Legislators, Governor Fail to Settle Gun Control Issues

Gov. George Deukmejian and the authors of legislation to outlaw a wide array of military-style assault weapons met Wednesday to discuss the governor’s newly raised objections to major features of the proposal but failed to resolve them.

“I’m less optimistic than I was a week ago today, but still hopeful,” a somber Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) told reporters after the hastily arranged 55-minute session in Deukmejian’s office.

However, a more upbeat Michael R. Frost, the governor’s chief of staff, said he believes that “it’s likely that we are going to get these things worked out. . . . I’ve always thought that this ultimately would be worked out and I still think that.”

More Talks Likely

Both sides agreed that negotiations would continue, but no second meeting between the governor and the legislators was scheduled.

Roberti and Assemblyman Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles), sponsors of virtually identical bills to ban about 60 semiautomatic firearms, and Frost said that agreements were reached on some “technical” amendments, but that two key issues raised by Deukmejian could not be resolved.

These involve the part of the legislation that sets forth criminal penalties for gun owners who fail to register assault weapons legally purchased before June 1, 1989, and provisions that would outlaw facsimiles of the firearms that would be banned.

Deukmejian set the stage for enactment of a ban on military-type assault guns when, two days after the killing of five schoolchildren in Stockton Jan. 17 by a deranged man armed with an AK-47 rifle, he declared his opposition to such readily accessible firearms in the hands of civilians.

Almost from the outset, Deukmejian, long an opponent on new controls on guns, declared that any gun ban bill he signed must be clearly written and contain no ambiguities that could be subject to “varying interpretations.”

However, last Wednesday evening, shortly after meeting with Republican lawmakers opposed to the gun legislation, he asked that expected final passage of the legislation the next day by the Senate be held up until he studied the proposal. Needing the governor’s signature for the bill to become law, Roberti agreed.

The legislation, which moved quickly through both houses despite the heavy opposition of the National Rifle Assn., essentially would make it against the law to import, manufacture, sell, lend, and, for the most part, own the 60 listed guns.

Deukmejian at press conferences earlier this week articulated his objections to the bill, especially the criminal sanctions for failure to register a lawfully obtained assault gun by Jan. 1, 1991. He called the penalties “too severe” and Frost said Wednesday the governor thinks failure to register should be made a minor infraction that would be subject, perhaps, to a $350 fine.

Frost said he believes that “somebody faced with that kind of fine would prefer to register the gun.”

Roberti said, however, he feared that unless a criminal punishment was established there would be no “incentive” for current owners of assault arms to register them and indicated that a lesser penalty would weaken the bill.

Also at issue is a provision that would outlaw weapons that, while not on the banned list, so closely resemble the banned firearms as to be essentially identical. Roos said some mechanism is needed to cover these facsimile firearms. Frost said Deukmejian was troubled that this could lead to confusion and that some gun owners could be unfairly subjected to legal penalties.

In a related development Wednesday, 64 employees at Stockton’s Cleveland Elementary School, where the five children were killed and 30 other people wounded in the January attack, petitioned Deukmejian to sign the bill without further amendments.

The school staff members said the Roos-Roberti legislation “contains the minimum standards we consider necessary.”