A March on Gun Carnage

Next month Congress is scheduled to consider a proposal to require the same background checks on buyers at gun shows as are required now for buyers at gun stores. That would be a modest but important step toward keeping legally purchased guns out of the hands of people with criminal records. But as usual, given Congress’ craven kowtowing to the gun lobby, the measure’s fate is uncertain. What would help is some offsetting political pressure on the House and Senate, and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors has a good idea about how to apply it. Denver’s Wellington Webb is urging his fellow mayors and the nation’s police chiefs to march on Washington next month to insist that Congress enact tougher gun control laws.

Last week’s assault rifle attack that wounded four children and an adult at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills and the racially motivated murder almost immediately afterward of a Filipino American postal employee produced the latest victims in a national epidemic of gun violence that persists despite an overall decline in crime. As Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks wrote in The Times the other day, more than 65% of the 217,853 murder victims in the United States between 1987 and 1997 died from gunfire. That’s more than 140,000 killed by firearms, many of the victims children. For the National Rifle Assn. and its political toadies to go on pretending that effective measures to reduce this violence are beyond devising is absurd. Parks Friday used even stronger language, saying assault weapons and “Saturday night special” handguns should be collected and destroyed, then banned.

A march on Washington that expressed the nation’s anger and anguish over the failure to achieve better controls on guns would force members of Congress and presidential candidates who bend their knees to the gun lobby to justify this political cowardice. The mayors represent cities, where most gun violence occurs. The police chiefs represent the forces of law and order, which are steadily undercut by inadequate gun control laws.

We hope the nation will be able to see a massed rank of uniformed chiefs calling on Congress to act. It would be a healthy reminder that what stands between the public and armed lunatics is not the NRA but the nation’s cops.