California Leads the Way

Next week, when Gov. George Deukmejian fulfills his pledge and signs a bill making this the first state to ban semiautomatic assault weapons, he will put California in the forefront of the nation’s painful, lurching progress toward rational regulation of firearms.

Great credit is due the law’s Democratic sponsors, Assemblyman Mike Roos and Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti. Their diligence and flexibility saw this measure over previously insurmountable legislative hurdles. Credit also is due the state’s Republican governor, whose commitment to public safety has, in this matter, overridden not only his own ideological predilections, but also attachment to his usual partisan allies.

President Bush and congressional Democrats ought to take this model of bipartisan cooperation to heart. The United States needs more than the inadequate limit on the size of magazines in semiautomatic weapons that Bush proposed Monday. It needs what this state now has, a ban on military-style assault weapons that protects both the public’s right to safety and the legitimate interests of law-abiding sportsmen.

Like all of us, Bush and the congressional leaders ought to be sobered by the recollection that those most responsible for enacting California’s new law will not be in Sacramento to witness Deukmejian’s signature. They are dead. They are the five children killed last Jan. 17, when a deranged petty criminal named Patrick Purdy sprayed a Stockton schoolyard with 105 bullets from his legally purchased assault rifle. Twenty-nine other children and a teacher were wounded in that attack.

Public revulsion against Purdy’s awful crime is what put the Legislature at last on the path to sanity. Who, after all, could forget the torn, bleeding little bodies, the stunned, haunted looks on the faces of the wounded children, the bewildered anguish in the eyes of the grieving parents?

Apparently, the 35 members of Assembly and the 11 Senators who voted against the bill already have forgotten. So, too, has the the National Rifle Assn., whose spokeman churlishly denounced the new law Thursday, and threatened to challenge it in court.

We suspect, however, that what the organization really objects to is the realization by lawmakers at all levels that passage of the Roos and Roberti bills signals their emancipation from the NRA’s willful, ahistorical distortion of Second Amendment freedoms.

This country needs a rational, national regulation of military-style firearms. The issue is clearly drawn. Those who labor to secure such laws are working to keep our playgrounds and streets from becoming slaughterhouses. Those who oppose them make themselves the accomplices of Patrick Purdy and of murderers yet to come.