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That opinion is growing in the wake of the Stockton slaughter. In California, Governor George Deukmejian and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, longtime foes of gun control, have lessened their opposition -- at least when it comes to paramilitary weapons. Deukmejian now calls for a 15-day waiting period for the purchase of assault rifles. Gates would apply the waiting period to purchases of all kinds of guns, and has called for an outright ban on paramilitary weapons. Says he: "We have been too tolerant. There is no need for citizens to have highly sophisticated military assault rifles designed for the sole purpose of killing people on the battlefield."
But gun control still faces daunting practical and philosophical objections. Even some advocates think it is oversold. Police officers tend to equate guns with drugs; so long as the crack trade is not significantly reduced, they think, the inner-city shoot-outs will rage on and contribute to the impression (not entirely justified in light of slight overall declines in the national crime rate) of a rising tide of violent crime that has driven so many peaceful citizens to arm themselves. On the practical side, writing a definition of paramilitary weapons that would distinguish them from some types of semiautomatic hunting rifles is no easy job.
To be effective, any law regulating semiautomatic assault rifles would have to be federal. It would make no sense to ban such weapons in, say, California, if they could be legally purchased in neighboring Arizona or Oregon. But tens of millions of Americans -- not to mention the Bush Administration -- resist the thought of giving Washington that much power over citizens' lives.
Most important of all, affection for guns runs deep in the American psyche, as evidenced by the common estimate that 50 million to 60 million U.S. households, about half the total, own at least one gun. And many of those households are convinced that gun ownership is an inalienable right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Actually, the wording is ambiguous; legal scholars have been quarreling for decades over whether it guarantees the right to bear arms to citizens individually or collectively -- that is, as members of a "well-regulated militia." The Supreme Court has never ruled squarely on that issue and has not even faced it indirectly since the 1930s. Then it upheld a law banning sawed-off shotguns on the ground that they would be of no use to a militia, seemingly upholding the collective interpretation. On the other hand, some writings of the Founding Fathers indicate they believed an armed citizenry to be the ultimate check against any tendency of their own government to turn into an oppressive tyranny, which would imply an individual right to bear arms.