I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry at this entry from Patterico. Actually, scratch that: it’s pretty clearly cryin’ time. The LA Times’ cluelessness is chuckle-worthy, but their subject matter here is outrageous and tragic.

In 2005, the LA Times wrote a sparkly puff piece about a “community leader” and former gang member named Hector Marroquin who founded an inner city group called “No Guns”. That name is the subject of considerable black humor, as Patterico walks us through an LA Weekly account of Marroquin’s organization, including details like this:

As for Marroquin’s daughter, Charleeda, who was the treasurer of No Guns?

Police arrested Charleeda in 2001 after she and fellow gang members admitted dumping the badly mutilated body of a young man — shot at close range in the head at No Guns’ offices — near her dad’s property in San Bernardino. The victim was found with his hands and genitals badly burned.

The young man’s brains had been “spattered on a wall” of the No Guns office, but the gang members present (and the mother of one of them) said the young man, who was called “Clumsy,” had died playing Russian Roulette. They apparently didn’t explain why the carpet was “missing a large cutout area” — or why “Charleeda Marroquin drove Clumsy’s body to a remote area, where she and other gang members burned his genitals and lower extremities — reasons unknown.”

There’s much more at the link, in the same grimly-not-quite-humorous vein.

Meanwhile Dave at Garfield Ridge thinks he catches a bit of subtle bias on the cover of Time, picked out in “Cowardice Yellow”.

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