Open Season on Republicans in Legislature

Deer in headlights? No. Republicans in gun sights. Same thing. They’re frozen. Won’t move out of the way. Standing targets.

Republicans in Washington seem to have been jarred to their senses on gun control, at least in the Senate. Not in Sacramento. They’re the same big bull’s-eye--mostly voting “no” on all the major gun control bills.

The perfect symbol for the California GOP on guns is state Sen. Richard Rainey (R-Walnut Creek), who represents growing suburbia on the east side of San Francisco Bay. Democrats are taking aim at him with the gun issue, and he hasn’t budged.

Rainey, 60, is a pleasant, substantive former sheriff. On most issues, he’s a moderate. He supports abortion rights. In 1994, as an assemblyman, he authored a centrist three-strikes sentencing bill that Gray Davis and most Democrats preferred over the broader version that ultimately passed. In 1996, Rainey won a Senate seat by just three-tenths of a percentage point, barely surviving charges he was too pro-gun.

Next year, he will be challenged for reelection by hard-working, likable Assemblyman Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch), 49, a former Contra Costa County supervisor and schoolteacher. It promises to be the hottest, most expensive legislative race of the November election. Torlakson says straight out: He’s going after Rainey on guns.

So what does Rainey do on the Senate floor? He votes against a bill to require safety standards for junk handguns, the so-called Saturday night specials. Last week, he sat there and didn’t vote at all on a bill to tighten up California’s assault weapons ban. And Tuesday, he cast the only “no” vote in committee against a bill to limit customers to one handgun purchase a month.

“Republicans are losing these suburban districts because of mothers,” says GOP consultant Allan Hoffenblum. “In the minds of women, if you’re for guns, you’re a gun nut and you’re putting their children in jeopardy. Democrats have taken the law and order issue away from us.”

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Hoffenblum knows this from sad experience. In 1996, his GOP client--Rep. Bill Baker--lost a congressional seat in Contra Costa County, mainly because he had voted against the federal assault weapons ban.

East Bay Democrats--like Torlakson and Sen. Don Perata of Alameda--remember well the power of that anti-gun ammunition.

Perata is the author of the Legislature’s assault weapons bill. And Rainey now is such a political target that Perata didn’t even lobby him for his vote after the measure fell short on an initial Senate roll call. Perata really didn’t want Rainey voting for his bill, which ultimately passed and moved to the Assembly. Now the trick for Democrats is to fend off amendments so the bill won’t need to return to the Senate--

where Rainey would be given a second chance to vote against assault guns.

So what’s with this moderate Republican? Why doesn’t he protect himself by voting more often for gun control, something the senator admits his constituents want?

Some of his answers are logical; most are complicated. He didn’t realize a minimum size requirement had been amended out of the Saturday night special bill, or he would have voted for it. The Perata bill would ban some sporting guns that really aren’t assault weapons. The one-a-month handgun bill “disadvantages honest people.” And he did vote for a bill requiring guns to be sold with child safety locks.

“I try to evaluate each bill to determine if it’s going to be effective or an effort in futility,” the former sheriff says. “Unfortunately, I can’t explain this in 30-second sound bites.”

Torlakson won’t have that problem.

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Republican pro-gun lawmakers are clinging to the past--in many ways a better past. But those times are fast disappearing because of population explosion.

The best symbol for this is Assemblyman Rico Oller (R-San Andreas), 40, a personable conservative who is the Assembly’s chief defender of guns. Oller grew up in the Sierra foothills, hunting quail with a 410-gauge shotgun as he walked to school.

“We’d walk through woods and across a creek,” he recalls. “When we got near school, we’d hide our guns in the brush. And after school, we’d hunt home.”

Kids who grow up like that grow up loving guns. But fewer and fewer kids do. Where Oller used to hunt quail, there’s now an industrial park. Since he was 12, California’s population has increased 70%. Meanwhile, the number of hunting licenses has fallen 59%, to roughly 762,000.

Oller laments the significance: “People’s experience with guns who don’t live in a rural area is people shooting people.”

Kids not hunting wild game, but gang members. And Republican politicians playing the role of deer.