Council OKs Curbs on Sale of Handguns

With strong backing from police, the City Council voted Wednesday to make Los Angeles the first city in California to prohibit the sale of more than one handgun per month to anyone.

The ordinance signed into law Wednesday is aimed at straw purchasers who buy large numbers of firearms and sell them to criminals, minors and others who are not legally qualified to own a gun.

Los Angeles Police Department officials supported the measure, saying that such handguns account for about 2,000 of the 7,000 weapons used in crimes and seized annually by the LAPD.

“We strongly support this ordinance,” Capt. Bill Fierro told the council. “We do have an illegal weapons and trafficking problem in this city, and we feel this ordinance definitely impacts the problems we have.”

The author, City Councilman Mike Feuer, told the council that the ordinance is a common-sense step to reduce gun violence that claimed 1,200 lives in Los Angeles County in 1997. One-sixth of those killed were children, Feuer said.

“Gun violence continues to pose both a public safety emergency and a public health emergency here in metropolitan Los Angeles,” Feuer told his colleagues before they voted unanimously to approve the ordinance.

More than a dozen residents, including two women who lost sons to gun violence, attended the council meeting to lend support.

Mary Leigh Blek, whose 21-year-old son Matthew was shot to death in 1994, criticized the gun lobby.

“I challenge anyone of them to dare complain that this might inconvenience some legitimate gun owner,” Blek said. “Just ask any parent who has forever lost a child to gun violence how inconvenient it is to bury a dead child.”

No one testified against the ordinance, but Sam Peredes of Gun Owners of California said in an interview later that the measure was unnecessary because there are already laws prohibiting the sale of guns to felons and minors, and that they are not enforced.

Councilmen Rudy Svorinich Jr. and Hal Bernson said they strongly believe in the constitutional right to bear firearms, but said the Los Angeles ordinance is not unreasonable because it allows law-abiding citizens to buy one gun a month, or 12 guns a year, for protection.

“For those who feel that they need more than one handgun a month, I take exception to that,” Svorinich said. “A dozen handguns in one’s possession does not make anyone safer.”

Similar laws have been enacted in Virginia, Maryland and South Carolina, but Feuer said no other city in California has adopted such an ordinance.

The number of straw-purchased guns from Virginia used in crimes in neighboring states declined 70% after it adopted the law, said Louis Tolley, western regional director of Handgun Control Inc.

The ordinance adopted Wednesday is one of several gun laws adopted by the City Council in recent years, including a ban on assault weapons in 1989. In 1997, the council banned the sale of large-capacity ammunition magazines.

The effective date of the ordinance will be delayed 90 days to allow the state Department of Justice to upgrade its computer database so gun shop owners can determine whether a purchaser has bought a handgun during the previous 30 days.

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* HANDGUN SUITS

Firms are sued for costs related to gun crimes, accidents. C4