Doctors Urge Plan to Ration Bullets in L.A.

To mark the 28th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s slaying, doctors at the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center called Thursday for the rationing of bullets in Los Angeles.

At a news conference in front of the Willowbrook hospital, the doctors said they decided to speak out on the public policy issue because gunshot wounds and deaths pose a daunting public health threat to their community.

“This easily qualifies as an epidemic,” said Samuel Biggers, vice chairman of neurosciences at the hospital.

As with other health threats, Biggers said, prevention of injuries is at least as important as treatment. “Inner-city hospitals are caught in a circular process where we treat patients [with gunshot wounds], and if they survive we return them to a [dangerous] environment where they’re recycled back to us.”

A set of proposals submitted Thursday to Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas by a group of doctors in the hospital’s neurosciences department calls for bullets to be issued in fixed numbers to hunters and to those who keep guns for self-defense. Target shooters would be provided with ammunition at licensed firing ranges, to be used on the premises.

The doctors also proposed that all guns and bullets be assigned identification numbers, so that bullets could be traced back to their owners.

Margaret Wacker, an attending physician at King/Drew, said she and her colleagues drafted the proposal because they are inundated with shooting victims. “On a typical weekend, we see 45 patients with gunshot wounds,” she said.

Ridley-Thomas said he is reviewing the proposals to decide whether to introduce legislation to implement the ideas. He said that he supports the aim of the proposals and that action is needed because the cost of treating patients with gunshot wounds is staggering.

At King/Drew, $265 million was spent from 1978 to 1992 to treat gunshot wounds, with 96% of the cost covered by taxpayers, Ridley-Thomas said. The councilman also said he is considering proposing a local gun tax to raise revenues for treating gunshot injuries.

Eugene Hardin, interim chairman of King/Drew’s emergency department, told a City Council committee that met at the hospital after the news conference that treating a gunshot victim can cost as much as $6,000 a day.

Hardin said that three weeks of treatment at King/Drew for Alfredo Perez, the teacher who was hit by a stray bullet as he stood in front of his fifth-grade class in February, cost more than $80,000.

Advocates for gun owners, however, dismissed the doctors’ suggestions. Steve Helsley, California liaison for the National Rifle Assn., said coming up with an effective identification system for ammunition would be technically impossible.

“These doctors should stick to medicine, since they know nothing about firearms. How are you going to put ID on all the pellets in a shotgun shell?” Helsley said.

Helsley also said that enforcing such restrictions on ammunition would require “a bureaucracy bigger than the DMV” and that limits on ammunition sales could easily be skirted by purchasing the items in other cities, counties or states.

But backers said the proposed measures could lead to more thorough restrictions. “In the long term, this has to be done at the national level,” Wacker said.