Boys Love Danger’s Thrill; Adding Guns to Mix Is Deadly

Adolescent boys love hideaways and secret places and things that smack of a little danger. It must be in the genes, because it’s always been that way and probably always will. When I was a kid in Nebraska, our refuges were makeshift forts and treehouses and deserted shacks on the outskirts of town. I remember one old ramshackle hut that we used as a clubhouse all one summer. Our brush with danger was to light little fires inside the hut with kerosene.

But we didn’t have handguns then, which is why all of us survived those days when our foolishness intersected with our juvenile machismo.

James Valentine, 14, wasn’t so lucky. He had the misfortune of being born into a society when handguns are as available as licorice, and where your cousin can get his hands on a 9mm pistol and shoot you in the head.

That, according to police, is the way it happened Monday morning when Valentine and his 13-year-old cousin and two other kids were horsing around in a vacant apartment building on the Garden Grove side of Westminster Avenue. In the absence of ball fields and rec centers, vacant apartments are probably cool places to hang out, and police say the boys had been in the apartment before, as had transients and illegal immigrants. In the world of young boys, an abandoned apartment was probably just off-limits enough to satisfy their sense of adventure.

But as happens these days, a gun changes everything. A recent U.S. Justice Department study reported that 40 million handguns were manufactured in the United States in the last 20 years. An adjunct study from the National Center for Health Statistics indicates that about 7,700 teen-agers and young adults were killed by firearms in 1993, the most recent year for which figures are available. The circumstances under which James Valentine died are not typical of those figures, but it’s hard to overlook the pervasive nature of gun violence.

Two things about this should disturb any rational adult. One is the ease with which young people can get guns. Another is the cavalier nature with which so many young people treat guns.

Police believe the gun Valentine’s cousin used probably belonged to someone in his family, but they’re still investigating ownership. And the police still are looking at the incident as lying somewhere in that murky area between a homicide and an accident. They believe that Valentine’s cousin fired in response to the kind of boyish dares and double-dares that, in another era, produced bloody noses, not fatalities.

Valentine’s cousin apparently shot himself accidentally while running from the scene and now is in a hospital. When he gets out, police said. he will go to Juvenile Hall and possibly face charges.

I drove out to the scene Tuesday. The apartments are about as nondescript as living units can be, looking more from the outside like storage units than residences. It wasn’t hard to imagine kids getting together there for mischief or whatever.

What was hard to imagine was a scenario during which one cousin shot another.

Police are more accustomed than the rest of us to seeing aberrant human behavior, but this kind of thing stops you in your tracks.

“I have a daughter who’s almost 13,” said Garden Grove Police Capt. Dave Abrecht, “and I was driving down the street today and thinking I can’t even envision her with her girlfriends handling a gun or tossing a gun around in somebody’s bedroom or in a vacant house. These were boys, and granted that there’s a difference with boys and girls, but it’s hard for me to imagine what they were thinking.”

We’ll find out more, I suppose, in the days ahead. Presumably, the cousin who allegedly fired the shot will tell someone what he was thinking.

I think of playing with my cousins when we were kids, and thoughts go to dusty ball diamonds, swimming holes and long hikes in the summer along the railroad tracks.

Coincidentally, I phoned my cousin 10 days ago in Lincoln, Neb., a day after his 47th birthday. He has the same infectious laugh he had when he was 10, and we’re both little boys with cowlicks when we get talking on the phone. I have to keep reminding myself he’s now a doctor.

We launched into our childish giggling, interrupted by reality only when I asked about his two sons, one just out of college, the other high school. The elder, he said, is doing post-grad work at UC Berkeley this fall, and the other has become so accomplished at the French horn that he’s now interested in playing professionally some day.

Little boys grow up. James Valentine had an uncharted future too. At 13, it was just about to start unfolding for him.

Monday was just another day on the way to that future when he went out to play with his cousin, two other friends and a gun.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.