Brown Assails Deukmejian’s Assault Gun Fines Proposal

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown on Tuesday declared his opposition to a proposal by Gov. George Deukmejian that current owners of assault guns who do not register their weapons should merely be fined instead of charged with a criminal offense.

“That’s like a parking ticket,” said Brown (D-San Francisco), asserting that “some of us (Democrats) will not vote to make the possession of an assault rifle an infraction.”

It was unclear whether Brown’s opposition would be enough to torpedo the assault-gun ban, which has been strongly promoted by law enforcement leaders, teachers and neighborhood activists fed up with street gang terrorism.

But Deukmejian’s chief of staff, Michael R. Frost, who is helping craft an expected compromise version of legislation to ban most semiautomatic weapons, suggested that Brown might not be up to date on the negotiations.

Frost told a reporter, “There is going to be a fairly stiff fine associated (with failure to register). I would expect (the Speaker) would support the final version of the bill.”

However, a spokeswoman for Brown later reiterated his determination to oppose any bill “that makes it an infraction to (illegally) possess . . . any assault weapons.”

As currently written, bills by Assemblyman Mike Roos and Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti, both Los Angeles Democrats, would make it either a felony or misdemeanor for current owners of assault guns to fail to register them with the state Department of Justice.

The governor maintains that the criminal penalties would be too tough on otherwise law-abiding gun owners who refuse or neglect to register their weapons. He has insisted that the penalty for failing to register an assault weapon be an infraction, punishable with a fine much like a traffic citation.

Among other things, the pending legislation would require owners of assault weapons who want to keep them to register the firearms by Jan. 1, 1991. To qualify, the guns would have to be acquired lawfully by this June 1.

The bills would make illegal the possession of about 60 military-style assault rifles, pistols and shotguns. Punishment could range from a $1,000 fine and one year in the jail to a term in state prison of up to three years.

Each measure has passed both houses in different forms and is awaiting final action.

More Time

Deukmejian announced his opposition to criminal penalties for failing to register the weapons shortly after he asked Roberti on April 19 to hold up expected final passage of his bill. The governor said he needed more time to study the measure and offer amendments.

Since then, Roos, Roberti and Deukmejian have met privately once to discuss their differences. Their staffs, however, have conducted a series of negotiating sessions in an effort to reach a compromise.

“We are now in the area of dealing with technical aspects of the bill,” Frost said Tuesday after a negotiating session. “I don’t think there are substantive major policy differences at this point. It is really in the fine-tuning area.”

But Brown, who has mostly played a cameo role in the Legislature’s effort to ban assault guns, told a press conference that he opposes the infraction penalty as “watering down the bill.”

The Speaker did not, however, indicate that his opposition to the infraction penalty would be enough to kill the proposal. He did voice concern that negotiations tend to “reduce the urgency and courage quotient” in many legislators who have supported the measure.

According to Brown’s press secretary, Susan Jetton, the Speaker believes that while some Democrats would not vote for the bill with the infraction provision, Republicans who previously opposed it would vote for it because it would bear the governor’s clear-cut endorsement.