I stopped by the Des Moines police station recently to talk with my old friend Chief Dana Wingert.

The calendar notification said we were meeting to talk about this year’s dramatic rise in homicides in the capital city.

But our chat drifted to the Las Vegas mass shootings Oct. 1 that killed 58 and injured nearly 500 others attending a country music concert. The shooter also killed himself to avoid capture.

I asked Wingert if it was a question of "when and not if" some horror like this visited Des Moines.

Wingert had met with command staff earlier that day about how to prepare for major outdoor events.

Ideas included having temporary concrete barriers lifted into place with forklifts to block streets surrounding the 80/35 Music Festival and the Des Moines Arts Festival to prevent someone from using a car or truck to mow down the crowd.

Wingert talked about having special poles that could be sunk into holes in downtown streets and locked into place for special events such as the Downtown Farmers' Market or the St. Patrick's Day revelry.

The chief talked about scouting for potential sniper positions at concert venues such as 80/35 or the Simon Estes Amphitheater.

"When you have to prepare for a parade or concert the way you would work with the Secret Service on a presidential visit, something has gone terribly wrong with society," Wingert said.

He gestured out his window toward the Estes Amphitheater, which rests between East Locust and East Walnut streets along the Des Moines River.

"You have a concert out there and somebody gets the right room at the Embassy Suites, it's game over — just like Vegas," Wingert said, noting the hotel just to the east of the amphitheater.

"It's not something I ever dreamed I would have to think about as a police officer. That's our reality now."

When I started my career as a part-timer at The Des Moines Register in 1995, the vice squad ran raids every night on crack houses and gang dens.

Nationally, violent crime was at its highest levels since the 1970s.

In 2001, there was a terrible shootout between police and drug dealers near 21st Street and Forest Avenue. Several officers were wounded.

One officer still carries part of a bullet in his back.

Yet, after that, things seemed to settle. By the time I was the newspaper's night police reporter from 2008 to 2011, we were seeing homicides in the single digits some years.

Yet homicides are climbing again. There were 21 homicides in 2015, the most since 1990.

Thirteen homicides followed in 2016. While that’s a number closer to the city’s baseline, one included the horrific death of Sgt. Tony Beminio, who was killed in Des Moines the same November morning Urbandale Police Officer Justin Martin was shot and killed in Urbandale.

The killer confessed to both murders, but the communal feeling that acts of senseless, brutal violence don’t happen in the Des Moines metro was forever shattered.

This year, with less than three months to go, there have already been 24 Des Moines homicides, including one woman shot and killed by police after she allegedly fired on officers in July.

A homicide, it should be noted, is defined as one person killing another person. Murder involves determination of intent and a judgement in a court of law. So while a police officer killing a suspect is a homicide, it is up to the courts to decide if the killing was justified.

Criminologists and statisticians say the best way to measure violent crime in a city is through serious assaults rather than homicides.

Homicide rates can be deceptive; a grievously injured person may survive an attempted homicide, especially in Des Moines with four excellent emergency rooms within minutes of every corner of the city.

Thus, criminologists look more closely at serious assaults — beatings, sexual assaults and other violence — to determines a city’s true level of violent crime. This is especially helpful in Iowa, where homicides outside the largest metros are rare.

Wingert generally agrees with that thinking, but he also believes there is a cultural change in the city's criminal class ages 17 to 24.

"Nobody wants to fight anymore," he said. "Everybody wants to pull a gun."

Petty disputes that were once solved with fights immediately escalate to shootings and homicides, Wingert said.

Des Moines detectives have investigated some non-fatal shootings that involved "the stupidest reasons you can imagine," Winger said, "like somebody seeing a picture of their girlfriend with another dude on Facebook or being dissed on Snapchat."

"You hear that and you're like, 'Really? You're willing to go to prison for that?'" Wingert said. "Twenty-five years ago, these guys would be going toe-to-toe in the parking lot of a bar. Now, the mentality is nobody is going to take a beating. They go right to the guns."

To be clear, Wingert isn't advocating fistfights or any other kind of violence.

Rather, he's saying, for reasons unknown to him, people criminally inclined are more inclined to shoot to kill than in the past.

Two-thirds of the 24 homicides so far this year were shootings. It begs the question: Where do the guns come from?

And that is one of the great mysteries of our time.

"This is nothing more than my opinion, but I believe the majority of the guns on our streets are coming from outside the community, probably outside the state," Wingert said.

Police take hundreds of guns off the streets a year; sometimes the confiscated guns match weapons stolen in burglaries, but that's rare, he said.

"And these obviously aren't people who are going out to Scheels and registering and going through the waiting period," the chief said. "They're getting them illegally, but how and where, we don't know."

Des Moines police work closely with local agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They try to track the guns.

But, Wingert said, "There just aren't enough of these guys nationwide compared to the number of illegal guns out there."

When I was a boy, I never thought much about guns. My dad owned several hunting shotguns and rifles.

I never took up the sport. It took place outside and usually early in the morning — two things I've never grown a fondness for.

When I was a kid, we took hunter safety courses for physical education credit on weekends.

One Saturday, the teacher would bring in a rifle and shotgun — unloaded, of course — and show us the parts, how to take it apart and how to properly store it.

In the fall, some high school kids would go hunting in the early mornings, drive straight to school and shower in the locker room and head to class. They left their guns in their trucks.

Nobody worried they were going to start murdering their classmates.

Anybody who did stuff like that today would be in jail. Schools can't help but treat even the vaguest of threats as a dire emergency.

Police in Des Moines are scouting potential spots for snipers before concerts and planning new blockades for public events because the unthinkable is becoming commonplace.

I often ask my friends Don Adams, the retired longtime Drake University vice president, and Polk County Sheriff Bill McCarthy, a Vietnam veteran and former Des Moines police chief, if the strife we see in culture today resembles the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s.

They always say no. It was worse then.

They point to the 1970 bombings of the Des Moines police station, a science hall on Drake's campus and another city building as evidence of, as McCarthy once put it, "society tearing itself apart."

I don't mean to disrespect my elders, but I'm starting to feel a badly shredded society these days.

Daniel P. Finney, The Register's Metro Voice columnist, is a Drake University alumnus who grew up in Winterset and east Des Moines. Reach him at dafinney@dmreg.com or follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/danielpfinney.