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Measures to Ban, Confiscate Guns Given to Council

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Times Staff Writer

A San Diego City Council committee, divided over whether it has the authority to ban local possession and sale of semiautomatic weapons, sent the full council two gun-regulation ordinances Wednesday and created a committee that may suggest more alternatives.

Faced with City Atty. John Witt’s strong warning that only the state Legislature can regulate the assault weapons, the council’s Rules Committee took no position on a proposal to ban the sale and possession of high-powered rifles, such as the AK-47, that police say are increasingly favored by street gangs and drug dealers.

But the committee recommended approval of an alternative ordinance, written by Witt’s office, which would allow police to seize an assault weapon and hold it for 72 hours unless its owner could prove that it was being used lawfully.

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Both measures are scheduled to come before the full council Feb. 27, along with the recommendations of a group of citizens impaneled Wednesday by the Rules Committee.

Composed of gun advocates and their opponents, police officers and city officials, the panel will attempt to write regulations that weapons owners and supporters of the ban can live with.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor said she will try to have a representative from California Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp’s office at the City Council meeting.

Council members hope that a Feb. 22 hearing in a lawsuit over Los Angeles’ recently enacted ban on the sale and possession of semiautomatic weapons will help guide them.

The vote ended a full day of testimony to two council committees dominated by the region’s vocal gun lobby. Organized by National Rifle Assn. member Brad Boswell, working through memberships of local gun clubs, gun advocates thoroughly outnumbered their opponents at a three-hour morning hearing before the council’s Public Services and Safety Committee and the 2 1/2-hour afternoon Rules Committee session.

Faced with Witt’s warning, the six-member Rules Committee was divided into two camps. Council members Wes Pratt and Judy McCarty, who proposed the Los Angeles-style ban, favored passage of an ordinance, even if it opens the City Council to lawsuits.

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Councilman Bruce Henderson, who is against local control of the weapons, led the committee’s opposition. Councilwoman Gloria McColl, who strongly supported regulating the weapons during recent interviews, became the primary supporter of Witt’s seizure alternative.

Pratt, an attorney, disagreed with Witt that state law prohibits the city from regulating assault rifles.

“I simply don’t see the pre-emption, either express or implied,” he told Witt. “It’s hard for me to make the quantum leap . . . that we can’t have more stringent legislation.”

Deputy City Atty. John Kaheny cited a 1982 attorney general’s opinion that concluded that “the subject of possession of firearms is not a municipal affair.” But Pratt contended that court decisions to date pertain only to handguns, leaving municipalities free to regulate semiautomatic weapons.

Several California cities, including Los Angeles, Stockton and Compton, have banned sale and possession of the weapons in the wake of last month’s slaying of five Stockton elementary schoolchildren by a gunman using an AK-47. State legislation to ban the weapons has been introduced in both houses of the Legislature.

On Monday, Hartford-based Colt Industries, manufacturer of the military-style AR-15 assault rifle, sued in Los Angeles Superior Court to block enforcement of Los Angeles’ sale and possession ban, which was enacted Feb. 7.

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Witt’s alternative would allow police to impound an assault rifle seen in public unless its owner could prove the gun was used for target practice or some other lawful purpose. Possession of an unloaded assault rifle is not now a crime.

Targeted at gang members and drug dealers, the proposed ordinance would empower a police officer to make a decision “before he seizes the weapon that there is no evidence the weapon is being used for any of those lawful purposes.”

Police Chief Bob Burgreen, testifying at the morning and afternoon hearings, called the proposal “a small step in the right direction. It isn’t as good a step as we would like.”

Burgreen noted that police now seize such weapons primarily when making arrests. The new law would allow seizures without arrests.

During the 72-hour hold, police would attempt to determine whether a weapon was stolen, or whether its owner had a felony conviction or mental illness. If those tests were passed, the gun would be returned.

Modifying his position between the morning and afternoon hearings, Burgreen by day’s end declined to endorse the City Council ordinance that would make it a crime to sell or own such weapons and instead called for the state to outlaw the weapons, which his outgunned officers increasingly face in confrontations. “There are some weapons which should be totally exempted from any civilian possession,” Burgreen told the Rules Committee, referring to the assault weapons. “Those weapons should only belong to the police or military organizations.”

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Burgreen’s morning testimony included a display of the AK-47, AR-15, Uzi, Mac-10 and other semiautomatic weapons to the Public Services and Safety Committee, and the warning that “any good gunman with a machine shop can make (the AR-15) into a fully automatic weapon in less than an hour.”

Gun advocates noted that such conversion kits have been illegal for several years.

Despite their increasing popularity with drug dealers and gangs, assault rifles are just a small fraction of the weapons that officers face on the street, police statistics show.

In 1988, 8 people were murdered with the weapon; 74 were killed with various other firearms; 34 were stabbed to death; 8 were strangled; 15 were beaten to death and 5 were killed by other means. Of the roughly 4,800 weapons seized by police last year, about 50 were assault rifles.

Scores of gun advocates who testified at both hearings opposed both the gun ban and the 72-hour seizure, raising the arguments that the Second Amendment allows the unregulated possession of guns, that the guns are needed for protection and that law-abiding gun owners use them in target-shooting competitions. They urged the council to get tough on criminals instead of guns.

Lynn Heffern, range officer of the South Bay Rod and Gun club, noted that the U. S. director of civilian marksmanship provides shooters with high-powered semiautomatic weapons for use in marksmanship competitions.

“Sixty years ago, they put a ban on alcohol,” said National Rifle Assn. member Bruce Cavanaugh. “It was kind of a miserable failure. It created a whole new underground. I implore you not to pass a ban on these guns because I think what you’re going to do is you’re going to create a whole new underground you don’t want to deal with.”

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Their opponents stressed that the guns are most efficient at one activity: killing human beings. “That’s not the kind of firepower needed to kill a deer. That’s not the kind of firepower needed for target practice,” James Lantry said.

O’Connor said she hopes to vote for a total ban on the weapons if she is convinced that the city has the authority to do so.

“We have some very bad criminal elements” in the city, she said at the afternoon meeting. “They don’t care about life. They would just as soon kill you with their semiautomatics as say hello to you.”

In an interview, O’Connor said a city ordinance may also be necessary to send a message to state legislators that cities want the guns regulated.

“They don’t do anything,” she said. “They just hold fund-raisers.”

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