State’s Fight Over Assault Guns May Set Trend in U.S.

Keenly aware that California is on the cutting edge of trends that spread nationwide, the ever-alert National Rifle Assn. is digging in for a major fight against a newly energized campaign to ban semiautomatic military weapons in the state.

Within only the last few days, the politically influential organization has dispatched troops from its Washington headquarters to Sacramento, is prepared to hire another state Capitol lobbyist and has issued an “urgent” warning to its 250,000 California members that ownership of their sporting firearms is imperiled.

No-Compromise Battle

Representatives of both sides of what is shaping up as a no-compromise battle over outlawing the manufacture and sale of such semiautomatic military weapons as the Israeli Uzi and the Russian-designed AK-47 seem agreed that the outcome in California may well influence gun control efforts nationally.

“California sometimes is the cutting edge (of political and social movements),” said Richard Gardiner of Washington, the NRA’s assistant chief counsel, who was sent to Sacramento as a spokesman and to analyze legislation.

Gun control success in California, the nation’s most populous state, could “stimulate the anti-gun organizations because when they have a victory they start pushing the same kind of thing elsewhere,” Gardiner said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to pass; it just means another battle to be fought.

“Our primary concern, though, is protecting our California members and they are 10% of our total membership,” he said.

Political Pressure

In recent years, legislative attempts to outlaw what have become known as semiautomatic military assault rifles have failed, in large part due to the NRA and the political pressure its members have applied to legislators highly sensitive to their own reelections.

But this time, both sides agree, the random murders of five children in a Stockton schoolyard Jan. 17 and the wounding of 29 others and a teacher by Patrick Edward Purdy, a drifter armed with an AK-47, substantially has changed the political equation.

Surprisingly, such staunch advocates of gun ownership for sport and self-defense purposes as former President Ronald Reagan and Gov. George Deukmejian have added their voices to those who insist that the AK-47, specifically, has no legitimate civilian use.

While the NRA readies its defenses, supporters of the legislation are preparing a lobbying and public relations offensive. One strategy calls for appeals to rank-and-file NRA members in an attempt to separate them from their national leadership, which often is portrayed as fiercely unbending to the detriment of public safety.

Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), in a plea for support from Californians, has promised a public relations campaign “second to none and better than anything the NRA can mount.” Handgun Control Inc., chief antagonist of the NRA, intends to spend $100,000 on public relations in California, a spokeswoman said.

Even before the slayings, top law enforcement officials, including Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, were drafting a bill to eliminate military assault weapons in California while safeguarding the ownership of hunting and sporting firearms. Previously, elected and appointed law enforcement officers had not sponsored anti-gun legislation.

The Stockton tragedy provided the catalyst to galvanize support for the legislation by Roberti and Assemblyman Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles).

Kent L. DeChambeau, a lobbyist for the California Rifle and Pistol Assn., conceded that the Stockton shootings made fighting the Roberti-Roos legislation much more difficult.

“It always is tougher whenever the opposition can take one of my firearms that I am trying to protect and drape five little bodies over it and say, ‘This is what we’ve got to stop.’ It’s not fair,” he said.

Justice System Blamed

DeChambeau, NRA lobbyist David Marshall and former Republican Sen. H.L. Richardson of Glendora, head of the 20,000-member Gun Owners of California, argue that what occurred in Stockton at Purdy’s hands was not the fault of a gun but rather a “collapse” of the criminal justice system.

Purdy had a long record of mostly misdemeanor crimes and of drug and alcohol abuse, but guns were sold to him legally over the years because none of his activities was offensive enough to prohibit his purchase of a firearm.

Rather than outlawing semiautomatic military combat rifles, which they insist are functionally indistinguishable from sporting firearms, the pro-gun organizations want stiffer laws designed to keep any kind of deadly weapons out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable.

However, advocates of eliminating the military semiautomatics, which police say are increasingly becoming the “gun of choice” of urban street gang members and drug dealers, appear to have picked up support from two unlikely allies--Reagan and Deukmejian.

Both have long opposed additional controls on firearms, but in the wake of the Stockton killings have spoken out against the AK-47.

“I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen to own guns for sport--hunting and so forth--or for home defense,” Reagan told USC students last week. “But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon.”

Deukmejian has said he doesn’t see “any reason why anybody has to or needs to have a military assault type weapon, even somebody who is a sportsman or a hunter. . . . I don’t think they need to use a military assault type weapon.”

The governor also favors extending the 15-day waiting period required for the purchase of handguns to all firearms. This would give authorities time to perform criminal background checks on all potential gun purchasers.

The AK-47s and other rapid-firing military weapons sold in the United States are semiautomatic, meaning they fire a single round with each squeeze of the trigger. Machine guns, on the other hand, fire a spray of bullets with only one pull.

Weapon Made Deadlier

Virtually any semiautomatic gun can be modified into a machine gun, which is illegal. Controversy swirls over how easily such guns can be converted to full-automatic, but law enforcement officials maintain that their officers are being outgunned by drug lords and street criminals.

The Roberti-Roos legislation, which has drawn the most attention, is intended to prohibit the manufacture and sale of certain semiautomatic military weapons such as the AK-47 and would establish an appointed commission to rule on the acceptability of other firearms as they came on the market. People possessing assault weapons would have to make them inoperable or register them.

As an alternative to banning military semiautomatics, the NRA favors mandatory sentences without parole or probation for criminals who use lethal weapons, elimination of plea bargaining for gun offenders, expanding the list of people who cannot legally buy firearms to include people ruled mentally unstable by a court and people involved in violent misdemeanors.

Additionally, the NRA favors creating in the state Department of Justice a computerized system that could inform a gun dealer immediately whether a prospective purchaser of any firearm had a criminal record or was mentally unstable.

Along with Gardiner, the NRA has sent a public relations specialist to Sacramento from Washington and wants to hire a second lobbyist in the state capital.

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) told The Times that the NRA was prepared to spend “incredible” sums for such a lobbyist, an assertion denied as “absolutely false” by Gardiner. “We are not offering incredible bucks to pay somebody,” he said.

Richardson, for years the Legislature’s outspoken champion of gun ownership, is homing in on the Capitol with a video he produced as a tool to lobby former colleagues. In it, he notes that the semiautomatic actions of a hunting rifle and a military version of the gun are the same.

‘Right to Vote’

“The internal workings are the same,” Richardson tells the lawmakers. “How are you going to outlaw one without outlawing the other?” At another point, he warns that if sportsmen lose their constitutional “rights to own firearms . . . those same constituents will not lose their right to vote. They will not go away.”

Handgun Control Inc., a controversial national organization based in Washington, has hired Cristina Rose, a Sacramento lobbyist, for the fight and says that although it let law enforcement take the lead, it will wage an active advertising and public relations campaign in California.

“Law enforcement officials are in the best position to tell legislators what is needed, so we defer to them,” said Barbara Lautman, the group’s director of communications. Handgun Control ads supporting the Roberti-Roos bills already have begun running in newspapers.

“We are probably going to commit about $100,000 to the campaign in California,” she said.

Van de Kamp, a likely Democratic contender for governor in 1990, recently announced a “divide and conquer” strategy to separate rank-and-file California NRA members from the organization’s hierarchy.

He appealed to the “law-abiding members of the NRA--the hunters of this state--to use some common sense and take a look at public safety and determine if these (military guns) have any legitimate sporting value. We are appealing to good sense.”

Such tactics have been tried before, NRA lobbyist Marshall said, and they have failed.

“Only one thing and one thing only interests us: the recreational use of sporting firearms,” Marshall said of NRA members, whom he described as Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals “yuppies, women, minorities, the housewife down in L.A.”

“NRA members believe they have rights as citizens and when somebody takes away those rights or diminishes those rights or threatens to do so, they react and they remember,” he said. “It is not something that is going to go away two years down the road when 1990 rolls around.”

Despite these threats, supporters of the gun-control legislation say they are cautiously optimistic that the Senate will approve a ban on assault weapons. The big clash, they say, will come in the Assembly, where the outcome seems less certain.