Taking aim at bullets could put dent in growing gun violence

The deadliest weapon being sold in gun shops these days is not the old .44 magnum revolver immortalized by Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry.” Definitely not. Nor is it even the 9-millimeter Glock semiautomatic used by the mass murderer at Virginia Tech.

The most lethal weapon is a bullet.

It’s true, guns don’t kill people. Bullets do.

Deny ammunition to a handgun, and it becomes about as lethal as a tack hammer.

Or as freshman Assemblyman Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) puts it: “Like humans need oxygen to breathe, firearms need ammo to function. Without it, the worst thing you can do with a Tech-9 is throw it across the room and hope you hit somebody.

“And do we regulate the sale and distribution of ammo in the state of California? The answer is unequivocally ‘No.’ It’s more difficult to buy a can of spray paint. Because spray paint is locked up and you have to show an ID, due to all the graffiti.”

Actually, the city of Los Angeles does try to minimally regulate handgun ammunition sales. Purchasers are required to show a driver’s license and leave their name, address and thumbprint. But there’s only random, cursory background checking later. And it’s easy for someone just to drive into Culver City or Compton and load up there on bullets.

A study by the Rand Corp. last year found that felons and other people who can’t legally possess guns did manage to buy more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition in L.A. city retail stores over a two-month period.

So De Leon, at the urging of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Police Chief William J. Bratton and county Sheriff Lee Baca, has introduced legislation that would make California the first state to seriously regulate handgun ammunition.

His bill, AB 362, cleared the Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday on a party-line vote -- Democrats for, Republicans against -- and was sent to the Appropriations Committee.

The legislation is aimed primarily at gangs. Its intent is to require instant background checks of all purchasers of handgun ammunition in California by 2011.

Meanwhile, handgun ammo vendors would have to register with the state Department of Justice, keep bullets locked up behind the counter, require an ID from purchasers and sell only face to face. No Internet transactions.

At the committee hearing, the gun lobby objected that keeping bullets locked up -- to prevent thefts -- would be inconvenient and inhibit comparison shopping.

“Wedding rings are locked up behind a counter,” De Leon says. “Cigarettes are locked up behind a counter. Why can’t we do that for a product with the potential to maim and kill?”

As a practical political matter, California already has gone about as far as it can -- or arguably should -- in controlling firearms. We have the strictest laws in the nation, most of them signed by former Gov. Gray Davis.

They include bans on assault weapons, cheaply made Saturday night specials and armor-piercing .50-caliber sniper rifles. There’s a one-per-month limit on handgun purchases and a requirement for minimal safety training. There’s also a state background check and a 10-day cooling-off period before a gun can be picked up from the dealer.

And even with all that, it’s not certain whether any of California’s laws could have headed off Seung-hui Cho’s murderous rampage Monday at Virginia Tech, where he gunned down 32 and then killed himself.

There is one possibility: Under California law, if a person is committed to a mental facility, even just overnight, and found to be suicidal or homicidal, he is barred from buying a gun for five years. There currently are 1.3 million Californians in the state’s database who fit that description.

Cho was evaluated at a Virginia mental facility in 2005 after stalking two female students. He was kept overnight and released. Virginia doesn’t have a law like California’s. But it’s not clear whether Cho would have been barred from buying a gun even in California, based on initial reports.

Unlike in Virginia, California gun clips are limited to 10 rounds. Cho reportedly was using 15-round clips. So if he had bought his handguns out here, he would have been slowed down a bit, having to reload more, possibly saving some lives.

But De Leon didn’t introduce his bullet bill because of Cho.

He introduced it because of Charupha Wongwisetsiri. She was a 9-year-old girl from Thailand, playing blissfully in her Angelino Heights kitchen while her mother was washing dishes one night last December. Then a stray bullet from gang gunfire tore through the wall, hitting her in the head. She died about a week later.

“The girl lived one block away from where I live,” says De Leon, 40, a former organizer for the California Teachers Assn. “It was the kind of senseless tragedy we see every day.

“I asked my staff to look into how we go after the ammo used by gangbangers....

“Today, somebody can go buy a trunk full of ammo, cruise around, go to MacArthur Park, ‘What do you guys need? I got it here in the trunk.’ We call them straw buyers.”

California needs to get control over that. Find out who the straw buyers are. Put them out of business.

Gun violence -- mainly gang violence -- has been rising, despite all the gun controls. That’s largely because there already are more guns than people in California, by some estimates. And there’s an unimpeded stream of ammo.

De Leon and L.A. are on to something. The way to make gun controls really work is to choke back on the flow of bullets.

Reach the columnist at george.skelton@latimes.com.