Shootin' Up the Charts

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Can't find peace on the streets

Til the niggaz get a piece

F--- the police

Lines to live by from gangsta rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur, 22, who not long ago gave an interview on MTV with what looked to be a pistol tucked into his waist. Last week Shakur was arrested in Atlanta and charged in the shooting of two off-duty police officers.

After a concert at Clark Atlanta University, cars carrying Shakur and his friends nearly struck Mark and Scott Whitwell, brothers and suburban police officers, who were walking in civilian clothes with Mark's wife. In the argument that followed, Shakur allegedly shot Mark in the back, his brother in the buttocks. Some witnesses say one of the Whitwells may have pulled a gun and fired first. Mark Whitwell's attorney says they were surrounded by Shakur and at least a dozen others, some of them armed and screaming threats.

Is life imitating rap? Faster than you could rhyme "niggaz" and "triggaz" (standard rap prosody) people were asking whether rappers -- especially those from the Thugs-'R'-Us subcategory called gangsta rap -- are too quick to use the guns they brag about in their songs. "Who is the man with the master plan?" asks a lyric by Snoop Doggy Dogg. "A nigga witta motherf-----' gun." Two weeks ago Snoop, 22, was charged as an accomplice to murder.

Last week, just a day after Shakur's arrest, Flavor Flav, 34, court jester of the otherwise unsmiling rap group Public Enemy, was arrested for attempted murder. On Tuesday morning Flav, whose real name is William Drayton, accused a neighbor, Thelouizs English, of fooling with his girlfriend. After Drayton pulled a gun, English fled to the lobby, where Drayton allegedly caught up with him, took a shot and missed. Released on $15,000 bail, Drayton, who once served 20 days in jail for punching his girlfriend, checked into the Betty Ford Center. His record company says he is seeking treatment for crack addiction.

Rappers aren't the first pop stars to cross from outlaw poses to real bloodletting. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols stabbed his girlfriend to death. Squeaky Claudine Longet, a vanilla songstress of the '60s and '70s, shot her boyfriend, a killing that she called accidental and a jury called criminally negligent homicide. But for the most part singers, even the ones who like to pal with mobsters, have been content to leave gunplay to the pros. Not gangsta rappers. In a world where it can seem as if everybody's "strapped" -- meaning armed -- the rapper Spice 1 bragged to TIME last week, "I'm gonna be strapped 24-7." (That's 24 hours a day, seven days a week.) "I've got an AK on the way, and that's real, you know? I've got a TEC-9. I got a little chrome .32 and a .380. I'm gonna get some more Glocks, I want some twin Glocks." Half a dozen armed friends keep Spice safe from "player-haters," who he says try to bring down successful rappers. "Six guns coming out is gonna get us out of there, wherever we are."