Right*wing Armies in California

from the New York 'Times' Folicemen in Riverside last week went to the home of a steel company labourer naned Jack Tomlin to investigate reports that he owned an unregistered machine gun, The police say they found not just a gun but a private arsenal consisting of dynamite, booby traps, machine guns and some solidfuel rocket propellant. Incredibly, discoveries of caches of weapons and explosives are recurring with increasin, frecuency in southern California. Six arsenals have been detected in the last month and more than a dozen in the last year. Thomas Lynch, attorney general of California, said that some of the discoveries clearly involved weapons that belon ed to or were destined for what he described as extremist private armies operatin; in the state- the Minute iien and the Californian Rangers among them. The detection of these illegal private weapons hoards has helped t: dramatise a much broader problem that is worrying authorities in southern California- the tremendous increase in the quantity of legal hand guns in the possession of ordinary citizens. The Watts riots of last swi.er first set off a buying wave and this pace has not slekened in the year since the riots. According to official estimates, more than 31,000 hand guns will be sold in Los angeles this year, enough to arm two infantry divisions. while ordinary citizens accuire most of their guns through regular commercial outlets, three southern Californian Representatives denanded this week a full-scale investigation into the possibility that the extremist groups might have found yet another secret channel for accuiring weapons en masse.