Guns, Laws and a Higher Authority

We were standing outside in a crowd on the sidewalk, singing “Las Mananitas,” the traditional Mexican birthday song. While the mariachis played, two local gang members came out of the projects to join the party. As we walked to the church parking lot where the festivities would continue, we saw that Julio and Frankie each carried a half-hidden bottle. Sticking out of Julio’s was a soaked strip of an old T-shirt.

Molotov cocktails.

Thinking on our feet, my co-worker Leonardo and I asked them to leave the bottles in the flower bed outside the church. They did, nonchalantly, as if it were nothing to walk around on the streets with a gasoline bomb.

As the party continued, recent neighborhood events ran through my mind. The previous weekend, a Molotov cocktail exploded through the window of a family reported to be “snitches.” Three days later, unexploded Molotov cocktails bounced off the apartment windows of the local leader of Neighborhood Watch.

Leonardo and I fixed our strategy. Rather than disposing of the bottles outside, we would get Frankie and Julio to do it. Personal responsibility, we decided.

We succeeded. Julio emptied his down the storm drain in front of the church. Frankie, belligerently drunk at this point, was more difficult.

“Hey, we’re not doing anything wrong. . . . It’s mine.”

Finally I got the bottle out of his hand and poured its contents down the drain. As his homeboys came to lead him away, Frankie turned to me and said “Hey, thanks. We could have gotten in trouble tonight.” His tone wasn’t repentant. Nor was it the tone of realization that a Molotov cocktail is a dangerous weapon. It was as if we had talked him out of tipping over garbage cans belonging to an argumentative neighbor.

Two days later, Gov. George Deukmejian announced that he would sign a bill banning the sale of assault firearms. The reasons he gave, and the legislative debate on the measure, were pragmatic and legalistic. But from the perspective of the streets of Los Angeles, the whole argument over assault weapons--the constitutionality, the citizen’s right to defend himself, the criminals’ access to them on the black-market--misses the point.

There is only one reason to ban such weapons. They are wrong. Wrong to make, wrong to own, wrong to use.

For better or worse, our culture links right and wrong with legal and illegal. Ethics and morality in the body politic has a working consensus: That which is illegal may not be wrong, but anything not illegal probably isn’t wrong, either.

Is it illegal for 17-year-old boys to carry 16-ounce bottles of gasoline? Probably not. But is it wrong? I think we would agree that it is.

Is it illegal to buy a weapon that can rip open a house and destroy everyone in it in less time that it takes to dial 911? Now it is. But until the governor signed the bill, was such a purchase wrong? Yes.

Banning semi-automatic assault weapons gets to the heart of the matter in a way that police street sweeps and news features on innocent victims of gangs cannot. The ban announces that something is gravely wrong. It says that the violence tearing apart American society is inhuman and unacceptable. It admits that prosecuting crimes after the fact is not the means of lowering the phenomenal level of violence in our cities.

Prohibiting semi-automatic weapons acknowledges that the law has the responsibility to protect us from the excesses of technology, fear and rugged individualism. In the ban’s limitations, we also can see that the changes necessary for peace on our streets--for teen-agers to feel that it is wrong to make Molotov cocktails--will not occur overnight.

In short, the ban on assault weapons is necessary because it speaks the truth.

On the weekend after the incident at the party, Julio attended one of the masses I celebrated. As he came forward to receive communion, I found myself filled with both affection, because I know him, and gratitude, because he was there and because nothing had happened two nights before.

Will the ban on assault weapons cross Julio’s mind if he thinks about making a Molotov cocktail in the future? A rhetorical question, at best. But as one step in the long road to peace in our neighborhoods, it will cross my mind the next time I’m walking through the projects at night, toward a crowd standing outside on the sidewalk.