Community Essay : Free Kittens and a Lost Gun? : The scrawled, tattered notice posted on a telephone pole in Altadena was startling. Who lost the gun? And who found it?

The sign was posted in west Altadena, near the arroyo, on a telephone pole along with the garage sale and lost-dog notices. The uneven scrawl in black marker on brown cardboard defied legibility and if it hadn’t been for the subject matter, I would have driven by it without another thought. But there it was, tacky and tattered, a nail driven into the heart of it, a communique that implicated so much more than its brief six words actually said: “Lost: Gun. If found, call (a local phone number).�

I tried to picture the circumstances that would cause the owner to lose a gun. Perhaps he had strapped it to the back of his motorcycle with a bungee cord and it had slipped out. Or maybe some drunken sot had gotten out of his car and had dropped it--like you or I would drop a set of keys in the dark--and had not realized its absence until the next morning. Or, chillier still, perhaps it had been unsecured in a child’s backpack and had fallen out while he was bicycling home from school.

I thought of the finder. Was it a housewife going on a pre-dawn jog, a street cleaner who had brushed it up with the other debris laying in the street? Or had it been a child walking to school in the early hours, at glee with the prospect of boosting his standing with friends by exhibiting his latest “show and tell�?

Did anyone return the gun? Did they give it to the police? Or did they decide that maybe they would keep it for their own protection or, worse, their own aggression?

Altadena is a quiet town for the most part. Yes, it has a pocket or two that are not considered to be idyllic places to live. Since Altadena’s favorite son (at the moment) is Rodney King, the town has received some negative press. But it’s not really deserved.

Altadena is like most places. There are some very wealthy people and some very poor people. But mostly there are hard-working people of a great ethnic mix raising families, walking dogs and catching a few holes on the local county golf course when they can. In Altadena, the smog creeps up and arrives in the foothills later in the morning than in the flats of Los Angeles and departs earlier in the afternoon. The schools aren’t the greatest, but they aren’t the worst, and old trees and the unique architecture of most of the homes here give it an eclectic feel in which residents take pride.

As a substitute teacher, I recently asked a class of 25 children which ones could, if they wished, get a loaded gun. Nine raised their hands. These were sixth-graders, mind you. They giggled and squirmed when I asked. I figured some were showing off and perhaps exaggerating. But I figured that at least one had to be telling the truth. And even one is too many. Just ask the mother of the child who was shot and killed in a Fairfax High School classroom when the gun carried to school by a classmate accidentally went off.

A few weeks after the lost-gun sign was posted, it was taken down. I am sure it sobered more than just a few of us passers-by. If it did any good, perhaps it jarred us into reality. It is a reality in which we have become so numb that for some, tacking a “Lost Gun� sign up on a post is as ordinary as posting “Free Kittens.� God, help us.