Gun Rental Restrictions Urged

On a summer morning last July, a pale and shaking Bobby Prince told his parents he was going for cigarettes. He climbed into his white Bronco and headed south, past the stream he caught bass in as a boy, and rolled onto the Ventura Freeway. Five miles down the road, he stopped under the ticking clock tower at the Agoura Hills Target Range.

Prince, 31, marked a single passage in his Bible and tucked it into the console. Then he walked into the range, rented a shotgun and killed himself. The clock’s hands rested at 10:10 a.m. It was the fourth suicide at the range since 1995.

The tragedy could have been prevented, his parents say, if the owner had conducted a background check and learned that their eldest son was a paranoid-schizophrenic who had been arrested several times. Although his arrest record and illness prevented him from buying a gun, he could rent one for $10.

Range owner Jim Davis insists that Prince was a trusted, regular customer who never gave any indication of instability. “He seemed fine,” Davis said.

Suicides with rented guns have plagued shooting ranges across the nation for years, although there are no comprehensive statistics. In Los Angeles County, at least 12 suicides have been reported at ranges since 1995. The problem has caused many range proprietors to insist that customers either use their own licensed guns or, if they rent, to bring a companion. Others have stopped renting guns.

Prince’s parents, Rosemary and Robert, say those safeguards aren’t enough. They want the Agoura Hills City Council to require ranges to conduct background checks on first-time renters through the state Department of Justice. The council is expected to take up the matter within the next few weeks. The Princes say they then want to take their fight to the county Board of Supervisors and even the Legislature.

“We don’t want to close the range down and aren’t suggesting that guns don’t have a place in the world,” said Rosemary Prince, 58, at her Westlake Village home.

“But would you take a 2-year-old child and let them make decisions for themselves?,” said Robert Prince, 60. “Ill people are no different . . . they don’t think they’re mentally ill.”

In 1995, Northern California lawmakers discussed strengthening rental regulations after a mentally ill man fatally shot another man before killing himself with a rented gun at a range in Stockton. Five others committed suicide at Bay Area ranges over the next year and a half, but the reform effort went nowhere. More than half of the suicides in California are by firearms.

Gun sellers must complete background checks, which can take up to 10 days, on prospective buyers. Ranges are left to devise their own policies. There are 1,835 ranges registered with the National Rifle Assn., 142 of them in California.

Members of the NRA and Gun Owners of California vigorously oppose tougher rental rules, citing their constitutional right to bear arms.

“The problem with background checks is that it takes a fair amount of time to do them,” said Merrill Gibson, a Los Angeles-based gun rights advocate. “Sometimes people really need to practice with a firearm . . . I don’t think [strictures] would save anyone, but would decrease the number of people who would practice for possible purchase later.”

Area range owners insist they do everything they can to prevent suicides. Davis, the Agoura Hills range owner, considers formal background checks unreasonable. He says he requires first-time customers to complete a brief questionnaire and wait a week before they are allowed to rent a gun.

Bobby Prince filled out that form three months before his July 15 death. The last of the eight questions asked: Do you have a history of mental illness? Prince checked no.

His parents say he never acknowledged his mental illness and instead accused everyone around him of being ill and out to get him. In 1998, they said, he was burned over 40% of his body after he became convinced that the federal government had rendered natural gas nonexplosive. He turned on the gas in his mobile home, lighted a cigarette and blew off the roof.

Davis, 65, says Prince’s parents could have called the range to warn him that their son was ill.

“Obviously he had a problem,” Davis said. “He was 31 years old and didn’t know where he was going in life. . . . I wish I could be of help in some way to stop this. It’s a total waste of someone’s life.”

The photos on the Princes’ dining room table--of a boy with butternut hair and freckles holding up a fish, of a teenager standing stiffly in a tuxedo, ready for his high school prom--held promises of a happier life.

Lt. Jim Glazer, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Lost Hills station, said he spoke with Agoura Hills officials about meeting with the council and Davis to discuss possible restrictions at the range.

“I think we can come up with some policies that will make it more difficult for someone to commit such a tragic act at that location,” Glazer said.

Prince’s parents said they never really understood how their son felt until they found the Bible he had left behind. It opened to a haunting passage marked with a star--Psalm 31. It read in part:

Terror is all around me.

They are making plans against me, plotting to kill me.

But my trust is in you, O Lord . . . save me from my enemies.