No Guns Allowed

THE FIRST MONDAY in October brought some good news to the Village Trustees of Morton Grove, Ill., a suburban community of 24,000 just northwest of Chicago. By refusing to review a lower court ruling appealed by the National Rifle Association, the United States Supreme Court let stand the town's ordinance against the sale and possession of handguns. Unfortunately, this decision is a rather hollow victory for gun control advocates. The fact that the responsibility for enacting gun control laws has fallen to local governments in towns the size of Morton Grove is just a reminder of a failure to enact a strong law on the national level. While local measures against handgun proliferation are encouraging, they do little to solve the problem, and only comprehensive federal legislation can be effective in stemming the dangerous flow of "Saturday Night Specials" into criminal hands.

The passage of the gun ordinance in Morton Grove was really an act of desperation by a group of citizens fed up with the increasing number of needless deaths. In 1979 alone, 10,738 people were murdered with handguns in the United States. Two of those victims were from Morton Grove, teenage girls shot to death in a wooded area of the community. When a local businessman announced plans to open a gun shop in the town two years after those killings, the Trustees acted swiftly. The result was the strongest anti-gun law ever passed in the United States.

Although the Morton Grove ordinance is the strongest in the nation, it is just one of the many new gun laws enacted by state and local governments in recent years. Some communities have banned the sale of ammunition, while others have instituted police registration programs. Cities as large as San Francisco and Washington, D.C. have strengthened their gun control laws considerably in the past five years. This year, the state of Washington lengthened the waiting period required for handgun purchases in order to allow police more time to check the medical and criminal records of gun license applicants. All of these actions have come at a time when public opinion polls show a majority of Americans in favor of federal gun registration.

ALTHOUGH STUDIES have shown that local gun laws do have some effect in reducing crime, ultimately these laws are undermined by the lack of federal guidelines. Washington, D.C. itself provides an excellent example of how local controls can be nullified by weak laws elsewhere in the country. John W. Hinckley Jr., a man with a history of psychiatric problems, shot four men in downtown Washington with a gun he had easily purchased in a Dallas pawnshop. The absence of strong controls in Texas rendered the D.C. law moot.

Obviously, it is grossly unfair for public safety in Washington, or anywhere else, to be endangered by lax gun laws in other parts of the country. But unless Congress acts, the present situation will continue.

Unfortunately, action in Congress still seems unlikely, mostly due to the efforts of the NRA. For years the NRA has successfully stalled gun control legislation in Congress through its well known tactics of political and financial intimidation. Senators and Representatives who might ordinarily favor gun control are effectively dissuaded from doing so by the spectre of large NRA contributions to an opponent's campaign and the mobilization of the "gun nut" vote.

The Trustees of Morton Grove faced the same kind of political intimidation and, despite NRA-backed opposition, all were re-elected by wide margins. So if Morton Grove can stand up to the NRA and win, why can't the Congress of the United States?