Our community is out of control. Maybe gunshots at a local football game will open eyes.

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INDIANAPOLIS – Outside the locker room, a mother is terrified.

“I want my kid,” she’s telling Ben Davis High School coach Jason Simmons. “I want my kid. I want my kid. I want my…”

Something horrible has just happened outside the stadium, gunshots ringing out in the fourth quarter of Carmel’s game at Ben Davis in Indianapolis on Friday night: boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom, six shots in all, fired in about two seconds. Simmons has devoted his career to kids, and he’s a father himself. He has four kids, ages 7 to 17. He gets it. But right now, he’s telling the parents gathered outside the football fieldhouse at Ben Davis, your kids are safe. They're inside brick walls, guarded by armed security.

“I know you want your kid,” Simmons is telling the parents. “Come with me, stand outside the locker room in our hallway. You’re in a safe place inside our fieldhouse. You know where your kid is — he’s in there. I’ve got to put eyes on him first.”

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Outside the stadium, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers find a 16-year-old boy with a gunshot wound in his arm and arrest the suspected shooter, 18.

Inside the stadium, where Carmel had been leading 35-21 when the shooting began, the field is empty. Video from the scene shows players from Carmel running to the visitors’ locker room at one end of the stadium, and they are not running alone. A fan in the Carmel section scales the fence, drops onto the track below and runs with the Carmel cheerleaders to the locker room. One cheerleader leaves the track, cutting across the end zone to get there faster.

On the Ben Davis sideline, players in helmets are sprinting to their fieldhouse. This being football, players have been injured throughout the season. Video shows one kid on crutches, making his way as fast as he can, while another kid is literally hopping on one foot to the fieldhouse.

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Several hours later, in another part of town, our city will reach a grim milestone: The 200th homicide of 2021, just the second time Indianapolis has recorded 200 homicides in a calendar year. The first time was last year, on Oct. 27.

We got there nearly a month faster in 2021.

Maybe this shooting on Friday night — the one outside a football stadium, where kids were playing and families were watching — will get enough attention, open enough eyes, to produce real change. Nothing else has.

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When I find the Rev. Charles Harrison on Saturday morning, he’s just finishing up his morning devotional. He does it daily, sending out words of hope to the congregation at Barnes United Methodist Church.

Harrison knows what happened the previous night outside the football stadium at Ben Davis. As board president of Indianapolis’ Ten Point Coalition, whose stated mission “is to reduce violence and homicide through direct engagement, the promotion of education, and the fostering of employment opportunities,” Harrison goes where people like you and me won’t. He goes toward the violence.

Like Jason Simmons, Harrison is a father himself. He has two older kids, 35 and 29, and two younger kids — a sophomore and freshman at Shortridge High, siblings he and his wife adopted after becoming their foster parents in 2008 — and he wants a safer world for them. We don’t have that world now, which is why Harrison is telling me his kids aren’t always allowed to attend football games at Shortridge.

“Depends on who they’re playing,” he says, “and sometimes it doesn’t matter.

“Just recently my (younger) son said, ‘Dad, you can’t fight today with other kids because a lot of the kids are carrying guns — and some who really don’t want to carry a gun are trying to get a gun anyway.' Because they know if they get into a conflict with the wrong kid, they could get shot. I try to talk to my son about avoiding conflict with those kids, what are morally right things to do, and settling an issue with guns is not the right thing to do. Those are the conversations I’m having with my son and daughter, because I’m concerned about their safety. Those are conversations parents need to be having with their children.”

For our world to get safer, the parenting has to get better. The issue is far too complicated for a sentence that short, but civic leaders like Harrison and IMPD Maj. Kerry Buckner are in agreement: It starts there.

“I do think it starts with parenting,” Harrison says, “and I know for some parents, they really struggle with this issue, particularly single moms who are trying to work and raise their family and may not have all the support they need trying to raise sons and daughters — in particular sons. But I do think a lot of factors out there are causing kids to pick up guns, and parents have to play a more active role.”

Said IMPD Maj. Kerry Buckner, to reporters Friday night after the shooting outside the Ben Davis stadium:

"We’re not here to raise kids," Buckner said. "We deal with criminal activity. But keeping guns out of kids' hands when they apparently can’t control their emotions is a very important part of parenting."

Parental failure, Harrison says, is made worse by a judicial system that isn’t tough enough on juvenile violence.

“They think they can get away with it because there’s no accountability anymore,” he says. “Most of these kids have been in trouble with the judicial system before. They know they get a slap on the wrist and are back on the streets. Kids have no fear now.

“This is the point I’d like to make: They have no fear now of pulling out guns, because there are no real consequences for getting arrested with guns before. A lot of kids think nothing is going to happen to them because they’re kids. They don’t realize this could ultimately change the whole direction of their life.”

When I find Simmons on Saturday morning, the Ben Davis coach is at Carmel for the freshman football game between Carmel and Ben Davis. The game had been scheduled at Ben Davis, but late Friday night, with the area still bathed in blue police light, Simmons and Carmel coach John Hebert decided to move it.

“In hindsight, we could have played it (at Ben Davis) this morning,” Simmons says. “When I left last night, (police) were doing the work they needed to do. Got to school this morning, and you would never know anything had happened.”

Maybe that’s the problem.

No sign of shooting at football game

Ten hours later, you’d never know this was the location of the city’s 200th homicide. It’s the corner of East 11th and North Oxford streets, and the police are gone. So are the ambulances, the yellow crime-scene tape, the gawkers, everything. A man and woman were found shot inside a vehicle at 11:30 p.m. on Friday, the man pronounced dead and the woman taken to a hospital in stable condition.

Three people are sitting nearby, on curbs outside boarded homes. One home isn’t boarded up, and has a shattered window to show for it. The shooting took place across from Nehemiah Bible Church, where volunteers are working in the yard, and a short walk from the Rabble Coffee shop, with customers seated behind the “Black Lives Matter” sign in the window. Life goes on.

We get good at going on, don’t we? We’re really good at cleaning up after these tragedies, normalcy already reigning Saturday morning at the corner of East 11th and North Oxford streets, and outside the Ben Davis stadium. We’re not so good at slowing down the violence, which is raging in the other direction. Just a few days ago, Rev. Harrison is telling me, he was at Tarkington Park on 40th Street.

“Kids were everywhere,” he says. “There was a fight at the park, and police were coming. When we got there, kids were having a verbal confrontation with another adult, who was trying to get the kids to leave. The young men, four or five of them — no more than 14, 15 or 16 — they had guns. The police were in the park, but not in that area yet, and you could see the kids reaching for their guns. We got involved quickly, or I think those kids were so angry they were willing to pull them out and shoot the adult.

“I started this 23 years ago,” he says of his community outreach. “If we ran into a group of 10 teenagers on the streets back then, maybe one or two had guns. Today, we run into group of 10, and 8-10 have guns.”

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Me not understanding that life at all, I’m asking the reverend how so many kids are able to get a gun. Immediately I’m sorry for asking, you know? Ignorance really is bliss.

“They can get them on the streets, some of the same places where people are selling drugs,” he says. “People are stealing guns and selling them. It’s the black market on the streets — kids have easy access to guns. If you’re working for a drug dealer, they maybe give you a weapon as part of your responsibility.”

This is the world today, 200 homicide victims and counting in the first nine-plus months of 2021 in Indianapolis. We have community leaders trying to find solutions, but it’s not easy. Generations of crime, poverty and, yes, racism have brought us to this moment, where one teenager is shooting another outside a football game at Ben Davis as players, fans and cheerleaders sprint toward safety. Parents are pleading with the Ben Davis coach to see their son — I want my kid, I want my kid, I want my… — and 12 hours later, that coach is almost pleading with me.

“Our players and our program are going to get unfairly tied to this situation,” Jason Simmons is saying from the sideline of a freshman football game relocated to Carmel. “In some ways I understand the headlines — 'Shooting at Ben Davis football game' — but it didn’t have anything to do with Ben Davis football. We have great kids at Ben Davis High School. We have great kids in our football program, and this situation doesn’t reflect who they are or how they carry themselves, and it doesn’t reflect the changes they’re going to make in society after they leave.”

Maybe the kids at Ben Davis, and at Carmel and schools around central Indiana, can be the generation that turns this violent cycle around. Lord knows mine hasn’t gotten it done. Ignorance isn’t bliss — it’s the problem.

Gregg Doyel is a columnist with the IndyStar, where this column originally appeared. Find him on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.