Survey Lists the Toll of Guns in County

A detailed survey of 1996 gun violence in Los Angeles County has found that someone died, on average, every six hours as a result of a firearms-related homicide, suicide or accident.

The report, compiled by the Los Angeles-based Women Against Gun Violence, also found that while the ages of the victims ranged from 2 to 93, one out of five people killed by gunfire last year was 18 or younger. And six of the victims were under age 9.

The findings underscore the need for officials to view gun violence as a public health crisis rather than an issue to be handled only by law enforcement authorities, said the group’s chairwoman, Ann Reiss Lane, who spent almost 20 years as a commissioner for the Los Angeles Police and Fire departments.

“We are not opposed to people using guns properly. We are not trying to confiscate everyone’s guns,” she said. “We are saying that we have a public health crisis . . . [and that] we have too many damn kids dying because of guns.”

Susan Shaw, the group’s executive director, called the survey “a vivid portrayal of the toll that the proliferation of guns are taking on people, and particularly the youth of Los Angeles County.”

But a spokesman for the nation’s most powerful gun owners association disputed the significance of the survey’s findings.

“I understand what they want to accomplish as far as keeping guns out of the wrong hands, but we have to be able to allow responsible people access to firearms if they wish,” said Paul Payne, a Southern California official of the National Rifle Assn.

“I believe we have too many criminals, not too many guns. It sounds cliched, but it’s true,” he said.

The key findings in the report, culled from several government sources, including death certificates filed with the county Department of Health Services, showed the following:

* Guns were involved in the deaths of 1,398 county residents. On average, that meant that four people a day, or one person every six hours, died as a result of firearms.

* The death toll from gun-related homicides included 236 people 18 or younger. In addition, almost one of every four residents killed in firearms accidents fell into that age group.

* Los Angeles residents accounted for nearly half of the total gun-related deaths in the county, which includes 87 other cities and the county’s unincorporated areas. In the city of Los Angeles, there were nearly 500 firearms-related homicides last year, the report said--or about 70% of the 709 homicides of all types reported in Los Angeles in 1996, according to FBI statistics.

* Not one federal, state or county legislative district in the county was spared a death linked to guns last year. Indeed, no fewer than seven gun-related homicides were reported in any congressional, Assembly, state Senate, Los Angeles City Council or county supervisorial district.

That last finding was particularly significant to the nonprofit advocacy organization because it intends to personalize the issue of gun-related fatalities by providing each legislator in Los Angeles County with the number of deaths in his or her district and the names of those who were killed or committed suicide.

“We are trying to put a human face on this issue, particularly with the young people--the 2-, 3- [and] 5-year-olds who have been killed in the last year,” Reiss Lane said. “And by doing that, by making the study relevant to each particular legislator and their district, we want to get the word out so . . . citizens will come up to them and say, ‘Look at this. What are you doing about this?’

“We want legislators to . . . face the reality that [so many] people are dying in their districts.”

Payne of the NRA challenged the import of the survey, arguing that it chronicles the number of deaths without addressing how many of them were the result of crimes, often committed by people who illegally possessed guns in the first place.

“The value of any statistic [on gun-related deaths] is almost nil if we don’t track the frequency of criminal activity as it relates to these statistics,” he said.

“We have a lot of people dying because there are a lot of criminals out there who should be in jail,” added Payne, whose father was gunned down in a 1991 robbery in Sacramento.

“The gun didn’t kill my father, the criminal did. And there were probably 20,000 gun laws on the books at the time . . . and not one of them saved my father’s life,” he said.

But Shaw countered that Payne’s position does not explain the staggering number of gun-related deaths in the county last year or the fact that many of the victims were clearly not criminals.

“[Payne’s stand] does not minimize the problem of the accessibility and availability of guns in Los Aneles County,” she said. “And it certainly doesn’t explain away the [killing of] two 2-year-olds, two 3-year-olds, the suicides, the accidents.”

*

While the study has been a focal point of the group’s activities and will be the first in a series of annual surveys, Shaw said it began not as a report but as an effort to memorialize the victims of gun-related violence.

“It started in the summer of ’96. . . . One of our volunteers began [a] bereavement letter project, letters of condolence to families of victims of gun violence,” recalled Shaw, who researched the survey with Kirsten Knutson, a graduate student at the UCLA School of Public Health.

Soon after issuing those letters, Shaw said, it became clear that the information being collected was of significance not only to the families of those killed by gunfire but also to elected officials.

From there, the group began to compile an entire year’s statistics, launching a survey that will be an annual project of Community Partners, a nonprofit umbrella organization of community service groups throughout the county.

“We also plan to do a report card on elected officials and their responsiveness to this problem,” Reiss Lane said.

“People are all paying attention to diseases and all kinds of other terrible things that happen to residents and our children,” she said. “But why, when we have this many gun deaths happening in our own city, why aren’t we doing something? Where is the outrage?”