Television Reviews : Gun Issue Debated on ‘Jennings Reporting’

What to do with the proliferation of guns and gun violence? The answer is somewhere; it is not, however, in “Guns,” the premiere edition of “Peter Jennings Reporting” (tonight at 10 on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

Jennings’ report isn’t really after an answer. It’s more of a sad lament, with documentation. There is Philip Glass’ melancholic music and the emotional recollections of victims’ loved ones. There is also the endless, familiar, insoluble debate between law enforcement experts who want gun control and National Rifle Assn. supporters who don’t. The sad debate also centers on a place: Stockton, Calif., a city still full of guns and people killing with them a year after Patrick Purdy and his assault rifle mowed down a schoolyard teeming with children.

Peter Jennings, reporter, does not conceal Peter Jennings’ opinions. Anti-gun control advocate Dale Thurston argues that criminals are deterred from armed homes and that armed citizens shoot more criminals than the police do, and Jennings, in a mildly chiding tone, immediately shoots back with counter-evidence. A generous section of “Guns” buttresses the gun control case--guns turn merely threatening acts into murder, a gun in a home will more likely be used against a loved one rather than an intruder. Balance is not a watchword here.

What becomes clear is that the Stockton City Council acted out of haste and public fear when, after the Purdy massacre, it banned assault rifles. A stark demonstration shows a deer rifle packing far more power than Purdy’s AK-47.

But when Stockton Mayor Barbara Fass argues that this move was “a first step,” that elected officials had to start somewhere, there’s a desperation in her voice. This is matched by the stunning, ersatz-libertarian paranoia of gun lobbyists who view government as the enemy. And in the streets, the drug economy and machismo ethic allow guns to multiply, causing a slow, awful self-immolation of America’s poorer classes.

Presumably, the live forum following “Guns” will transcend the near-nihilism that concludes Jennings’ piece. “Perhaps,” he utters vacuously, “Americans are simply willing to accept the violence.”