Shots Ring In a Grim New Year

Mark me down as one more victim of Stockholm syndrome. I’ve been held captive so long that I’ve begun to enjoy it.

It’s been years since I ventured forth to hear the chimes at midnight on New Year’s Eve. My excuse: the volume of gunfire--for once, “hail of bullets” is the right meteorological cliche--which has been known to dimple car roofs like golf balls, panic the dogs and rattle my karmic calm. Oh yes, and kill people.

Ten years ago was the worst. Ten years ago, in certain parts of town, spent bullets could be scooped up like hailstones. King/Drew Medical Center calculated that in eight years worth of New Years and July Fourths, festive gunfire--there’s a phrase for you--had killed 38 people.

Once in a rare while, the laws of gravity and of natural selection conspired, and the same man who fired a gun also got his skull cracked by his own bullet. But more often it was someone else: a boy watching his own relatives fire off a few shots being killed by another family’s bullet plummeting back to earth, a 3-year-old boy wounded in his mother’s arms.

Santa Ana became such a fire zone that the Mexican Consulate pleaded with its expatriate countrymen to give up the custom of cranking off a few midnight rounds. Billboards sprang up along with holiday tinsel, bearing the faces of fearful children pleading with the grown-ups not to shoot. If the shooters’ brains were beyond reach, perhaps their consciences were not.

Ten years ago, the law changed, and made such “negligent discharge” a felony. Eight years ago, another law changed, and no ammunition can be sold in Los Angeles in the week before New Year’s and July Fourth.

The LAPD recorded half as many arrests of urban gunslingers this New Year’s as four years ago, and about half as many 911 calls about it. The Sheriff’s Department likewise answered fewer than half as many New Year’s-related shooting calls this year as it did in 1996, confiscated only two guns, made only two arrests and for the first time in memory noted no injuries.

*

Ours is not the only gun-as-fun culture. There’s a New Year’s toll of the inadvertent dead in the Philippines, in the Balkans. In Egypt last year, a man cranking off bursts from his automatic rifle to celebrate his brother’s marriage accidentally killed the wedding singer. At another wedding a week earlier, bride and groom were shot to death when a guest misjudged his aim as he fired a few congratulatory rounds over their heads.

If New Year’s Eve was happily short on gunfire, the fresh New Year has not been. Two L.A. security guards were murdered, and two others desperately wounded. Nevada sheriffs have in custody a “goofball” they say was shooting at drivers along I-80 in hopes they’d crash and he could sprint over and rob them.

And then there is Riverside, where the present controversy is not about armed civilians but cops--men who carry guns as familiarly as other men carry briefcases or lunch pails. And still, a young woman is puzzlingly dead, shot by police who found her, evidently unconscious, in her locked car at a gas station with a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun in her lap.

Her worried family had called police, told them she was out cold, told them about the gun. Police tried to wake her, and only when they broke a window to take the gun, police said, did she come to and grab it, and all hell broke loose, and she died, shot a dozen times.

Investigators said she fired first; later they said they weren’t sure whether she had fired first or even fired at all. The woman’s cousin has sued over “Riverside’s failure to properly train and supervise” police, and the FBI has entered the scene. It will be long and testy, the hunt for truth, and no one will be satisfied with the other’s truth.

If even cops, minutely schooled in guns--LAPD officers must qualify with their sidearms at least every 60 days, and sometimes every 30--if even cops can get it so wrong, what of the rest of us, the amateurs, the “casual users”? What of the misinformed woman who told the police yes, she owned a handgun, but only to shoot it on New Year’s Eve when it’s legal? What of the good citizen startled by a figure moving in his house who shot and killed--his daughter?

When the muckety-mucks speak of gun control, it is always at a macro level. At a micro level, a gun may be beyond control, a killing machine calamitously powered by honest fear or testosterone rage or plain stupidity.

Since time out of mind, cultures have used loud noises to chase away evil spirits. The pop and blam that issue from a gun may just be the one loud noise that invites them.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com