Swimming in Handguns : Beach shooting illustrates anew need for education on gun culture

Life for teen-agers is filled with possibility and, from the vantage point of a boogie board, it may at times seem indestructible.

But two surfers got into an argument on a beach in Orange County last weekend, and now only one is alive--thanks to a gun. We need to take stock of how flooded society is with guns when, in broad daylight, the storied and peaceable world of surfers is violated by a shooting death.

It happened on a hot Saturday afternoon in Dana Point when a long-simmering quarrel between two teen-agers broke out into violence. The fatal shooting was triggered by a dispute over who did what to whom between two youngsters whose comrades on the beach knew of the feud but seemed powerless to resolve it. The 16-year-old suspect who was carrying a pistol is now in custody. He was packing a piece, he had earlier told pals, because he was afraid for his life.

Authorities will want to determine how this youngster could so easily get a gun. They will want to determine why there wasn’t anyone there who had the sense to intervene and try to mediate this dispute. From the accounts of eyewitnesses, there were several moments before the shooting when the conflict could have been resolved, or at the least, a death avoided.

Now one youngster is a murder suspect, too young even to have his name made public. The other surfer is dead at 18. Neither youth seemed to fully understand the potential for a gun--surfacing on a sunny, wave-caressed beach--to produce death. And so the shooting on a crowded beach offers more sickening evidence of the menace of guns in our culture.

A similar story unfolded in Los Angeles last weekend, when a boy, 11, a girl, 16, and two adults were killed by suspected gang-related gunfire. We need more effective gun-control legislation and a broad assault on the entire culture of the handgun: Teen-agers need to learn that bullets really kill. Even when life seems just to be a day at the beach.