I just finished a History channel show on the bank robbery that happened in North Hollywood, Los Angeles, on February 28th, 1997. It was on a couple weeks ago on the History channel, but with a DVR you can watch stuff like this when you have some free time. So tonight was the night. Essentially it was a 45 minute shootout between 2 psychos and a bunch of cops. The documentary walked through the horrific event–something no one should ever have to go through.

One thing was I wish it would have focused more on the 2 gunmen before the incident–it did walk through a little about each of them, but there has to be a lot more to the story. Both had issues with the law before they robbed their first bank–from what I could tell the North Hollywood robbery was at least their 2nd bank robbery.  Either way, it seems like there were signs that these 2 pyschos were headed for trouble.

One thing that I feel we should do to help reduce crime is to punish criminals harder. Almost all of the gun control in this country simply focuses on punishing law abiding citizens, not criminals. It won’t solve all of our problems, but there’s a whole bunch of laws in this country that are merely a slap on the wrist if you are caught breaking one of them.  If we focused on key laws (violent offenses, robbery, homicide, etc.) and gave real sentences, then half of these criminals wouldn’t be walking the streets months after being convicted.

Either way, in this tragic event, it proves a lot about how criminals act. These men modified an AK47 to fire fully automatically. They hand made their own body amour. They were willing to kill even if people followed their instructions. They were vicious psychos who were determined to get through life with shortcuts at the expense of innocent people. Luckily, the two criminals were the only ones who were killed during the event, but there were 10 police officers and 7 civilians who were shot, some who still have health issues from the incident today.

I hope we can all learn from this event and find real ways of stopping these types of criminals before they do something like this. Or at least provide ways for people to defend themselves if they are ever caught in a situation like this.

You can find a brief clip on what happened here.