Voter Message on Assault Weapons Was Unequivocal

A young L.A. police officer is killed by a fleeing suspect firing an assault rifle. “Why did my daddy have to die?” his 7-year-old son asks red-eyed officers.

When is enough enough?

Officer Brian Brown, 27, a single parent and war hero, was the latest victim of an assault weapon Sunday night.

If any voter mandate can be gleaned from last month’s election--if Democrats were given the green light for anything--it was to rid society of these semiautomatic firearms with large capacity ammunition magazines.

Call them assault weapons; call them toys for macho men or tools for gangbangers. The name matters not; the firepower does. Ask Officer Brown’s surviving colleagues, whose common handguns were outmatched by the killer’s Ruger Mini-14.

The solution is not an arms race on our cities’ streets. There’s no need to issue every cop an assault weapon. The solution, at minimum, is to stop manufacturing and selling these large capacity magazines. Then also require the existing magazines to be altered--plugged--to reduce their capacity. Like shotguns already must be when used for duck hunting.

That’s the direction Assemblyman Don Perata (D-Alameda) is aiming. Now a senator-elect, he intends to introduce his latest assault gun bill Monday when the new Legislature convenes for a brief get-acquainted session.

Perata wants to keep it simple: Limit the ammunition capacity--preferably 10 rounds, certainly no more than 19. Maybe also impose a minimum rifle length to hinder concealment.

“This isn’t metaphysics,” Perata says. “I just want rational language, like we have in all the best laws: ‘You can’t go faster than 25 mph in a school zone.’ ‘You can’t hunt ducks with more than three shells.’ Likewise, we should have some maximum number of bullets you can use for self-defense or causing mayhem.”

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Perata’s last bill was more complicated. It imposed a 19-round limit, but also defined a banned weapon by such military characteristics as a bayonet mount, a flash suppressor, or “a conspicuously protruding pistol grip.”

Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed the 1998 Perata bill, contending--as the lawmaker does now--that an assault weapon should not be defined by “cosmetics.” The real issue is rapid-fire capacity.

But Perata’s cynical. He believes the Republican governor was so eager to protect his political right flank that there’s no assault weapons ban he would have signed. “He just put us through a lot of mental gymnastics and kept us on a treadmill,” Perata says.

Whatever his motive, Wilson’s veto of that bill and another measure to ban junk handguns--Saturday night specials--gave Democratic candidates a crate-load of ammunition to fire at Republicans. And they did it with great effectiveness. Gov.-elect Gray Davis, Sen. Barbara Boxer, Atty. Gen.-elect Bill Lockyer and scores of Democratic legislative candidates all pummeled their GOP opponents on the gun issue.

Every Lockyer TV ad promoted gun control. “A madman with an assault weapon can turn streets into battlefields and playgrounds into killing fields,” a narrator intoned as footage rolled of the 1997 North Hollywood bank holdup, in which two robbers sprayed police and civilians with AK-47s. Then came film of five small corpses being removed from a Stockton school yard after a 1989 shooting with another AK-47.

Lockyer’s message registered with voters, who in turn sent him another: OK, fix it! So he has a dozen volunteer advisors--police chiefs, prosecutors, lawmakers, firearms experts--drafting details for Perata’s new bill.

“Criminals will find weapons they shouldn’t have,” Lockyer concedes, “but we need to do all we can to get these things out of circulation--the way we did machine guns decades ago. Now, they’re pretty much dried up.”

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Davis has promised to sign bans on assault weapons and junk handguns, plus a requirement that firearms be sold with trigger locks.

Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) will reintroduce a tougher version of the junk gun ban that Wilson vetoed. The new bill will contain a minimum size limit, something demanded by police chiefs. “The No. 1 fear that an officer has is confronting a bad guy who has a concealed weapon,” says Los Gatos Police Chief Larry Todd, who heads the chiefs’ firearms committee.

Assemblyman Jack Scott (D-Altadena), whose son was killed accidentally by a party host waving a shotgun, will reintroduce a vetoed bill requiring trigger locks. “If there’d been a trigger lock, my son would be alive today,” he says. “These stories are legion.”

Stories about people like Scott’s son, school kids and Officer Brown. Enough. Democrats now have the legislative firepower and voters want them to use it rapidly.