"What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?"
William Butler Yeats
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Two years ago, a San Pedro woman who was angry that she had to move out of her daughter's apartment decided to buy a gun. She easily passed the background check and safety test and purchased a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. She then shot and killed her daughter and her daughter's fiance, my brother David.
I cannot tell you where this brutality came from -- nor the vast alienation that spurred her to destroy a daughter who had children herself and a man who had a son, parents, brothers and a sister. But I can tell you where the gun came from. She bought it at Western Surplus in Hawthorne. It was a Glock 19.
The 9-millimeter semiautomatic is America's murder weapon of choice. The highly popular Glocks are as lightweight, powerful and easy to fire as Glock's engineers can design them to be. The super-lightweight 19, a "compact" model, is easily concealed and can fire two bullets per second. It packs the same firepower as many larger handguns and tends to be the favorite Glock of women.
In the last four years, California has passed more high-profile gun-control laws than most other states combined. It is widely lauded as the most progressive state on gun control. But I believe we should see this not as progress toward an end to gun violence but as a great victory for the gun lobby, which has succeeded spectacularly well in blocking laws that would make a real difference.
Among the new laws -- all hailed as major or even groundbreaking -- the most highly praised measures of all make safety locks mandatory, require buyers to prove they can handle a gun safely and allow victims to sue manufacturers for negligence. Another much-touted law prohibits Californians from buying more than one handgun a month. Pending bills would require "ballistic fingerprinting" so that a bullet could be traced back to the gun that fired it and would extend assault weapon regulations to .50-caliber rifles -- but California, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "has done most of the big exciting laws that [it] has the political will to do."
The National Rifle Assn. must be rejoicing. It should be celebrating, because if such minor laws can seem "strong" or "tough," it's only because the gun lobby has managed to define the debate so narrowly that gun-control advocates have to fight like wildcats for safety locks and put in long nights so that people can file lawsuits after a person they loved is killed. Will these modest measures really save lives? Maybe a few, but California is more armed than ever. As if to prove the point, despite these new laws, the gun-related homicide rate in Los Angeles County has increased in each of the last three years.
The debate has to shift to center court, where the battles truly matter. The debate needs to focus on whether people should be allowed to own handguns at all. Handguns are tools to kill people. It's what they're designed to do effectively and well. It's not surprising that some 11,000 people annually in the United States use them intentionally to do exactly that -- and many thousands will continue to do so, no matter how "safe" the guns are, or how well regulated or how liable we hold the manufacturers to be. Many murderers originally buy the handguns for self-defense. Many buy them specifically to kill. A great many would-be murderers do not have criminal records.
Gun control has to address three categories of gun deaths -- accidents (2% of the state total), homicides perpetrated by known-to-be violent criminals and all other shootings, whether planned or on impulse. While current measures attempt to address the first two, they almost entirely ignore the third. Yet the third category accounts for the most deaths, and most shootings occur with legally purchased firearms. And you only have to read the California section of this newspaper to see that such shootings occur daily.
In the week in which I am writing this piece, The Times reported the following gun deaths in L.A. County: A man allegedly shot his mother and his sister; another allegedly killed a store owner he was arguing with; a third allegedly murdered someone in a dispute over a gas pump. A 7-year-old boy was killed in what may have been gang cross-fire, and two men were shot while leaving a memorial service for a victim of gang violence. In Pomona, a depressed man stood up at a Burger King and shot a 2-year-old boy at another table, and in Oxnard, one man allegedly shot another over a parking spot.
