Little by Little by Little

Once more, our legislators in L.A. and Sacramento are declaring war on guns by promising to enact laws that will clamp down on the use of trigger fingers and limit the number of people guns can kill.

Well, sort of.

What they’re actually trying to do in L.A. is make it tougher to buy bullets on the theory that if you don’t have bullets you can’t shoot anyone. Hollering, “Bang, you’re dead,” just isn’t the same.

Meanwhile, in Sacramento they’ve proposed limiting the purchase of guns to one a month, so that in a year a guy will have only 12 guns to fire on his neighbors, cops, relatives and children caught climbing his fences.

These, you’re probably thinking, aren’t the most courageous attacks you’ve ever seen in the never-ending war on gun ownership, but that’s only because you don’t understand the situation.

True, our leaders are less than damn-the-torpedoes when it comes to taking on the National Rifle Assn., especially now with Moses running the outfit, so they’ve hit upon a new tactic. It’s called Piecemeal Warfare.

What we’re doing is employing the most common of all guerrilla strategies to win what has become not so much a war on guns as a war on the NRA: We’re sneaking up on it.

First, you see, we make it more difficult for gun owners to get bullets. Then we enact legislation for background and sanity checks in order for them to purchase gun-butts.

Then we limit the sale of gun barrels, followed by firing pins, followed by triggers, and pretty soon, hoo-boy!, we’ve got the whole damned gun.

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I realize that making it difficult to buy bullets has already been tried in Pasadena and declared ineffective, but that’s only because they didn’t make it tough enough. Being forced to sign a logbook before buying ain’t about to frighten off people arming for Armageddon.

L.A. has the same requirement, and we all know how effective it’s been here. So Councilman Mike Feuer wants to toughen it by making bullet buyers pass a background check, buy a permit and have their thumbprints taken before they can stock up on their killer BBs.

I say we go even further by photographing the bullet-buyers, logging their tattoos, requiring an IQ of at least 75 and maybe selling each bullet in two parts and forcing everyone to go through the whole process twice.

They’ll either grow old and mellow standing in line, stop buying bullets, be forced to deal on the black market or pack up and move to a place where nuts and bullets grow on trees.

Just as the state ban on assault rifles was rooted in the murderous attack on Stockton schoolchildren eight years ago, so the current rash of anti-gun measures has its origin in an act of violence, the wild North Hollywood shootout that killed two heavily armed bank robbers and left 11 officers and six civilians injured.

We watched it live on television and read about it for days afterward, thus allowing the problem of guns on the street to take shape slowly in the minds of those who legislate in L.A. and California. It requires more time for a message to reach a politician’s brain than it does for the rest of us.

But they seem to have the idea now that guns, in combination with bullets and fingers, kill, and that’s bad.

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You’ll notice I’ve called them gun owners and not gun nuts, because I’ve come to realize over the past months that not all of them are raving lunatics. Maybe, oh, 28% are normal folks who are fearful that Helter Skelter is just around the corner and by God they’re going to be ready.

However, I stand solidly in favor of any anti-gun legislation, even that as weak and trifling as the regulation of bullets, because every step forward favors the future.

What we’re trying to do here, you see, is not solve the problems of crime and gunfire in our generation but create a psychological climate that will make shooting guns as socially unacceptable as smoking cigarettes in public or walking your dog without a leash.

We begin here and now in small ways and then build on them until by the year 2100 or so we’ll live in a society that doesn’t require a sidearm or the presence of an armed guard to use an ATM at night.

We’ve declared war on cigarettes and drunk driving, and we didn’t begin those battles by banning matches and bottles, which makes the current effort against bullets less than historic.

However, if it means that the message has at last reached the brains of those who chart our destinies, then it’s worth the effort. Surrounding the NRA may take a little longer that way, but it’s still possible.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com