Just A Typically Deadly L.A. Weekend
LOS ANGELES - "The toll this weekend in Los Angeles was 22 killed; that's one higher than in Bosnia," said the voice on the radio as Los Angeles went to work last Monday morning. It was Michael Jackson, a popular call-in show host here - and he was wrong about the number.
By the end of the day, police concluded there were actually 28 men, women and children murdered in Los Angeles County between 6 p.m., Friday, Aug. 21, and 6 a.m., Monday, Aug. 24 . . . Arroyo, Valdez, Sac, Martinez, Morgan, Elguezabal, Rodriguez, Guzman, Perkins, Alvarado, Kislo, Macias, Lamb, Millner, Gasca, Thompson, Gutierrez, Proxmire, Arzouman, Sanchez, Sotelo, Hernandez. Six bodies could not be immediately identified.
Twenty-five were shot to death, at least five of them in drive-by shootings, and three were stabbed to death. Eight of the murders were classified as "gang-related."
They were a Little League coach and a burglar, a Los Angeles Police Department detective and a disc jockey, an ice-cream stand owner and the 14-year-old girlfriend of a gang member. A 19-year-old named Veronica Nunez, in a wheelchair, was shot from a car that stopped as she waited for a light to change. Someone inside asked directions and she didn't reply - then there was a shot. She is still alive.
"Numbed L.A." was the headline in the Los Angeles Times. I guess that is about right. I had personally been numbed by reports on that Sunday, Aug. 23, of the earlier killings of two young women, both shot by people they did not know. This was the report on those two:
Kimberly M. Horton, 21, UCLA student: "Shot shortly before midnight . . . in Inglewood, as she waited in her car at a stoplight. The gunman, who wanted her 1991 Honda Accord, pulled Horton out and drove off, leaving her on the street. She died four days later at a hospital."
Mrs. Anita G. Robertson, 30: "Murdered in front of her children at a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant in Watts. At the drive-through counter, a man leaned in the window of her van, demanded her purse and shot her in the chest when she refused to surrender it. She staggered out, collapsed and died in the parking lot."
There was nothing unusual about last weekend or these cases, police said, except that it is possible that a highly publicized "truce" between the city's principal gang groupings, the Bloods and the Crips, may mean that gang members are doing less killing of each other and more random shootings. Either way, the numbers are holding up: There are six or seven murders a day, every day, in Los Angeles County.
"Little Murders." I was reminded of the title of a play written by Jules Feiffer in 1967. It was set in a future New York City and people were taking pot-shots at each other from behind steel-shuttered windows. Today, in some parts of our great country, it could be produced as a documentary.
Michael Jackson called me (and a number of other people) that day, last Monday, and asked what we would do about all this. I answered:
(1) Repeal the Second Amendment to the Constitution, because it is now obviously insanity to give all Americans the right to bear arms;
(2) Establish a federal agency to regulate handguns as the Food and Drug Administration regulates pharmaceuticals - to register and trace domestically manufactured and imported weapons and ammunition;
(3) Review all existing handgun licenses and licensees, with the idea of revoking most of them;
(4) Declare an amnesty period in which handguns could be turned in to recycling stations without penalties or questions;
(5) Use emergency police powers (and military powers, if necessary) to sweep neighborhoods for illegal weapons;
(6) Establish an automatic 10-year sentence without parole for illegal-weapon-possession convictions.
Draconian?
Really? And what do you call it when Americans have to risk their lives to pull up at a stop sign or take the kids out for hamburgers?
(Copyright, 1992, Universal Press Syndicate)