LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/state/20010528/t000044767.html
Monday, May 28, 2001
Parents Urge Gun Rental Checks
Safety: Shooting range provided shotgun to their mentally ill son, who
killed himself. Range owners say they do all they can to prevent
tragedies.
By NOAKI SCHWARTZ, Times Staff Writer
On a summer morning last July, a pale and shaking Bobby Prince told
his parents he was going for cigarettes. He climbed into his car and
headed south, past the stream where he caught bass as a boy, and rolled
onto the Ventura Freeway. Five miles down the road, he stopped under the
ticking clock tower at the Agoura Hills Target Range.
Prince, 31, marked a single passage in his Bible and tucked it into
the console. Then he walked into the range, rented a shotgun and killed
himself. The clock's hands rested at 10:10 a.m. It was the fourth suicide
at the range since 1995.
The tragedy could have been prevented, his parents said, if the owner
had conducted a background check and learned their eldest son was a
paranoid-schizophrenic who had been arrested several times. Though his
arrest record and illness prevented him from buying a gun, he could rent
one for $10.
Range owner Jim Davis insisted that Prince was a trusted, regular
customer who never gave any indication of instability. "He seemed fine,"
Davis said.
Suicides with rented guns have plagued shooting ranges across the
nation for years, although there are no comprehensive statistics. In Los
Angeles County, at least 12 suicides have been reported at ranges since
1995. The problem has caused many range proprietors to insist that
customers either use their own licensed guns or, if they rent, to bring
along a companion. Others have stopped renting guns.
Prince's parents, Rosemary and Robert, said those safeguards aren't
enough. They want the Agoura Hills City Council to require ranges to
conduct background checks on first-time renters through the state
Department of Justice. The council is expected to take up the matter
within a few weeks. The Princes said they then want to take their fight to
the county Board of Supervisors and the state Legislature.
"We don't want to close the range down and aren't suggesting that guns
don't have a place in the world," said Rosemary Prince, 58, rubbing her
hands together nervously in her Westlake Village home.
"But would you take a 2-year-old child and let them make decisions for
themselves?" said Robert Prince, 60, as if to finish his wife's sentence.
"Ill people are no different. . . . They don't think they're mentally
ill."