"Insane and Reckless Murder"

FIREARMS

"Insane and Reckless Murder"

After Robert Kennedy's murder, the Associated Press counted 199 Americans killed by gunfire in only seven days. The toll of citizen slaughter apparently rose even higher last week.

In Manhattan's Central Park, across Fifth Avenue from Jacqueline Kennedy's apartment,* a 42-year-old stock clerk named Angel Angelof waited inside a women's public lavatory. When Lilah Kistler, 24, a Pennsylvania physician's daughter who earned $80 a week walking dogs in the park, tied a Hungarian puli to the fence outside and walked into the lavatory, Angelof killed her with one shot from his bone-handled .45-cal. revolver.

Then he climbed through a skylight to the roof of the small stone building and began firing methodically at pedestrians near a children's play area. An 80-year-old man was wounded twice in the back; nannies shielded children with their bodies. About 100 police swarmed around the toilets and exchanged gunfire with Angelof for an hour. Two cops were wounded superficially before a patrolman climbed a tree behind Angelof and brought him down with two shots from his service revolver. Two other officers leaped onto the roof and poured ten more rounds into him.

Shooting Times. In Angelof's dingy $40-a-month Manhattan apartment, police found the walls decorated with photographs of Hitler, Goebbels and Goring. On a chest of drawers lay the May issue of Shooting Times. Born in Bulgaria, Angelof deserted his country's army in 1965, slipped across the border into Greece, and entered the U.S. as a refugee in 1966. The Central Park episode would not have been so prominently noted had it not occurred on the fringe of Manhattan's safest and most comfortable East Side enclave.*

Within three hours after the Central Park shootings, and referring directly to them, President Johnson again pleaded with Congress to "pass the gun-control measures which are needed to protect the American people against insane and reckless murder by gunfire." Congressional reaction was muted. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, under heavy pressure from Montana hunters to oppose gun-control legislation, compromised by repeating his support for a moderate law sponsored by Maryland's Joseph Tydings while rejecting Johnson's measure requiring the registration of all firearms in the U.S. Congressional mail, which had overwhelmingly supported tough gun controls after Senator Kennedy's death, once again responded to the gun lobby's orchestration. Letters opposing gun controls began rising in volume as mail favoring new laws diminished.

* Jackie and her children, John Jr. and Caroline, were in Hyannisport.

* In the early morning after the Central Park gun battle, Saidallah Sirhan, 36, brother of Robert Kennedy's accused assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, pulled in to the Pasadena police station and said that while he was driving home on the Pasadena Freeway, someone had fired twice on his car after it was boxed in by two other cars. Police found two .38-cal. slugs embedded in Sirhan's 1955 De Soto. But some police officers were skeptical of Sirhan's tale.

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