Gun Lobby's Perfect Aim

"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."