Small-Time News of Kids Plus Guns Equals a Big Deal

John got a call a few weeks ago from some gang members in Placentia.

“They said they were going to kick my butt,” John says. “I guess some girl told them to call me.”

So he called his cousin, Carlos, who stole his father’s gun and the ammo to make it kill. Carlos gave the gun to John, who took it to school, Fullerton’s Ladera Vista Junior High.

“I was really scared,” Carlos says.

John walked around school with the gun, a .38-caliber revolver, then handed it to his friend, Hector, who tucked it into his waistband.

These guys were cool. These guys were bad . They say they were prepared to defend themselves. They say they meant no real harm.

These boys are 12, 13 and 14 years old. The names that I’ve given them are not their own.

They got caught by the principal, fingerprinted and photographed by police, and now they are each at home, released to their parents. They’ve been suspended from school.

This, in the larger scheme of things, is not big-time news. No one was killed or physically hurt.

The last time I wrote about kids’ lethal cool was after Juan Cardenas, 12, killed his classmate, Jacalyn Calabrese, with a bullet to the head in the Mall of Orange. Juan said he didn’t mean to. Now he’s serving a year in Juvenile Hall.

The Fullerton police say I shouldn’t get the wrong idea. Most kids in Fullerton don’t arm themselves for school. Here, they say, it’s not like in L.A.

“This is an isolated incident,” says Sgt. Don Kimbro of the juvenile division. “It’s not like it happens on a daily basis. During the course of a school year, I’d say we have about two or three incidents in the schools where there will be kids with guns. . . . These kids were playing the John Wayne thing.”

Kids, of course, have always played the John Wayne thing, even before John Wayne had a name. The difference today is that they use real guns, with live fire. Their cool has to really count; only babies bluff.

Kimbro says he’s talking low key so that I should not become unduly alarmed. He adds, however, that things really do seem to be getting uncomfortably close.

“I have two little daughters who play Bobby Sox,” he says. “Last season, we were at one of the softball games, and 15 minutes after we left, they arrested two kids with loaded handguns. Then it becomes a personal thing. I thought, ‘Holy Toledo, we were just there!’ . . . A few days later, a kid points out these same guys to me, just walking across the park. They had taken them to Juvenile Hall and released them.”

John, Hector and Carlos, the kids at Ladera Vista Junior High, aren’t in a gang, at least as far as police records show. They have no priors.

Still, John says, joining the local Fullerton Toker Town, known as FTT on graffiti-strewn walls, might not be such a bad idea. A lot of his friends have already sworn the gang’s oaths.

“It’s kind of a good gang,” John says. “Nothing happens there.”

How that translates is that nobody gets badly hurt, or at least according to John. Death at 13 years old is still something to fear.

The school district has scheduled the boys’ expulsion hearings for Monday. Teachers at the school say the principal announced that he would recommend that Hector and John, who are in the eighth grade, not be allowed to return, but that Carlos, in seventh-grade special education classes, come back in the fall.

(Robert Taylor, the principal, says that he made no such announcement, “although that may have been something that has been discussed.”)

The Fullerton police, in the meantime, have written up these kids and passed their files to the probation department to decide what should be done next. It is highly unlikely that they will spend any time behind bars.

Parents and teachers at Ladera Vista are still wondering how something like this could have happened in their own school. And they worry what kind of message will be sent if Carlos gets off easier than the rest.

There is concern too that the disquieting news of a gun at school has leaked to those outside. It could, they fear, make them all look bad.

“It upsets me that we have so many wonderful kids here, and then this happens and we get press,” Robert Taylor says. “But I guess what I have to tell people is, ‘Damn it, this is indicative of the times we are living in.’ ”

It is worth repeating, I suppose, that this is really not big-time news--just another “might have been” caught early enough. Yet it is neighborhood news, family news, that can happen where we all live--in the schools, the park, in the bleachers where parents are watching their kids step up to bat.

That is why I believe all of this must come out, no offense intended to Ladera Vista Junior High--or to Parks Junior High or Nicolas Junior High, where three other Fullerton children also face expulsion for carrying weapons.

Small-time news such as this may make us look bad, but maybe it can help to make us smart.