Gun Stores

After unanimously agreeing to ban Saturday night specials last month, the Sierra Madre City Council backtracked Tuesday night, voting down an ordinance to bar the local sale of the small, cheaply made handguns. Sierra Madre has no gun stores, but agreed to consider the law after the San Gabriel Valley Council of Governments urged the 30 cities in the valley to pass bans modeled on ordinances adopted by the cities of Los Angeles and West Hollywood.

Protesters objecting to the opening of a Pasadena gun store just a few doors from a preschool and a church marched with a child's casket from the store to City Hall on Monday demanding that the City Council restrict where guns may be sold.

Pasadena anti-violence activists and church leaders outraged at plans for a new gun store a stone's throw from the city's biggest church persuaded the City Council on Monday to look for ways to limit where such stores open in the future. The council directed staff members to work with groups including Pasadena's Coalition for a Non-Violent City to develop local laws to limit such uses.

A 22-year-old man who stole 93 handguns from a Westminster store and tried to burglarize two other firearm dealerships was sentenced Monday to 15 years in prison, and his partner faces more than six years behind bars. Michael Lamont Bourgeois and Cedric Gunter, 24, both of Los Angeles, were convicted by a jury in January of conspiracy to burglarize the Stockade gun store on Westminster Boulevard and being felons in possession of firearms, Assistant U.S. Atty. Ronald Cheng said.

A 52-year-old mother, distraught over her only daughter's death, complied with Florida's three-day "cooling off" period before she picked up a new gun and killed herself with it. "If we had known that she was in a state of grief because of what happened to her daughter . . . we would not have sold her the gun," said Sharon Brown, daughter of the president of Mom and Pop's Guns. Connie Clay killed herself Thursday after seeing her daughter, Christina, for the last time at the funeral home.

Corrupt "kitchen-table" gun dealers licensed by the federal government are a key source of handguns used in crimes in Southern California, according to a report released Tuesday. The study, prepared by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, also cited gun-store burglaries by gang members--and unlicensed street dealers who use others to acquire guns from retail stores.

The Los Angeles City Council agreed Wednesday to raise business permit taxes for firearms and ammunition sellers as a means of recouping the costs of fighting gun-related crime. "The use of firearms in the commission of crimes causes a tremendous burden on our communities and great expense to our city's government in public safety resources needed to combat and control gun-related activity," said Councilwoman Rita Walters, the motion's author.

Saying a gun shop would make downtown Santa Paula less tourist-friendly, the Planning Commission has denied a merchant's application to open a weapons store near the city's core. The commissioners voted 4 to 1 Tuesday night to deny a weapons store on the grounds that it would not enhance the city's plan to make its downtown more pedestrian- and tourist-oriented. The store, proposed by a Port Hueneme gun shop owner, would have operated out of a building at 112 S. 8th St.

Five reputed gang members were indicted in federal court Tuesday on charges that they conspired to steal firearms from Southern California gun dealers. Four of the five were arraigned Tuesday morning in U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter's courtroom. The fifth, named in the indictment as George Batiste Thenarse, was arraigned later Tuesday.

The argument that the assault weapons being banned (May 6) have only one purpose, which is to take human life, is as irrelevant as it is true. Our forefathers gave us the right to keep and bear arms so that we could rise up against a tyrannical government. No one has presented this in the press. Banning assault weapons will be as futile as banning cocaine has proved to be. But it is a very big step down the slippery slope of socialism. If the press does not present this side of the argument, it is an accessory to the process.