Judgment Day on Firearms

There are certain decisive votes by which the people can and should judge the moral courage of those they have elected to represent them. One of those rare opportunities will occur today in Sacramento, when the state Senate debates AB 497, a bill that would make sanity rather than expediency the organizing principle of California’s approach to firearms regulation.

The measure, which was introduced by Sacramento Democrat Lloyd G. Connelly, already has passed the Assembly. Connelly’s common-sense proposal is that the current 15-day waiting period between the purchase of a handgun and its delivery be extended to all sales of all firearms. That brief, two-week interval would allow the Department of Justice to ensure that the buyer was not a person prohibited from gun ownership under the terms of the bill. These would include people found mentally infirm under law, convicted felons, those found guilty of certain violent misdemeanors within the previous 10 years and individuals prohibited from possessing a weapon as a condition of probation.

AB 497 is supported by every major law-enforcement agency in California, and why not? The benefits of such a law are so clear and its respect for the rights of legitimate sportsmen and law abiding gun owners so obvious that its approval ought to be unanimous. In fact, at this moment the outcome is in doubt. On one side of the issue are those lawmakers of both parties who hold not only for the public’s interest, but also for its very safety. On the other side are a small band of zealots, who--history and reason notwithstanding--persist in a willfully distorted reading of the Second Amendment. They are aided and abetted by an even less-principled group of legislators whose cowardly attention to the threats of the gun lobby has deafened them to the claims of decency.

These are senators who not only appear to believe that the deranged and the criminal should have ready access to firearms but also that those guns should be of the deadliest possible sort. For that reason, they also oppose AB 334, a measure by Democrat Johan Klehs of Castro Valley that would ban detachable magazines with a capacity of more than 15 rounds and military-style shotguns with rotary or detachable magazines capable of holding more than five shells.

The defeat of either the Connelly or Klehs proposals would represent a victory of cowardice over reason and ought to be remembered as such.