Artist’s Sculptures Give Gun Control a Shot in the Arm

When his daughter’s boyfriend was shot to death in 1979, Chicago artist John Kearney turned to a new style. He began shaping sculptures out of handguns--which he deforms with a welding torch but leaves the serial numbers intact--that police confiscate from criminals and pass along to him. The works honor those who strive for tougher gun laws. “It seemed like a logical way to get some sanity into the murderous behavior of handgun killers . . . by destroying weapons,” said Kearney, 60. His latest effort features a female hand touching a gun barrel. He created three variations on that theme for presentation to representatives of the Chicago suburbs of Morton Grove, Evanston and Oak Park, which have banned handguns. “It’s sort of the “Beauty and the Beast” concept--the gentleness of the female touch as compared with the violence of the handgun, which is designed to kill people,” Kearney said. The sculptures will be awarded Tuesday by the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, on Lincoln’s Birthday. “Mr. Lincoln was a handgun victim, too,” Barbara Fowler, a council director, pointed out.

--Lucille Thompson wanted to keep physically fit--she could hardly get in and out of the bathtub--and be able to fend off purse snatchers, so she learned to splinter two-inch boards with her bare hands and smash inch-thick concrete with her feet. Her grandchildren are impressed. “Now, they call me ‘Killer,’ ” she says. Thompson, 88, took up martial arts on her last birthday, enrolling in a school in her hometown of Danville, Ill. “I noticed that most people my age could do little more than complain about all their aches and pains,” she said after giving a demonstration at the Oriental Martial Arts Expo in Decatur.

--A U.S. Postal Service memorandum issued in Honolulu announced an open house at the new post office at Keaau on Hawaii Island and said that the area’s “main industry is pakalolo (sugar cane).” The statement may be true but the definition is not. “Pakalolo” is a Hawaiian word colloquially translated as “crazy weed” and is a common name for marijuana. Felice Cooke of the Postal Service public affairs office in Honolulu said that the error occurred when her background notes on Keaau were misunderstood at the western regional office in San Bruno, Calif.