Effort to Curb Assault Weapons Creeps Forward

A Senate committee approved legislation Tuesday to further restrict the sale and use of assault weapons but not without a fight, suggesting that approval of a ban this year is not a sure thing.

The measure has support of anti-gun groups and Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer. Gov. Gray Davis has vowed to sign legislation that bans assault weapons. Davis, like Lockyer and many other Democrats, ran successful campaigns last year that included promises to outlaw the military-style weapons.

“We’ve mastered what the opposition calls the impossible science of defining an assault weapon,” the bill’s author, Sen. Don Perata (D-Alameda), said as he began touting the measure to the Senate Public Safety Committee.

Although the betting in Sacramento is that Perata’s measure will eventually win legislative approval later this year, Tuesday’s hearing indicated that it will not be easy. The bill received the minimum four votes needed to clear the committee. The vote came only after the bill was amended five times.

Perata’s measure is designed to toughen a statute approved a decade ago in the wake of the massacre at a Stockton elementary school that left five children dead. The 1989 legislation by then-Sen. David Roberti and Assemblyman Mike Roos bans specific models of military-style semiautomatic weapons.

Perata’s measure, SB 23, would prohibit so-called copycat weapons by adding a generic definition of semiautomatic guns. Sales of rifles and pistols that are knockoffs of weapons on the original Roberti-Roos list would become illegal.

However, the definition of an assault weapon is not simple. Opponents charge that Perata’s description is so broad that many guns used for hunting and other sports would become illegal.

Perata’s bill would prohibit semiautomatic weapons with fixed magazines containing more than 10 rounds. It also would ban semiautomatic rifles that can accept such large capacity magazines and have one other characteristic such as hand grips or other accessories that make them easy to maneuver or conceal.

Additionally, the legislation would ban the manufacture and sale of large capacity magazines, although gun owners who now have such magazines could continue to own them, as long as they modify them to hold no more than 10 rounds.

People who violate the act could face either misdemeanor or felony charges.

Anyone who already owns a weapon covered by the proposed law would have to go through a background check and register the gun with the state, at a cost of $20.

“This is a tax bill,” said Steve Helsley, lobbyist for the National Rifle Assn., one of the bill’s leading opponents.

Helsley and other pro-gun lobbyists criticized what they see as ambiguities and inconsistencies in the bill.

“It will be a speed bump,” Helsley said, predicting that the measure will be tied up in litigation. “It will be back here in two years.”

At one point, the discussion veered into a plea by lobbyists representing park rangers, fish and game wardens, and state medical, dental and insurance investigators. They want the right to continue to use assault weapons.

“They serve warrants just like anyone else does,” said John Miller, representing the investigators, rangers and wardens.

“You’re telling me a fish and game warden needs an assault weapon?” asked an incredulous Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), a committee member.

Miller cited an example of a warden who used such a gun to kill a mountain lion that had fatally mauled a jogger a few years ago, prompting Burton to press: “He could not have killed it without an assault weapon?”

“I would prefer to have a rapid fire weapon,” Miller responded.

“I’d rather have a Sherman tank,” Burton shot back.

Perata initially agreed to allow park rangers and the other investigators to use the weapons while on duty. But seeing he would lose votes, he backed off.

After the vote, Perata said the bill will impose perhaps the nation’s toughest restrictions on such guns.

“The art of this,” he said, “is what can you get through the Mix Master.”