The Guns of August

August was the cruelest month this year. During its 31 days of mostly stupefying damp heat, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office investigated a record 263 possible homicides. That record broke the one set just a month earlier. Of the 263 deaths, 169 of them resulted from gunshots.

There’s something about being able to murder from a distance--which a gun allows a killer to do--that makes it that much easier to snuff the life out of another human being, said a veteran Los Angeles Police Department officer.

And in spite of a shameless, pandering series of ads by the National Rifle Assn. that suggests that the Los Angeles riots are a good reason for just about everyone to pack heat, cooler heads are trying to prevail. A group of former gang members and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) made a public appeal Thursday for a no-killing holiday weekend and expressed belief that the truce between the Crips and Bloods gangs will hold.

In order for that truce to hold--and a truce among Latino gangs to begin--Los Angeles will need police officers who know and understand the community’s problems and facilitate peace. That’s one of many reasons why, no matter how bad the state budget gets, no proposal to cut hundreds of county sheriff’s deputies can stand. And deputies making arrests won’t make any difference if there are few deputy district attorneys to prosecute crimes.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel in the city of Los Angeles, which also is facing devastating budget cuts. Proposition N, on the city’s November ballot, would impose a special tax on property to hire 1,000 new police officers. They would be assigned to uniformed, detective, narcotics and anti-gang activities in order to implement community-based policing.

The monthly murder statistics are horrifying. But the only thing more horrifying would be for Los Angeles not to do all that it must to fight crime rationally. A pistol in every pocket is not the way.