A Kansas City hero gunned down for nothing: ‘This is not normal’
Daryl A. Singleton, who was a Navy mechanic and a school cook, a fiancé and a grandfather with a second job, saved a bus full people in this city in 2003.
After he jumped up and grabbed the wheel as a Metro driver suffered a seizure, they called him a hero on the evening news. “Daryl Singleton picked the right day to take an early bus to work,’’ the story that ran on the Metro front of The Star began, “and 13 other passengers are thankful he was there to aid them.” As Stephanie West said at Thursday’s candlelight vigil for her 57-year-old cousin, “it was a very big deal at the time.”
Gun deaths, on the other hand, are not a very big deal at this time, or any other time in recent memory. Or at least, not such a big deal that we often even remember to look up and say, as Pastor Branden Mims asked the 46 folks at the sidewalk service for Singleton to repeat after him, “This is not normal.”
Singleton, whose day job was cooking for the students at Phillis Wheatley Elementary, was shot because he was there, on break from his evening shift as a cashier at LP’s Grocery and Liquor at Cypress and East 24th. The 18-year-old arrested in his death is alleged to have killed his father and then Singleton, the stranger who just happened to be standing next to him, having a smoke in front of the store.
Can we get an amen, too? This is not normal.
Yet in the five years that have passed since the slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary, we’ve gotten ever more used to mere double homicides like this one. For most of the country, the anniversary has been a painful reminder of all we have not done to make schools much safer. There have been 269 U.S. school shootings since 2013.
Or to make churches, gay night clubs, or country music festivals safer either, of course. In most of America, little has happened in those five years, either to combat gun violence or expand treatment and early intervention for mental illness, which is somehow always cited as the easier lift. (Then do it already, and prove it.)
Not so in Missouri, though: Instead of tolerating the status quo, lawmakers here have aggressively made the situation worse, jettisoning some of our state’s last remaining limits on gun rights on Jan. 1 of this year.
That erosion of safeguards — more like mountain-top removal with dynamite, really — actually began a decade ago, in 2007, when the legislature stripped away the requirement that anyone buying a handgun had to go through a background check in person, at the sheriff’s office.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that in the first six years after the state repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, Missouri’s gun homicide rate rose by 16 percent — at a time when the national rate declined by 11 percent. The kind of law Missouri repealed is considered the single most effective way to keep those who really shouldn’t have guns from getting them. In the decade after Connecticut passed such a law, gun murders went down dramatically, by 40 percent.
By 2013, Missouri had the second-highest gun murder rate in the country, after Louisiana. But there was more damage to be done: The 2014 “right to bear arms” amendment to the Missouri Constitution and the expanded concealed carry law that took effect on Jan. 1 of 2017 took things even further, allowing gun owners to carry a concealed weapon without having to go through any training or pay any fees.
Though there may not be a straight line between the looser laws and the uptick in local homicides that has followed, Kansas City has had 137 murders so far this year, compared to 126 in 2016. And that is how merchants in Westport see it, with gun incidents in the popular entertainment district up four-fold in this calendar year. Since “they decided it would be a good idea to remove the remaining restrictions,” said Kim Kimbrough executive director of the Westport Regional Business League, “the gun-related violence has just been escalating out of control.”
We’d like to invite lawmakers to attend some candlelight vigils like the one for Singleton.
And to repeat after Pastor Mims: This is not normal.
This story was originally published December 15, 2017 at 4:40 PM with the headline "A Kansas City hero gunned down for nothing: ‘This is not normal’."