GUN CONTROL WATCH : Help Where It’s Needed

Although many urban and suburban California counties--including Alameda, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and San Francisco--are besieged by escalating gun violence, a statewide preemption law bars them from imposing tougher gun control measures than the Legislature has approved.

AB 2706, by Louis Caldera (D-Los Angeles), would end the state’s exclusivity in the area of firearms and ammunition regulation. The bill would allow local governments to, for example, require gun licensing or registration. Also, localities would be able to experiment with a host of measures as long as there was no conflict with state law.

The fierce debate over guns traditionally has been a confrontation between urban and rural values. Forbidding local governments to pass gun laws may sound more reasonably in a place like, say, Yolo County, where only four people were shot to death in all of 1992. However, the law clearly damages the public good in a densely populated city like Los Angeles, where in 1992 nearly 2,000 people died from gunshots and at least four times that number were treated for bullet wounds at county hospitals.

Sacramento hasn’t passed a major piece of gun control legislation since 1991. If it will not speed up its pace in dealing with this issue, then at least it should allow violence-weary, bullet-riddled cities like Los Angeles some measure of choice in controlling guns. The Legislature should release its chokehold on local communities and allow them to take constructive action on their own.