The Guns of August

The pages of history flip by like an easy-reading book, filled with more events than anyone cares to remember.

Yet certain chapters stand out in each passing year, causing one to pause over them and ponder their contents for meaning.

And so I pause today.

I have been asked to recall the chapter that lingers with me in the book that was Los Angeles in 1999. Toward that end I have spent the past several days reviewing the stories and headlines that comprise the fading year, the closing book.

They include charter reform, secessionist movements, the police Rampart scandal, the Belmont debacle, the ousting of schools Supt. Ruben Zacarias, the loss of a possible NFL football franchise, police shooting protests, the opening of Staples Center and The Times’ embarrassing involvement in it, and so many acts of calamity that it short-circuits the brain to recall them.

To select a single event out of all this requires an arrogance of position that a newspaper columnist must assume without hesitation. I assume it today by looking back to that time of horror that turned gunfire at a Jewish community center in Granada Hills into a metaphor for evil.

Once more on a sunny day in the suburbs, blood stained our collective conscience and caused us to reflect on the so-called freedom that contributes to it.

Once more the screams of our sons and daughters cried out for protection.

*

It happened on a Tuesday morning.

A man later identified as Buford Furrow, a mentally troubled white supremacist, allegedly walked into the North Valley Jewish Community Center like a vision from hell and opened fire with a 9-millimeter assault rifle.

Bullets sprayed the lobby and a hallway of the center. Blood spattered the walls and streaked the floor.

When it was over, three children, a teenage girl and one adult lay bleeding. They all recovered. Furrow was arrested and awaits trial in that assault and in the murder of a Filipino American postal worker, Joseph Ileto, a short time later in Chatsworth.

The attacks, like those elsewhere, not only caused us to wonder about the hatred lurking in the nation’s psyche but also the proliferation of weapons that gives it voice.

The ability to possess firearms is beginning to seem less like a freedom than a burden.

Even before the bloody attack on Rinaldi Street, protests were raised here and across the country against the easy access to guns that allowed a dangerous subculture to exist.

Early in the year, a Los Angeles city ordinance was signed into law limiting the sale of handguns. Almost simultaneously, the county Board of Supervisors voted to ban the sale of junk guns in unincorporated areas.

Then both the city and county joined other municipalities in suing the handgun industry. The merchants of death were being called to account.

*

Two weeks to the day after the attack at the Jewish center, its thunder still resonating, the Board of Supervisors banned the sale of guns and ammunition on all L.A. County property.

“Enough is enough,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky declared as he led the assault against gun sales.

The ordinance covered buildings, beaches, parks and the sprawling Fairplex in Pomona, which would have effectively ended the nation’s largest gun shows held there each year.

“I am speaking for the children,” said Jeff Rouss, director of the Jewish Community Centers of Los Angeles, as he addressed the county’s five supervisors. “You have to lead. You have to protect them.”

And lead they did, although two--Mike Antonovich and Don Knabe--voted against the gun ban, despite the blood and tears that intermingled in the vast areas they governed.

Later, Great Western Shows won a reprieve in court but moved to Las Vegas, ending its 22-year run in Pomona.

The shootings in Granada Hills will be inexorably linked to L.A.’s war on firearms, serving as a kind of centerpiece around which outrage swirls.

But time has a way of collapsing even major events into a single message. The one that emerges from the chapter on guns and the North Valley Jewish center is an easy one to absorb: It happened here and it could happen again.

Its subtext is contained in the realization that as long as guns remain an icon of our culture, the voices of hatred will be thunder and pain. Our future will be its victims.

The message teaches that we can close the book on 1999, but we dare not forget its warning.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.