that problem.”
In April, five people were injured in a shooting during the popular Black Spring Break event in Biloxi. Two weeks later, a 19-year-old gunman in Bay St. Louis allegedly shot and killed two teenagers and injured four others at an after-prom party. And in May, a shooting during a Cinco de Mayo party at an Ocean Springs bar left a 19-year-old dead and six others wounded.
Tia Mosley, whose 17-year-old son, Caleb, was killed two years ago in a drive-by shooting in Gulfport, said that every time she opens Facebook and sees more news of local violence, anxiety washes over her.
“It makes me not want my daughter to go outside at all,” she said of her 11-year-old. “All you can do is pray.”
In Gaston Point, a historically Black middle-class neighborhood in Gulfport, some say that’s just part of the picture.
Martha Lockhart-Mais, a retired schoolteacher, said it’s also a question of how parents are supported in caring for their children. Teens need somewhere safe to go after school, she said.
Others in the community mentioned the need for mentors and conflict resolution resources. Some suggested restorative justice, which allows for teens accused of nonviolent crimes to be subjected to an alternative criminal justice system.
Lockhart-Mais, who said one of her former students was shot and killed last year and several others have been involved in shootings, lives not far from the Navy base and the shipping containers.
“I don’t like walls that separate people,” she said. “I feel that people should be able to live together without having a barrier.”
Ahead of last week’s shootings, she and other neighborhood residents said the previously frequent gunshots had tapered off after the wall of containers was put up last fall.
The Navy once had the slogan, “A Global Force for Good.”
Well, they have to put up a wall to protect members of the vaunted the Navy “Seabees” because we can’t be honest about black gun crime in Gulfport, Mississippi (or for that matter, anywhere in the United States).
The shipping containers are strewn with bullet holes, mind you, a visible reminder of the consequences of allowing the 2nd Amendment to grant the right to bear arms to black individuals.
[Comment at Unz.com]
