Senseless violence in KC raises the question: How deep is the hurt?

Here’s a written version of the verbal beatdown Kansas City is unleashing.

You know, in response to the heinously opportunistic run of violence in the news during the last few days.

▪ A 25-year-old father, out for a night with two of his friends, is carjacked, robbed and shot dead.

▪ An 82-year-old priest is slugged in the face, injured so badly that surgery is necessary.

▪ A mother driving her son and his friend home from a school party is trapped at an intersection by a group of marauding teenagers, a rock is thrown, shattering the van’s window, and one teen opens the passenger door and punches the young boy.

Sometimes you just want to ask: What the hell is wrong with people?

Because clearly, the people committing these assaults have drifted far, far away from acceptable human behavior. Figuring out why, really understanding it as opposed to posturing assumptions, would require delving into a host of social issues, the personal backgrounds of the people involved.

Identify those underlying factors, and we’d have a better functioning city on multiple levels. Most people inherently know right from wrong. How people stray, how they rationalize and creep toward such actions, isn’t easily unraveled, much less addressed.

The man shot and killed Saturday night in Westport was Derrick Jones, a 25-year-old father of a not-yet-2-year-old little girl. Most people’s memories begin at about the age of 4. The idea that this child will never know her father is heartbreaking. That’s damage that can never be undone.

In a Star interview, the mother who was driving the van surrounded by teenagers expressed empathy that her attackers did not show her. She worried that innocent people, teenagers who just matched the description by being young and African-American, were assumed to be involved and were stopped by police investigating the incident.

The attack happened east of the Plaza, at the intersection of Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard and Rockhill Road. People quickly underlined “east of the Plaza.” The location was code for white victims and black assailants, or so people assume. Yes, the teenagers appeared to be African-American. But the victims were not all Caucasian. One passenger in the van was African-American. So nip the idea that this is some sort of black-on-white crime spree.

As a reminder, The Star has rules about when to use the race of a suspect into a story. “A white teenage male.” Think how many people that describes. Race is not a helpful descriptor without multiple other details, like height, weight, hair color and type, what a person was wearing or driving.

An adage that is gaining leverage of late applies. Hurt people hurt people. Written more broadly, a person who has been deeply harmed emotionally, physically, or perhaps both, will reach out and harm someone else unless they receive some kind of intervention.

So here is one question that all of Kansas City might start asking: of the person who murdered a man for a joyride in a hijacked car; of the teenager who punched an 11-year-old; and of the person who felt it acceptable to hit an elderly man — who put the hurt on you so bad that you felt entitled to cast it off onto other innocent people?

That’s anger misplaced. Anger that will only lead you to more pain.

This story was originally published October 25, 2016 at 7:05 PM with the headline "Senseless violence in KC raises the question: How deep is the hurt?."