"Why would you go somewhere you would need a gun?"

[Pat McGarrity]

"Why would you go somewhere dangerous where you would need a gun?"

(Like your living room)

Rep. Janis Sontany (D-Nashville) - Chair of the House Criminal Practice & Procedure Subcommittee to Collierville TFA Member, Scott Frick, April 7th, 2005.

This Subcommittee is where the Anti-Gun House Current Speaker; Jimmy Naifeh, and his subordinates kill bills that the people of Tennessee have told their "Representatives" they want voted on, before the bills ever get to the House floor for a vote. This prevents Naifeh and his fellow travelers from having an anti-gun vote on their record.

Even a shotgun blast won't deter one Memphis woman from reclaiming neighborhood
By Cindy Wolff (Contact)
Saturday, April 19, 2008

When a bullet shattered two panes of glass Friday morning, tore through the slats of a plastic mini-blind and punched a hole in the lace curtain of a duplex window on Boston, Sharon Stone got mad.

The 47-year-old with the famous Hollywood name shook shards of glass out of her hair, stood up, called the police and shouted into the still, dark morning.

"You missed!"


Alan Spearman/The Commercial Appeal

Sharon Stone's front window was shot out early Friday morning. The president of the Beltline Neighborhood Association believes it was a warning.

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Stone, president of the Beltline Neighborhood Association, believes one of the drug dealers on her street fired into her home as a warning.

She didn't hear a car drive away. She found an unspent shotgun shell in her front yard Friday afternoon.

On Thursday, Memphis Police raided three homes in the neighborhood bounded by Hollywood, Central, Southern and Goodwyn looking for drug dealers. Two arrests were made on her street for drug/narcotics violations.

Stone believes the drug dealers think she called the police on them.

She says she didn't.

But she does have a sign on her front door that says "Do the Crime. Do the time."

"They think that because of what I do for the community that I'm involved in that (drug raid)," Stone said.

Stone and others in the neighborhood are working to clean it up, fix up homes, run drug dealers away.

It's an 88-year-old neighborhood with dilapidated shotgun-style homes and duplexes, some with boards on windows and junk in the front yards that sit on tight streets where two cars can barely pass. Stone lives with her son in a 41-year-old duplex with two bedrooms and a bathroom.

After her duplex was broken into several times, she bought bars for the windows because her landlord wouldn't.

She and other community leaders hope the proposed resurrection of the nearby Mid-South Fairgrounds area will breathe life into the little neighborhood.

Stone is involved in a documentary on the neighborhood that is being developed by a professor at the University of Memphis.

Her father and his mother grew up in the area in the 1930s. Stone moved there from New York City after her mother died from a stroke at age 39.

Stone has worked for 25 years at FedEx. She was off Friday and stayed up late Thursday night to watch "The First 48," a crime show that regularly features Memphis.

The room was dark except for the television. She woke up a little after 1 a.m., turned on the kitchen light to get something to drink and sat back down on the loveseat underneath the front window.

"Glass just rained all over me," Stone said. "I sat there for a minute in disbelief. Did what I think just happened, happen?"

Then anger set in. She cleaned up the glass before her son woke up for school. She didn't want him to be upset. She called the newspaper and left a message.

She found out Friday afternoon her landlord won't pay for a new window, just a board over the hole.

"It feels like I've been hit all day."

Stone said she could wish it would go away, hope it goes away or help make it go away.

She's choosing the latter.

Contact Cindy Wolff at 529-2378.