Guns and Tire Irons

Ten years ago, in scattered incidents around California, three people were killed and one was seriously injured in shootings on California highways. Reports of the shootings read much like those from Southern California highways today--reports that have Easterners on their way to Disneyland calling the Highway Patrol for advice as though they were driving to Beirut.

Police said then, much as they say today, that they had seen people stop their cars after one or the other had grazed a bumper in a sudden lane change and go at it with fists and even tire irons, but that guns were something new.

Psychologists then rounded up the usual suspects--too much macho-oriented television programming, self-awareness training carried to extremes, constraints on freedom imposed by a population explosion of automobiles, rising violence on the streets spilling over onto freeways, a sense of the automobile as a traveling fort like the tanks in Army recruiting commercials. The advice to motorists in 1977 was the same as it is now: “Be humble and back off.”

After 30 or so highway attacks this year, involving everything from .357 Magnums to B-B guns, four people are dead, several are recovering from injuries, and Edward Gomez, chief of the California Highway Patrol, is saying that motorists are “freaking out,” despite increased patrols.

But little was said then, as now, about the source of the bullets, the guns that have replaced tire irons and fists as the way to settle grudges. There is so far a mute acceptance among political leaders of the fact that nobody seems to know how many Californians carry weapons in their automobiles, and even of the likelihood that the vast majority of weapons in California are not even registered.

That omission surely has something to do with the National Rifle Assn.’s successful campaign over the years to persuade legislatures that the trait separating wimps from real Americans is knowing how to squeeze a trigger. The campaign to make certain that a gun is handy when a tire iron would do also helps account for the fact that concealing a handgun in the glove compartment of an automobile is a misdemeanor while concealing brass knuckles is a felony. Still the gun lobby labors on to make it easier, not more difficult, to carry a gun.

Would the freeways and the neighborhoods dominated by gangs and drive-by killings be safer if political leaders had taken seriously the warning signals of 1977 and tightened up on guns? We can only guess that it would have helped. Just as we can only guess what the freeways and the neighborhoods will be like in 1997 if they fail to respond to the warning signals of the summer of 1987.