Baca, Parks Join Call for County Gun Ban

The two top police officials in Los Angeles County announced their support Monday for banning gun shows on county property.

Sheriff Lee Baca and Los Angeles Police Department Chief Bernard C. Parks joined a majority of the Board of Supervisors at a packed news conference to praise the proposed ordinance, designed to end what is billed as the world’s largest gun show, held four times each year at the county fairgrounds in Pomona.

“L.A. County is not a frontier county anymore,” Baca said.

Noting that the two North Hollywood bank robbers who pinned down dozens of LAPD officers with automatic weapons fire two years ago bought some of their weaponry at gun shows, Parks added: “The pendulum has swung back in the direction of people wanting the reduction of gun violence.”

A majority of supervisors announced Monday that they support the law barring the sale of firearms on county property, which will be formally voted on at today’s meeting. Representatives of Great Western Shows, which runs the event, could not be reached for comment, but in the past have defended the show as legal and safe and vowed to fight the law in court.

“The county of Los Angeles should not be the place you should come to buy a gun,” said Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who also is proposing convening a task force to trace the high-powered weaponry used by criminals in Los Angeles.

Monday’s event not only demonstrates a solid board majority to approve the law today, but also is the latest example of how the issue of gun control has lent historically unprecedented strength to ties between the county’s two biggest police agencies.

Ever since a white supremacist allegedly shot and killed a postman and sprayed gunfire from a semiautomatic weapon into the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills two weeks ago, Parks has been campaigning for tougher gun laws. He has been increasingly joined by Baca, who heads a department that frequently has had cool relations with the higher-profile LAPD.

“This is a serious community issue,” said sheriff’s Sgt. David Halm. “He [Baca] is going to form an alliance with whomever we need to, not that we weren’t already allied anyway.”

Baca, a former National Rifle Assn. member, has been an activist sheriff since being sworn in this January, and extended his portfolio to gun control even before the Granada Hills shootings. Earlier this year, Baca supported the board’s ban on the sale of so-called Saturday night specials on county property.

The sheriff and chief also have been joined by Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who, although he was not at the news conference Monday, said through a spokeswoman that he supports the gun show ban. Garcetti and Baca also have expressed support for Parks’ hopes that all military-style assault weapons and so-called “junk guns” in the county be confiscated and their owners compensated.

The alliance of local law enforcement gives extra strength to the effort to bar gun shows on county property, which advocates Monday hoped would spread across the state.

Acknowledging that the Pomona show could simply move a couple of miles east into San Bernardino County, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky called on the state Legislature to ban the sale of guns on all state property, which would cover a far wider swath of California, including state fairgrounds in neighboring counties.

“This is only the beginning,” he said.

Supervisors for years have been troubled by the Great Western show, which transforms the fairgrounds into a sprawling supermarket devoted to Civil War memorabilia, leaflets, guns and bullets. The Fairplex Assn., which leases the fairgrounds from the county, sub-leases it for the event.

But a recent spate of high-profile shooting rampages and undercover investigations by state and federal agents have spurred increasingly tighter regulation of the show.

This spring, in the wake of a massacre at a Colorado high school, undercover state investigators quickly exhausted $4,000 buying illegal firearms at the fairgrounds and arrested four people. Supervisors unanimously approved new security measures for the show.

Then, two weeks ago, federal agents arrested at his Orange County home a man they met at the Fairplex show, where he allegedly offered to sell them parts required to assemble a machine gun. That same day, white supremacist Buford O. Furrow Jr. allegedly went on his rampage in the west San Fernando Valley, killing postman Joseph Ileto and wounding five at the community center. Shortly afterward, Yaroslavsky proposed a blanket ban on the sale of firearms on county property.

Officials Monday acknowledged that most guns are purchased between individuals in private settings rather than at a gun show. But the shows, Parks said, appeal to a certain type of buyer looking for deadly weaponry.

“If you want an UZI, you don’t go to a gun shop on La Brea,” he said. “You don’t go to the Police Academy gun shop. You go to a gun show.”

Rattling off a tally of gun violence in her district--which includes the fairgrounds--Supervisor Gloria Molina said the law was the least elected officials could do.

“Bad people, as well as unstable people, will continue to have access to guns,” Molina said. “But each of us has to do what we can.”