A Mississippi military base in the small city of Gulfport put up a wall of shipping containers after stray bullets from a nearby gunfight struck homes on the base.

Naval Construction Battalion Center (NCBC) Gulfport first placed more than 20 shipping containers around its perimeter last year after gunfire broke out in the apartment complex across the street, striking multiple homes on the base, a local television station reported.

Captain Jeff Powell told the outlet that the base "took prudent measures" to ensure the safest and most secure environment possible for residents inside the base.

Since then, shootings have continued to plague Gulfport.

On Thursday, two people were shot at a birthday party near the military base. While responding, police officers said they heard more gunshots and found a third person killed in a different location, according to local media. Two other separate shootings also occurred in Gulfport on Thursday.

Martha Lockhart-Mais, a retired schoolteacher who lives near the military base, told NBC News that one of her former students was shot and killed last year.

Lockhart-Mais said she thought the gunshots in the neighborhood had been less frequent before Thursday's shootings, and that she didn't approve of the shipping containers walling off the military base.

"I feel that people should be able to live and work together without having a barrier," Lockhart-Mais said.

John Whitfield, a local pastor and CEO of Climb CDC, a workforce development nonprofit, told NBC News that he thinks the optics of the barrier are "very bad." But he said he understands the "practicality of it."

Becky Shaw, a spokesperson for the base, told NBC News that the barrier is meant as a "temporary solution," but that the Navy is considering building a concrete wall across the street from the apartment complex.

"The force protection of our base, personnel, and families is our highest priority," Shaw said.

Once sacrosanct, the military has increasingly become a political punching bag in Washington, D.C., but the country's largest service has lately started taking some swings of its own.

"We are a ready Army, not a 'woke' Army," Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told reporters Tuesday. "What I'm trying to talk about now is how that drip, drip, drip of criticism about a woke military is having some counterproductive effects on recruiting."

The services have come under near constant attacks on Capitol Hill over the past year, with Republican lawmakers claiming the military is getting soft due to its embrace of racial minorities, women and LGBTQ+ troops. The criticism comes at a particularly sensitive time for the Army, which had its worst recruiting year in decades in 2022.

Lawmakers blamed the "woke" policies of the Biden administration. In reality, the recruiting slump has largely been attributable to a relatively healthy civilian job market and difficulty in finding young Americans who meet the academic and body fat standards to join.

The criticisms became mainstream when Joe Biden became president, though there have been no substantial changes to diversity or equality training in the services since the Trump administration.

The added burden of political attacks amid tough recruiting times has caused frustration among Army leadership.

"This was the kind of politicization in which you're not using the military social esteem to make yourself look better, you're trying to batter it and use it as a wedge point," Risa Brooks, a professor of political science at Marquette University, told Military.com.