GUNS WATCH : Assault on Sanity

What began with the horror of 105 gunshots in a blood-stained Stockton schoolyard has ended, appropriately enough, in federal court with the National Rifle Assn. discredited in its legal challenge to California’s ban on military-style assault weapons.

The NRA, fearing that the U.S. Supreme Court would refuse to hear the case, dropped its two-year-old lawsuit to overturn California’s landmark law. Monday’s action represents a rare acknowledgment by the NRA that its dogmatic opposition to even sensible gun control legislation is increasingly harder to defend.

The Weapons Control Act of 1989 bans the sale, importation and civilian possession of about 70 kinds of high-capacity semiautomatic rifles, shotguns, and pistols.

A deranged drifter’s attack that year on children playing in a Stockton schoolyard provided the impetus for the legislation.

After the schoolyard massacre--five children were shot to death and 29 others were wounded--an enraged public demanded that the Legislature do something. That turned out to be a state ban on military assault weapons of the general type used in the shooting.

The law was reasonable. But apparently not to the NRA, which believes in an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Never mind that its argument was rejected by a federal district court and then by the court of appeals.

Now the NRA will attempt to cut its losses by challenging the law only in the California courts. We hope that effort runs into a dead end, too.