Have Weapons, Will Shoot

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Brandishing a Chinese-made AK-47 semiautomatic rifle, a man rose from his seat at a hearing of the California assembly in Sacramento last week and announced to some 80 startled listeners, "Ladies and gentlemen, take a look at your watches and start counting. You are lucky that I am the attorney general and not some nut. Because if I had the ammunition, I could shoot every member of the assembly by the time I finish this sentence -- about 20 seconds."

California Attorney General John Van de Kamp could be forgiven his 20 seconds of melodrama. His state was still reeling from the massacre wrought when a crazed man murdered five children in a Stockton schoolyard, wounded 29 others and a teacher, and then killed himself with a pistol.

Van de Kamp was making a sobering point: the nation's body count keeps mounting as reckless gunplay continues at an alarming rate. In Bethesda, Md., last week, an emotionally disturbed office worker shot and killed three people and then committed suicide by turning his weapon on himself. An exchange of hard looks in a Woodbridge, Va., high school corridor ended when a visiting teenager shot a student in the groin. A man who was asked to leave a sweet-16 party took his revenge by spraying a New York City subway platform with a 9-mm automatic handgun, wounding six.

The District of Columbia alone has counted 75 homicides during the first 45 days of 1989, many involving guns. In one wild 24-hour period last Tuesday, 13 people were killed or wounded. Some of these shootings were committed by "ordinary" citizens; others could be tied to drug criminals, who continue to produce their own separate necrology, turning inner cities into so many Dodge Cities. Then there are the now familiar cases of children found carrying weapons to the classroom; only last week a New York City fifth-grader brought a sawed-off shotgun to school.

To the relief of many, what is also finally on the increase is the feeling among Americans that enough is enough. A TIME/CNN poll conducted by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman last week found that 86% of those interviewed believe crime is getting worse and 84% think violence resulting from the use of guns is becoming a bigger problem. Fully 57% worry about becoming victims, 22% say they or members of their families have been threatened by someone with a gun, and 30% are so fearful of being assaulted on the street that they would just as soon carry a gun themselves. An overwhelming 89% favor a two-week waiting period for gun purchasers, and 65% want stricter gun-control laws.

While Americans would welcome harsher gun-control measures, they are skeptical and ambivalent on the subject. Most do not want to ban gun possession entirely; 84% say people have a right to own guns, perhaps because 53% feel they are inadequately protected by police. As for semiautomatic weapons, 51% would make civilian ownership of these guns illegal. In any case, 48% believe new restrictions would not reduce the amount of violence.