Supervisor Raises Real Issue

In Orange County’s unincorporated areas, the law is now “brandish a gun--go to jail.” That means any kind of gun, including fake ones.

The county Board of Supervisors last Tuesday, at the urging of the county sheriff and California Highway Patrol, passed an emergency law making it a misdemeanor to brandish fake weapons.

It’s a sensible law needed to control the growing number of incidents involving mock firearms that look real enough to scare anyone at whom they are pointed and to get those waving them shot by police officers or anyone armed with a real gun who understandably believes that their life is in danger.

The Orange County board wasn’t the first to pass such emergency legislation. Anaheim and Costa Mesa have enacted similar laws. And in recent weeks, so have Hermosa Beach, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the state Legislature. Others will surely follow. And that is good.

But while the county board was showing rightful concern over the dangers posed by the fake guns, Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, who joined her colleagues in the unanimous vote, tried to take the issue one logical step further.

If fake firearms are dangerous and worthy of action by elected officials to control their use, what about the real guns that do kill and maim and have taken the lives of 700 police officers and thousands of other people in the last decade?

As Wieder sees it, those firearms are “2 times, 10 times, 100 times as dangerous” as the replicas.

The rest of the county board wasn’t buying the logic. Maybe they believe, as some of them later stated, that current gun-control laws are satisfactory. Maybe they just wanted to avoid the politically explosive issue. Whatever the reason, they took no official notice of Wieder’s suggestion and limited their action to “look-alike” guns.

Wieder was well aware of the controversial nature of her proposal to consider a gun-control measure that would bar the possession of real firearms. Still, she had the courage and concern for the threat that real guns pose to the public to go to the heart of the issue and propose that the county staff and the county’s lobbyists in Washington and Sacramento look into the possibility of developing stricter gun-control legislation.

Most people favor tougher gun laws. What’s needed now is a majority of elected officials as concerned about the menace of real guns as they are about the fake ones.