Back in my day, prom parties were held at someone’s home, usually the kid with the cool parents who didn’t mind us drinking, or in someone’s barn where the parents could pretend they didn’t even know what was happening. We were not the most well-behaved kids, to be sure, but no one got hurt, and we all had a good time. These days, kids can get a parent to rent an Airbnb or some other short-term rental, and there is no pretense of parental supervision. It doesn’t always work out well.
In the Meridian-Kessler neighborhood of Indianapolis, someone rented an Airbnb for a prom party. That party was disrupted by gunshots, leaving one person dead and two others injured. Now, members of the community are voicing their concerns, both about the rentals and, unfortunately, guns.
Although detectives are working through hundreds of leads to solve a triple shooting at a post-prom party in Meridian-Kessler, residents who gathered for a neighborhood meeting on May 6 have questions that likely won’t be answered by an arrest.
Just before 1 a.m. on May 3, a spray of bullets killed 38-year-old Brittany Members, injured two others and landed in the houses of sleeping neighbors, some of whom had earlier called police to report nuisances stemming from a rental property in the 4000 block of North Park Avenue.
A woman who’d lodged a noise complaint around 7 p.m. said she woke to find two bullets lodged in her bathroom wall.
For some, the shooting amplified long-held concerns about the presence of short-term rentals in the neighborhood. While there’s no indication that Saturday night’s event was a for-profit party, the rentals are sometimes used by party promoters as a lower-cost, lower-oversight alternative to event spaces, said William Carter, captain of nuisance abatement with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.
“It’s easier to rent the AirBnB. When they rent these venues, I promise you they’re not saying, ‘hey, we’re gonna have 100 people come over,'” Carter said.
No, they’re likely not.
I don’t have a lot of experience with Airbnb, though I’ve used the service. I don’t remember being asked if there would be guests or not, but even if I were, it’s trivial to lie, especially if I’m looking to make some money by hosting a party.
Even if it weren’t someone trying to make money, I know how I was in high school, and I know how my peers were, and while we weren’t the worst of the worst by any stretch of the imagination, we still liked to do things that our parents wouldn’t approve of. Had short-term rentals been a thing, I promise you that we’d have used them a lot more often for our parties than risking our parents’ wrath by having a shindig while they were out of town and risking something getting wrecked.
I get the concerns, too, though I don’t know how you deal with that, especially considering that I suspect there a ton of these kinds of parties that don’t end up with someone shot.
But if it were just about that, I wouldn’t be talking about what happened.
For some people, the problem isn’t parties in short-term rentals, the potential gang-related aspects, the idea of people with no respect for human life, or anything like that.
Oh no, it’s always one thing and one thing only in these people’s minds.
For some of those in attendance, the shooting’s location was immaterial: the problem was the guns.
“People with guns, who are shooting – it doesn’t have to be a party. They drive down the street and shoot. What are you doing about that?” asked Nicki Coleman, a resident of the northside neighborhood since 1976.
Prosecutor Ryan Mears responded that there are virtually no gun control laws that he can enforce. A person under 18 can be charged with a misdemeanor for possessing a gun, but as adults Indiana provides people ample opportunity to own and carry firearms.
“That’s all we can do. If they are 18 years [old] and they have a Smith & Wesson revolver, or an AK-47, there is nothing anybody in this room can do, because they are legally permitted to have that firearm,” Mears said.
That’s assuming, of course, that these individuals do not have a felony conviction. Quite often, they do, even at young ages. They can then be charged as a felon in possession. Mears left that part out, of course, in part because unless someone runs a background check on everyone they see with a firearm, there’s no way to know if someone’s a felon if you’ve never interacted with them before.
As it stands, there doesn’t seem to be any information about the shooters in the May 3rd incident, so it’s kind of hard to look at the situation and say definitively where the system failed to do what it was supposed to do, but as that information develops, we can adjust.
However, it’s worth remembering that for some people, the problem is always guns. Never mind that it still takes a person to pull the trigger, and that if you address that part of the equation, then guns become irrelevant. That’s too hard, so they’d rather just scream about guns.
I wish it wouldn’t be that way, but alas, this is what our hostile media has brought us, because most people don’t really know how to think, they only know what they’re told, and that plays a role in everything.
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