Lessons of Gun Violence: A Need for Tough Controls

Bullets flew. A Palestinian professor fired into a crowd of tourists atop New York’s Empire State Building, killing one and wounding six before taking his own life. Near Trousdale Estates, a prominent attorney shot his twin children to death then killed himself. Sunday’s brazen drive-by shooting of rapper The Notorious B.I.G. on the Miracle Mile occurred with many of us still shaking from the horror of the North Hollywood bank shootout.

Not surprisingly, these incidents generated a host of proposals to put more firepower in the hands of police and keep firearms out of potentially dangerous hands. But to appreciably reduce the chance of similar gun tragedies, lawmakers in Los Angeles, Sacramento and Washington must focus on making guns considerably harder to obtain for everyone.

Alas, the immediate reaction has been to endorse small, incremental changes: expanding the requirements that persons in a growing list of categories must meet before they may legally buy a gun. President Clinton, for instance, wants foreigners to provide documentation that they have been residents in one state for 90 days. Ali Hassan Abu Kamal, the Empire State gunman, entered the United States in late December, less than two months before the shooting. Had the 90-day requirement been in place, he might not so easily have purchased in Florida the semiautomatic pistol he used in New York.

But Clinton’s proposal would have done nothing to stop the Valley bank robbers from acquiring their arsenal, or attorney William J. Billick III from acquiring the pistol he used to kill his children and himself. Nor would this proposal stop Sunday’s drive-by shooting or stop the gruesome street violence that has become so commonplace in American cities.

What would make a difference? Limits on possessing whole categories of weapons, such as cheap handguns, would help a lot. So would an expansion of the existing federal ban on assault weapons to include components used to convert semiautomatic rifles to fully automatic. These guns have no purpose other than to kill and maim. Certainly near-blanket bans on assault weapons and cheap handguns would be most effective if Congress imposed them nationally. But given the strength of the gun lobby in Congress, a state by state or even locality by locality approach is more likely. For that reason, we strongly hope pro-control state lawmakers, led in the fight this year by Los Angeles Assemblymen Louis Caldera and Antonio Villaraigosa, will prevail in efforts to lift state preemption on local gun controls, allowing cities and counties to act on their own.

The North Hollywood shootout has already triggered calls for tougher local action. Councilman Mike Feuer and other leaders are meeting this week to consider the city’s legal options.

Tough requirements on gun manufacturing would also help. Clinton and Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) have proposed bills demanding child-safety features on handguns to make them harder to fire, and requiring trigger locks and loaded chamber indicators. Similar measures are pending in Sacramento as well.

The bloody lessons of recent days are clear: absent tough, broad gun control measures, we can expect more tragedies of the sort we have just witnessed. That’s unacceptable.