LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Setting up two chairs in the middle of Little Rock's dining pavilion promotes sane conversations after Saturday's deadly rampages in El Paso and Dayton. It brought out a handful of Arkansans willing to share their perspective and ideas as the anxious debates return in the wake of the latest killings.
"It's just sad that it keeps happening and more lives keep getting lost," said Kim Carlson of Sherwood. "I just turned off all [coverage] when I heard."
"I found myself thinking about where I could go to get out of the way at my job," said Radiance Beltz of Little Rock. "Even though I'm not a paranoid person."
"I don't blame it on anyone," said Robert "Butch" Hurford of Augusta. "I read an article or saw it on TV they were trying to blame the president. That don't make sense at all."
Others who sat down in our makeshift television studio included a teacher and a student who didn't know each other but who's thoughts reflected each other.
"This time doesn't feel different, and I think that's the sad part," said Dwight Hall, a researcher, and teacher at Arkansas Baptist College. "The biggest thing that I talk about with my students is 'how do we make data-driven decisions and how can we become solution-based."
"It just makes it feel like, as a society, we should always have to look around our shoulder and worry about what's coming next," said Joseph Cummings, a student at the University of Arkansas coming off an internship this summer in Bloomington, Indiana.
Everyone who sat down expressed frustration regardless of where they stand politically.
"Republicans and Democrats are maybe starting to agree on making it more difficult for people with mental illness to get guns," said Beltz. "But really there's gotta be more than that."
"I don't think gun control will help," said Hurford, who said he wasn't a "gun guy" but had coffee every morning with avid hunters. "A guy can go get a hunting rifle and do just as much damage as he can with an assault rifle."
But Hurford agrees something must be done. Like him, Carlson shakes her head when asked to come up with a solution, but the conversations can lead to some progress somewhere in the noise.
"The thing I keep trying to find out is what was the motive," she said. "If it's bullying it starts in the schools. The kids just don't have a way to deal with it and that needs to be dealt with more in schools, I believe."
"More intensive background checks for people purchasing guns," said Cummings. "If you're in a place where you should not own a weapon and that you could harm a person or yourself, you should not purchase that weapon at all."
Another couple didn't want to appear on camera or give their name but shared that, to them, the only thing that would solve the problem is prayer.
"I don't think blaming people helps, though I do feel there are people who are to blame," said Hall. "We got a lot of different types of people and it's important that if we have all these different types of people that we protect everybody, and everybody has a say in how things should look."