Outrage in Stockton

The appalling crime that transformed a Stockton elementary-school playground into a slaughterhouse on Tuesday evokes horror at its purposelessness, grief for its young victims, outrage over how easily a killer came by the weapon that he would use to murder five children and wound 30 others. Last Aug. 3 Patrick Edward Purdy, who had a criminal record, walked into an Oregon gun shop, signed a paper saying that he was neither a felon nor “mentally defective,” handed over some money and became the owner of a Chinese-made AK-47 semi-automatic rifle--a weapon whose sole purpose is to kill people. Thus armed, Purdy was ready when prompted by God knows what compulsion to carry out his massacre of the innocents.

This cannot be said too forcefully or too often, for it is a terrible truth: The crime that Purdy committed before ending his own life began the day he legally purchased the AK-47. The unindictable accomplices to that crime are all those who have resisted and sabotaged every effort to impose even the most minimum restraints on gun ownership. The National Rifle Assn. is the leading lobbying force opposing controls over virtually any kind of gun--even those, like the AK-47, that no decent sportsman would think of using. The NRA doesn’t write the nation’s laws. It does, however, work long and hard and successfully to intimidate the nation’s lawmakers. On no other issue of public concern have politicians at both the state and the federal levels proved more gutless, more weaselly, more ready to do the bidding of a coercive pressure group than on gun control.

Purdy entered the grounds of Cleveland Elementary School armed with 190 rounds of ammunition for his high-powered rifle. He could just as easily have been carrying 1,000 rounds, and his victims could just as easily have numbered in the hundreds. Will this latest tragedy at long last be enough to arouse Congress from its fearful inertia and, against the earlier expressed opposition of President-elect George Bush, lead it to ban such high-tech weapons and pass a law requiring a police check on all would-be gun purchasers so that felons, drug abusers and the mentally ill can be screened out? In Stockton, five died. How many more must die before responsibility and sanity finally prevail in Congress?