The train robberies provided me an opportunity to write about Wyatt Earp over on the home page:

For the first time in more than 100 years, train robberies are a big thing again, drawing loose comparisons to the Wild West era.
Of course, this is overwrought. Jesse James isn’t boarding trains with his gang to make off with whatever loot they can grab, before inevitably disappearing only to — maybe after writing a self-valorizing letter to the newspaper — strike again.
If current conditions are totally different than in the late-19th-century West, the public dereliction is arguably worse — Los Angeles isn’t a boomtown surrounded by vast ungoverned spaces and overrun by drunk cowboys in the warm months. It is a 21st-century city, with all the advantages of a lavishly funded, well-established, completely legitimate system of public order.
It is choosing, however, to create ungoverned places through its own decadence and ideologically driven folly. Or to put it in Old West terms, it is ignoring what Wyatt Earp, that most famous of American lawmen, knew.