The question was a timely one.
“Have you written about the fire at that house where the guy died?â€
I was speaking on Monday to a group of fifth graders at Green Pines Elementary in Wildwood. I live down the street from the school. Two of my kids attended there.
The day before, Bobette Everhart-Boal, 59, had been found shot to death in the parking lot of the Baxter Crossings Apartments, in nearby Chesterfield, where she had been living with her adult daughter. That daughter, along with her brother, were also graduates of Rockwood schools. Not long after Everhart-Boal was shot, firefighters found Michael Boal, also 59, dead in his house, which had been set on fire. He lived in Wildwood near Lafayette High School.
The couple was getting a divorce. Police suspect Boal shot Everhart-Boal and then went home and killed himself. I didn’t plan to talk to fifth graders about domestic violence, about murder-suicides, about guns in the home. It might have been unheard of for a speaker at an elementary school to broach such a topic years ago.
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But these kids know the score. Every year, sometimes more than once, they hide under their desks and in closets and behind locked doors as they go through intruder drills the way people my age used to go through fire drills, or even the Cold War-era sit-under-your-desk-and-close-your-eyes nuclear bomb drill.
My wife works as a secretary at a school in the district. She used to have a photo of a man on her desk that we jokingly called her “work husband.†He was a man involved in a domestic dispute with his ex-wife. Their children attended the school where my wife worked. If he showed up, she was to put the school on lockdown. This is the world we live in. It’s no joke.
The kids knew about the shooting. One girl described how some friends of hers watched the house burn.
So we talked.
Yes, I told them, I have written about shootings and gun violence and death far too often.
This year, for instance, I have written about too many dead children in the city. Some of the fifth graders at Green Pines live in the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ and ride a bus to school every morning to west ºüÀêÊÓƵ County as part of the voluntary interdistrict transfer program. In the city where those children live, 13 children have died this year of gun violence. In ºüÀêÊÓƵ County the number is smaller — eight children. In the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region, according to Post-Dispatch reporting, 25 children have died in shootings this year.
This sort of thing is hard to write about, I told the fifth graders. I recalled a conversation with a colleague several years back, after another spate of shootings, in which a little girl had died after being caught in a crossfire of bullets. My colleague just couldn’t write about it, he said. It was an editorial he had written too many times before. Too many guns. Too much death. What to do about it?
In Missouri, it’s difficult to do anything about it. have laws that make it illegal for people convicted of certain domestic violence offenses to possess a firearm. Missouri is not one of them. These days, Missouri has among the weakest gun laws in the country, making it more likely for people to die from gun violence, various studies have shown.
Homicides are up. Suicides are up. , in the city and the county, in rural areas. Everywhere.
The other day, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker and I were talking about this problem. Peters Baker, who is also chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party, used to regularly go to the Missouri Legislature to advocate for commonsense gun safety regulation, the sort of thing that is often supported by police chiefs and other law enforcement officials. She hardly bothers anymore.
“I don’t think people appreciate how far Missouri has gone,†she says. Take the Springfield, Missouri, man who armed to the teeth earlier this year and created a palpable fear in the store.
“What he did, on its face, is legal in Missouri,†Peters Baker told me. (The man ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of “making a false report,†but not a gun charge.)
In recent months, her city’s mayor, Kansas City’s Quinton Lucas, ºüÀêÊÓƵ Mayor Lyda Krewson, the mayors of Columbia and Springfield, and Republican Gov. Mike Parson have been meeting to discuss ways to deal with gun violence in Missouri’s biggest cities.
The political leaders have roughly endorsed a proposal to support the simplest of gun measures: making it illegal for juveniles in the state to possess handguns. If that last sentence confuses you, it should. Missouri law, as it is currently written, doesn’t have a specific prohibition against juveniles — such as fifth graders — from possessing handguns.
“That’s the unbelievable reality in which we find ourselves,†Peters Baker says. “It’s the Wild West.â€