L.A. Bans Manufacture, Sale of Cheap Handguns

Pushing into the front ranks of a burgeoning political movement, the city of Los Angeles on Wednesday outlawed the manufacture and sale of inexpensive, cheaply made handguns commonly known as Saturday night specials.

The measure, inspired by a similar new law in West Hollywood, comes seven years after Los Angeles banned the sale of assault rifles. It is expected to make it more difficult for criminals to obtain the types of low-cost, easily concealed weapons that accounted for 13% of all firearms confiscated by the Los Angeles Police Department last year.

“Studies have proven time and again that Saturday night specials are disproportionately represented in homicides, suicides and other types of crimes,” said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who introduced the measure in January. She said the council’s 13-0 vote Wednesday represented an important step in a “statewide movement” of cities cracking down on the cheap handguns.

After the vote, the ban was immediately signed into law by City Council President John Ferraro, acting as mayor while Richard Riordan is in Israel. The ban takes effect in 30 days.

The guns, which sell for as little as $25, can still be easily purchased in most cities in the area. But advocates of the ban expressed the hope that enough cities and counties will join the movement to spur state and federal laws against the sale of Saturday night specials, just as Los Angeles and other cities helped to bring about a nationwide ban on assault rifles.

So far this year, the sale of Saturday night specials has been banned in West Hollywood and Compton, as well as in a number of Northern California cities, including Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco. Fourteen other cities and counties are drafting similar bans, Goldberg said. New York City also has a ban.

The law in West Hollywood--now under legal attack by the National Rifle Assn. and the California Rifle and Pistol Assn.--is not being actively enforced while the lawsuit is pending. City officials there have compiled a list of 51 handguns that are no longer legal for sale, including a variety of semiautomatic pistols, single- and double-action revolvers and derringers.

The Los Angeles ordinance makes it a misdemeanor to sell or manufacture any weapons that fail to meet minimum construction standards for metal strength, safety features such as trigger locks and chamber compression. Violators will be subject to a fine of up to $1,000 and up to six months in jail. It is still legal to possess the guns.

Despite its ardent opposition to such laws, the NRA did not send representatives to Wednesday’s meeting. Steve Helsley, a California lobbyist for the pro-gun group, said a decision was made to attack the measure on other fronts.

“We are putting our resources into dealing with this in the courts and not debating with city councils,” Helsley said. “We believe the law is quite clear. . . . The law says only the state can regulate firearms.”

The ordinance was welcomed by community groups and physicians who often must deal with the aftermath of violence.

Emergency room physician Edward E. Cornwell learned about the ban after serving a 31-hour stint at County-USC Medical Center. As an on-call doctor at one of Los Angeles’ largest trauma centers, Cornwell began work Tuesday by tending a 15-year-old boy shot by a handgun. At the end of his shift Wednesday, he treated a 16-year-old girl shot by a handgun.

“I know there are a lot of other weapons out there besides Saturday night specials, but we can’t have the easy access to weapons where just a flare of tempers among kids leads to loss of life,” said Cornwell, who is also an assistant professor of surgery at USC. Banning the cheap guns “may only be a drop in the bucket, but we need drops in the bucket.”

Law enforcement officials also praised the new law, noting that the Los Angeles region is one of the nation’s hubs of cheap handgun manufacturing.

“These kinds of cheaply made guns are not made for sporting activity--they’re designed to shoot people,” said Lt. Chuck Helm, an LAPD spokesman. “They’re not designed for any lawful purpose.”

LAPD Det. Steve Mulldorfer, in charge of the unit that monitors gun trafficking, said the assault weapons ban does not apply to the types of weapons most commonly used on the streets.

“The type of guns we see on the streets in Los Angeles generally are your Saturday night specials and your .38s, 9-millimeters and .22s,” he said. “I don’t see a drastic change [because of the new ordinance], but it is a start in the right direction.”

The sole dissenter at Wednesday’s meeting was Councilman Rudy Svorinich, who said the law will not slow crime.

“When you talk to police officers, the types of weapons they are confiscating in this city are pretty good weapons,” Svorinich said. “In fact, the criminals in the city of Los Angeles are better armed than the police.”

Furthermore, the ordinance is unfair to those who lack the means to buy top-quality weapons, he said.

“What you’re saying is, ‘If you want, as a citizen, to take the risk to buy a cheap gun and to have it to protect yourself or your family, that will not be possible . . . in the city of Los Angeles,’ ” he said.

Svorinich did not vote against the measure, however. He left the meeting before the roll call was taken. Councilman Mike Hernandez was not at Wednesday’s meeting.

Other council members expressed varying degrees of enthusiasm for the law.

Councilman Hal Bernson, acknowledging Svorinich’s concerns, called himself a reluctant supporter, noting that Saturday night specials are often used by those who flout gun registration laws.

“I do feel we need to keep firearms out of the hands of people who use them for criminal purposes,” Bernson said.

Others described the ordinance as long overdue, citing the bloody history of a city where Saturday night specials were found at the scenes of 64 of the 849 murders in 1995.

“We all know that our society is too violent, that our city is too violent,” Councilman Michael Feuer said. “We all know that there are too many guns on our streets. We all know that cheap, easily accessible guns contribute to making our city more violent. So this is a very reasonable and logical step.”

Councilman Nate Holden cited the case of a woman who was shot twice in the head not long ago after returning to her home from church. The intruder, who nearly killed her, used a Saturday night special, Holden said.

“We can’t ban all guns . . . but we can ban Saturday night specials as we did with Uzis and AK47s,” Holden said. “And when we took that action, Sacramento listened, and then Washington. . . .”

Some law enforcement officials said they were unsure how quickly the effects of the ban would be seen on the streets or how great those effects would be. Gang members, for instance, who rely upon a variety of guns, including Saturday night specials, were not expected to heed the ban.

Of 214 gang killings in Los Angeles County in 1995, 78% were committed with handguns, said Sgt. Wes McBride of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It is not known how many of those were Saturday night specials.

“People who buy Saturday night specials are not going to turn them in or say, ‘I’ve got to move out of Los Angeles city,’ ” McBride said. “We are still going to read about little kids getting shot by Saturday night specials, but you’ve got to start somewhere.”

Last year, the legislative craze was to require purchasers of ammunition to register at gun shops. Pasadena adopted what was believed to be the first law of its kind in March 1995. Azusa, Los Angeles, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, among other cities, soon followed suit.

Not every law enforcement agency embraces gun bans, and some cities are rejecting them. A proposal to ban Saturday night specials failed in Huntington Park.

“Everyone would love to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals. I definitely want to . . . trust me, my life is on the line,” said Huntington Park Police Sgt. Ron Beason. “But these proposals are always ambiguously written and poorly written and don’t reflect reality. . . . If they want to affect crime, the way to do that is to put people who commit crime in prison and keep them there.”

A recent study by the Washington-based Violence Policy Center used FBI statistics to examine the causes of shooting fatalities that involved handguns. Of every 130 bullets that are fired, Goldberg told council members, only one is used to defend against an attacker.

“Those are not very good odds,” she said.

Even so, gun shop owners decried the new law.

Manager Louis Ferguson of Pony Express and Archery in North Hills called the measure yet another confused and impotent crime-fighting policy that will serve mainly to limit the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.

“Eliminating Saturday night specials does nothing to help with crime,” he said. “A criminal has money. They don’t care if they pay $800 or $900 for a gun.”

At Bateman Bros. & Co., a gun and taxidermy store on Hollywood Boulevard, co-owner David Bateman said criminals manage to get the guns on the street, where illegal sales will continue.

“If someone has a bad record, they’re not going to go to a legitimate store,” Bateman said.

Although he displays about 15 of the mostly California-made, .25-caliber guns along with the rest of his nearly 500-gun collection, Bateman said he sells fewer than 10 .25- and .22-calibers each year.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Abigail Goldman, Greg Krikorian, Jeff Leeds, Jean Merl, Nicholas Riccardi and Eric Slater.

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Cheap and Deadly

The L.A. City Council banned the manufacture and sale of Saturday night specials--low-quality handguns costing as little as $25. In 1995, the Los Angeles Police Department confiscated 1,437 Saturday night specials made in Southern California. Of those:

* 64 were found at the scenes of murders.

* 56 were found at robbery scenes.

* 109 were taken after assaults.

* Saturday night specials accounted for about 13% of all confiscated firearms.