Nine Days in October

The emotional pain of children is the worst kind of pain, an anguish of the innocents that claws at the heart and lingers in a dark place of memory.

I recall as though it were yesterday the question of a boy about 6, thinking I was a doctor, looking at me from his hospital bed and asking with a sadness that defies description, “Am I going to die?”

I was touring the children’s ward for a newspaper story and was stopped cold by the question. I looked at the boy, his eyes filled with tears, not knowing what to say until a nurse comforted him and we moved on.

He was suffering from terminal leukemia and did die only weeks later. That was 40 years ago, but I still see his face and hear the question asked in a voice as soft and sweet as a baby’s kiss, “Am I going to die?”

I have the same anguished feeling about a child’s plea cast to the night last Thursday as the three young daughters of Leticia Morales-Carranza watched their mother being shot down in the driveway of their Sun Valley home.

A witness heard one of them cry, “Mommy, mommy, please don’t die!”

But the prayers and pleas of the young often go unanswered and their mother, her body riddled with bullets, died instantly. No motive for the murder has been established and there are no suspects.

Far removed from the scene, I didn’t hear the little girl’s plea and yet it drifts through my mind like a ribbon in the wind, isolating the horror of nine days in October that saw murder run rampant in L.A. County.

*

Fourteen people died violently during the period from Oct. 15 to Oct. 24, each meaning something to someone in life, but dissolving slowly into the realm of reportable statistics when those lives were ended.

The news sang a litany of violence in those nine days as it recorded the deaths of Jun Jo, Artie Gilbert, Edgar Patino, Julio Rosas, Dario Torres, Rosie Jane Almeyda, Robert Cabrera, Nancy and Franklin En, Catherine Tran, Antonio Contreras and Leticia Morales-Carranza.

Their names will mean little in the days to come because they occupied no high place in the public consciousness. Only those who mourn and those who care will store them like small treasures in secret places.

Students and laborers were among them. One was a nurse, another a housewife. Two were murdered by a father, John En, and one by a boyfriend, Robert Dang, who then took their own lives.

But their stations in life and the ambitions that died like the last rays of a fading sunset meant little to those who pulled the triggers of the guns that killed them.

And it was gunfire that killed them all.

As a result, the men and women who curse the day the gun was invented, and I’m one of them, once more raise their voices in rage against the violence that weapons perpetuate. And once more those who cling to their right to be armed rage back across the chasm that divides us.

Candlelight vigils, flowers against fences and wars of words characterize these times of violence, but little if anything ever comes of it. The problem is too big, too all-encompassing, too self-perpetuating to even be fully understood, much less solved.

But I have at least one small breakthrough.

*

For months I have carried on an e-mail dialogue with one Sam Brunstein, a retired aerospace engineer and member of the National Rifle Assn., who has always argued that private citizens have a right to keep firearms for self-protection in an age of escalating violence.

Even though we disagreed, sometimes angrily, I realized that Brunstein was a thoughtful and intelligent man. I wouldn’t have bothered with an exchange of views if he weren’t.

My assessment was rewarded one day when he sent a note that said:

I opened the paper this morning and I wanted to cry. Three friend/family shootings in a week. Would the killings have happened anyway if there hadn’t been a gun handy? . . . Am I and my attitudes toward guns partially responsible for those deaths? I don’t know, but I can’t help but think about it.

My argument with Brunstein has always been not that an army of policemen could absolutely guarantee our safety in a world without guns, but that a world without guns ought to be a goal for all of humanity. I said that we had to start somewhere and that somewhere ought to be here and now.

I know guns. I’ve handled guns and carried guns both as a Marine and as a civilian. I also know that violence, like an evil mist, is seeping into every area of the county, including my own neighborhood. A kind and caring woman named Jean Schwartz was murdered a month ago not far away, causing us all to stare with apprehension into the darkness of the night.

There is comfort in a weapon of self-defense when one’s family is in peril. But if I thought at all about buying a gun after Jean Schwartz was murdered, I quickly rejected the notion. The risk we take on the path toward a gun-free world ought to be my risk, too, and I’m willing to take it to honor that vision of a planet free of violence.

“The question that I cannot escape,” Sam Brunstein wrote, “is: ‘Would these deaths have occurred if the guns had not been so readily available?’ ”

I don’t know, Sam. But if the energy of thought ever replaces the cacophony of babble, we might come up with an answer. I know I just can’t take any more crying children. The pain is too great.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com