Prayer--and Gun Control

The scenes that played over and over on television screens across the country captured the surreal collision of innocence and horror in Tuesday’s shootings at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills. Burly policemen and firemen in red hats walked hand in hand with wide-eyed preschoolers, leading them not on a field trip but to safety from a gunman. Uniformed officers, guns drawn, searched the center’s playground, crouching behind swing sets and slides while pet goats scattered in fright. A young victim looked up from a stretcher and gazed around in bewilderment on the way to a waiting ambulance.

Three children, a teenage camp counselor and a receptionist were wounded in the attack.

“We’re about kids and family,” said an anguished Jeff Rouss, executive vice president of the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Los Angeles, as he stood behind yellow police tape. “We’re a place of fun and caring and learning.”

All of Los Angeles became family as we gathered in offices and living rooms, stunned at yet another senseless shooting, not in Littleton, not in Atlanta, but here. And in that moment of unity we wondered whether any place remains that is fun and caring--and safe.

Amid the horror, tales of heroism emerged--the center workers who rushed the children away, the convalescent home staffers who sheltered them, the police officers who showed up within minutes of the first call.

As SWAT teams fanned out in trying to find the gunman and the police and FBI tried to determine the motive, the rest of us were left to echo Rouss’ impassioned plea: “We must do something about guns,” he said. “We must stop this.” And we were left with the words of Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, who did what people all over the city were doing silently: He prayed. “We pray that God will bless his people with peace,” he said, “especially peace in our hearts so that the senseless crimes that go on literally day after day will end.”

Washington can and should do more than pray. “Once again our nation has been shaken and our hearts torn by an act of gun violence,” President Clinton said Tuesday. California’s Sen. Dianne Feinstein didn’t mince words: Our places of learning, places of respite, she said, “are being blown apart by the psychopaths in our society.” Her answer, she promised, will be legislation to register handguns and license gun owners. It’s an idea proposed in June by presidential candidate Bill Bradley, and one we endorse.

Once again, we can predict that the gun lobby will claim that one crazed man, not a gun, was responsible for what happened in the Valley. But one man with a knife could not have mowed down four children and an adult within seconds. And had there not been a gun used, the two teenagers and two adults slain at a Rosemead home Monday night, apparently in a jealous rage, probably would not be dead. The incidents are endless.

Tighter gun regulation won’t solve everything--ask the parents of the children who were deliberately struck by a car at an Orange County preschool May 3. But there’s no denying that guns are used more than any other weapon to intentionally kill and maim. It is insanity that these tragic shootings continue to occur in this nation, with almost numbing regularity. We ask, again: Will it take the shooting of innocents in every congressional district before national lawmakers shake themselves loose from the death grip of the gun lobby?