How L.A. Is Becoming A Gate To Hell

I lived in Los Angeles for about 5 years. Before I moved there I remember hearing about a big car chase almost every week, some lunatic in a stolen coupe flying down the 5 with a swarm of blue and red lights in tow.

In L.A. STORY the only classic Steve-Martin-slapstick scene is the one where it's declared gun season on the freeway and everybody starts shooting at each other from their cars.

And while I lived there I saw some shit - there was the jewelry robbery that happened down the street from my work in Beverly Hills (which I discovered when I saw the suspects and a paper bag surrounded by cops on the curb at Brighton and Crescent); there was the shooting on the corner of Sunset and Wilcox, at my Staples, where some lunatic was finally terminated by LAPD after walking down Vine shooting randomers; there was the shotgun supposedly shot from a building around Hollywood and Vine; a few hit and runs; that publicist gunned down with the unfortunate fate of BURLESQUE being the last Hollywood film she'd ever see.

Notice I don't bring up any of the violence from south central because, let's be honest, very few outside south central know or, sadly, care about that. That's a whole different beast.

The thing is, all those random acts of violence were spread out over a few years. But ever since I left, it seems like one lunatic after another is shooting up Southern California. The natives are getting restless, the hopelessness is getting too heavy, and shit's hitting the fan with a vengeance.

Did you hear about the guy who got kidnapped and carjacked, forced to stop by some stores for his kidnappers and drop them at a strip club?

The college kid who went on a shooting rampage, firing blankly into the 55 Freeway in  the safest, most manufactured, most conservative county in Southern California, legendary Orange County itself.

Then there's the whole Dorner incident, an ex-LAPD gone mad, killing a few cops before running off to the mountains, causing a 200-person manhunt and culminating in a Hollywood-movie-quality shootout in a cabin.

And the thing is, this all just happened in the last 2 months. Even more, it didn't happen in the traditionally sketchy neighborhoods, Hollywood or South Central. It happened in places like the mountain resort town of Big Bear and Ladera Ranch, a bubble community known for being where white bread families can hide from the ugliness of the rest of SoCal, a community without even a proper bar.

California already has close to the toughest gun laws in America and is looking to make them officially the toughest in the nation. The problem is that, in spite of all everybody says and claims, tough gun laws aren't going to solve anything. Attacking the rising violence by making it hard to get guns is like trying to quell drug-based crimes by busting dealers. Supply side never works, whether you're talking about drugs or guns or economics.

The sick truth is that America, in spite of all our advancements and posturing, still has no comprehensive plan to address the real culprit behind these violent crimes in Southern California and beyond, the growing mental instability of the modern era. The most poignant and revealing article to come out of the Sandy Hook tragedy is "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother", an essay about how one woman's son is mentally unstable and for the most part gets marginalized by society and the national media that looks to point to the easy culprit of loose gun laws instead of getting into the much trickier issue of mental health.

Until we address the madness spreading through our nation, and, as I just pointed out, specifically through the L.A. greater metropole, we're grasping at straws.

But I can guarantee you this, until we do, things will get worse. Over the half-decade I was an Angeleno I felt a tectonic shift in sentiment and mental state. People seemed to get angrier. Crazier. More rundown and, as follows, more desperate. It's a tough world, no doubt. And until we address that and start a real national dialogue on the mental weight of being an American during these trying times, things will just get worse, gun laws or not.

And if this continues, L.A., filled with malcontents and crazies breaking under the hard sun and shuffling downtrodden down the cracked streets, peering over the hedges at what could be before returning to the roach-infested apartment of what is, could very well become the first gate to hell.

- Ryan