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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
In English it's called a stray bullet. In Spanish police say it is a bala
perdida, a lost bullet.
In fact, it is not lost but usually fired without responsibility. The
bullet might be the result of horseplay, a distant confrontation
between gangs or just someone pegging shots without worry where they
might land. The lost bullet represents one dimension of a growing wave
of shootings.
The latest such incident was Tuesday night when a 9-year-old schoolboy
suffered the fatal impact of a bullet in La Carpio in La Uruca.
The child died in the Hospital Nacional de Niños, and
investigators blamed a gun battle between rival gangs. A woman also
suffered life-threatening wounds in the shooting.
Many expats might point to the deprived economic nature of the area and
say that such tragedies are commonplace in what amounts to slums.
But then there is the case of Adelsio Gerardo Paniagua Castro,
25. He was in the company of a girlfriend Sunday night, Aug. 22, in
front of the Teatro Nacional. This is about as close to the heart of
San José as one could get. Two and a half blocks away on Avenida
6 two groups of bar patrons got into a fight that degenerated into a
shooting match. One man suffered a leg wound. As one group ran from the
other south on Calle 3, one turned and fired a shot at pursuers. It
missed. Some 300 yards to the north the piece of lead found a vein in
Paniagua's back. Rescue workers could do little.
Perhaps fueled by alcohol or drugs, perhaps stemming from a drug
dispute, there is little citizens can do to protect themselves from
these unintended tragedies.
Even at the school yard level there seems to be a growing lack of
respect for firearms. Two weeks
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ago a 7 year old was found to
have a weapon at school in Santa Cruz, Guanacaste. Wednesday a police
search located
a.22-caliber revolver at the Liceo Napoleón Quesada in
Guadalupe. The
student with the last names of Sánchez González
told officers he
needed the weapon for protection, they said.
These incidents plus a host of drive-by shootings and killings are
encouraging the executive branch of the government to push harder for
more restrictions on legal weapons. Such laws will do little to prevent
killings such as that of a man named Granados and one named
Núñez who
were gunned down in La Colina, Limón, in the middle of last
month by
someone with an AK-47 rifle, something that already is illegal in Costa
Rica. A third man was wounded in that incident.
Two men and a woman were in a car at a gas station in San Antonio de
Desamparados Monday night when two men on a motorcycle pulled up and
pumped 18 bullets into the vehicle. No one died in that attack.
Hospitalized early Tuesday was a 42-year-old man with the last name of
Rodríguez who was gunned down when he left his León XIII
home about
7:30 a.m. to go to work. He was in Hospital México.
The spike in shootings took security officials by surprise. They had
been praising their work in Limón when statistics showed a
decline in
murder rate. That lull was temporary.
And no longer can observers say that the victims are just drug dealers
killing themselves.
Within days, the Laura Chinchilla administration will be formalizing
proposals that will be designed to guarantee citizens personal security
on the streets and in the home. Such measures certainly will have to
take into consideration the rising wave of gun violence. |
