It reads like a scene from “The Wire,” almost comical in its chaos: Two people are wounded in a drive-by shooting at a funeral – a funeral for the victim of an earlier shooting. Some of the people attending the service whip out their own handguns and fire away at the fleeing vehicle.

But it’s not a TV fantasy. It happened late last month outside a church in Nashville, just one more incident in what can seem a never-ending cascade of gun violence in the city.

I learned of it because I get daily emailed news alerts relating to all things Nashville. Just before the funeral shooting came a report of a 19-year-old man found shot to death in his car outside his apartment in South Nashville. Another report told of a 38-year-old man shot and killed after an argument with a man outside his apartment in East Nashville.

Since the violence at the funeral, a Kwik Sak employee was shot and killed at his job in Hermitage. And then there was the puzzling case of a man firing shots in a stairwell at St. Thomas Hospital in Midtown.

Fortunately, no one was hurt in the St. Thomas episode. But so many alerts of late have involved shootings with victims living or dead that I began to wonder if we were setting some kind of record for firearm mayhem.

No, as it turns out. Metro Police data for firearms incidents shows that, with 353 nonfatal shootings through the end of November, we’re slightly behind the rate that produced 422 such shootings by the same time last year.

We are, however, running ahead of last year’s gun homicide rates, with 86 through November compared with 88 in all of last year.

A cynic might suggest that this year’s shooters have simply demonstrated better aim, since it’s fair to assume that merely winging someone is not the goal for a typical shooter.

The record for gun homicides came in 2020 with 100, Metro Police records going back to 2005 show. Guns are, unsurprisingly, far and away the weapon of choice for killers, accounting for 85% of homicides this year and 86% last year.

(Other, less-popular means recorded by the police include knives, asphyxiation, a metal pipe, vehicles, a screwdriver and the vague “blunt force.”)

Both Metro police and community organizers have taken steps to try to address the violence. Partners in the Struggle and Mothers Over Murder are just two Nashville groups that work to call attention to the problem and push for solutions – or, at the least, some efforts to lessen the brutality.

Part of the police response is a unit called The Investigative Team Addressing Neighborhood Shootings, created in December 2020 using detectives formerly focusing on gangs and juvenile crimes.

I worry that too much effort was spent creating a name that produced the desired acronym, TITANS. But it seems reasonable to gear juvenile crime-fighting efforts toward the highest level of offense. Suspects arrested in the Kwik Sak murder, for instance, are two 15-year-olds from Kentucky.

One of the contributors to gun violence – the essential element, it’s easy to argue – is the ready availability of guns with which to conduct it. In addition to those provided by licensed merchants, there’s a constant stream of stolen guns into the market: 1,804 this year in Nashville, police figures show.

Of those, 1,216 – more than two-thirds – were stolen from vehicles, many of them left unlocked. Doesn’t speak highly of the intelligence or civic responsibility of Nashville gun owners.

Attempts in the legislature to increase penalties for those who carelessly make guns available have so far lost out to those who resist any tightening of gun laws. Heaven forbid someone should have to pay a penalty for witlessly donating his weapon to the bad guys.

And heaven forbid any suggestion that guns are central to gun violence.

As I write this, today’s alert carries news about a man pistol-whipping a woman who had accused him of cutting in line at a gas pump on Gallatin Pike. He twice pointed the gun at her, the police said, but didn’t fire, contenting himself with beating her face in.

There’s an obvious lesson in that: Think twice before getting into a dispute with a stranger. There are a lot of people with guns out there, and it’s unwise to test their willingness to use them.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.