When Patrick Purdy sprayed 100 or so bullets from a rapid-fire assault rifle into a crowd of children outside a Stockton, Calif., elementary school, killing five students and wounding 29 others and one teacher before dispatching himself with a pistol, he set off a national wave of horror. If tots playing innocently in a schoolyard at recess are no longer safe from heavily armed criminals and lunatics, who is? Many citizens concluded that no one is, and some on the West Coast resolved to take action. Their solution: to arm themselves for survival in a world seemingly gone mad.
And so the Stockton massacre started a new spiral in America's domestic arms race. All last week California gun shops were jammed with customers, sometimes standing three or four deep at counters, clamoring to buy an imitation AK-47 like the one Purdy used or, failing that, some other semiautomatic paramilitary weapon. (His gun was actually an AKS, a Chinese-made semiautomatic version of the fully automatic Soviet AK-47, though many gun dealers and users call both versions AK-47s.) At B & B Sales in North Hollywood, owner Bob Kahn spent much of Thursday frantically phoning suppliers to replenish his sold-out stocks. "We're in a frenzy," he said. Kahn assured customers that 50 AK-47 look-alikes would arrive on Friday, but some buyers were in no mood to wait. Jay Montoya, a Los Angeles salesman who had already visited three other stores in a futile attempt to buy the Chinese-made weapon, finally plunked down $341 and walked out with a Ruger Mini-14, an American semiautomatic rifle with a smaller caliber. Said he: "In case there's an earthquake, I'm going to protect my house ((from looters, presumably)). I know how to use this gun, and I would."
In Castro Valley, Calif., Dick Bash, owner of a store named Combat Arms, reports that he is overwhelmed by demand, largely from gun fanciers who fear that the Purdy massacre might at last prod legislators into taking some serious steps to control the sale of guns. Says he: "There is an arms race on, all right. People are rushing to buy guns before the government takes them away."
In all probability, however, Combat Arms customers need not worry. The Stockton slaughter has indeed prompted talk in state legislatures and the halls of Congress about cracking down on gun sales, and a few actual proposals. Some would ban the high-powered paramilitary weapons that, foes say, have only one use: to kill human beings. Others would institute a federally mandated waiting period, generally 15 days, before a qualified buyer could pick up his gun. (Under the bewildering mosaic of state laws now in effect, waiting periods range from 30 days in New York to zero in Virginia and Oregon, where Purdy bought his rifle.) Such a cooling-off period is thought necessary to allow time for a thorough background check that would disclose whether the would-be buyer is a felon or mentally ill. Such proposals have picked up powerful new allies: police chiefs who once opposed gun control but fear that their patrolmen are being outgunned by crack-dealing gangs and other criminals.