Massacre Creates Gun-Control Activists

The AK-47 bullets that blasted away his left knee and right elbow also ended Mike Campbell’s comfortable detachment from the struggle over gun control.

“I’ve never been much of an activist,” said Campbell, one of a dozen survivors of Joseph Wesbecker’s Sept. 14 rampage at the Standard Gravure Corp. printing plant. “Obviously I am for gun control now.”

The ability of a mentally ill man bent on revenge to legally buy a military-style semiautomatic rifle has made Campbell’s wife, Betty, even more partisan.

She has special contempt for legislators she sees as complicitous to the extent that they permit traffic in such guns and for people who think “that their right to carry a gun supersedes my husband’s right to carry his grandson.”

The National Rifle Assn. is strong in Kentucky, where hunting is good and freedom to bear arms is cherished.

But fallout from the Standard Gravure shootings, in which nine people died, including Wesbecker, may put the NRA on the defensive for the first time in memory when the Kentucky General Assembly convenes in January.

Betty Campbell looks to the session and the likelihood of legislation to ban or limit the sale of “assault” weapons. “I am not a public speaker but I will support, in any way I can, legislation to ban those kinds of weapons,” she vowed.

The NRA, which regularly fights such legislation as an infringement on the Second Amendment right of citizens to “keep and bear arms,” will be ready.

The organization says that nothing--not a waiting period, not a ban on specific weapons--would have prevented Wesbecker’s mission of vengeance against the company that ended his job.

“I think what’s the real tragedy is that we use incidents like this to propose restrictions on law-abiding citizens that will have no effect on incidents in the future,” said James T. Hayes, an NRA lobbyist.

“How in a free society do you keep (mentally ill) people like that man from acquiring a firearm? I don’t know what the answer is to that,” Hayes said.

A number of state officials now say they have an answer: restrictions on assault weapons.

Gov. Wallace Wilkinson, long an opponent of gun control, endorsed assault-weapon restrictions in the days after the massacre. Two state lawmakers from the Louisville area said they are ready to sponsor the legislation.

U.S. Rep. Carroll Hubbard Jr., a conservative Kentucky Democrat and NRA ally, agreed four days after the shootings to become a co-sponsor of legislation in Congress that would ban the domestic manufacture of assault weapons.

Wesbecker, 47, had an abundance of demons: two broken marriages and a belief that he had been injured by workplace chemicals and wronged by Standard Gravure, which prints newspaper supplements and advertising inserts.

He had been placed on permanent disability leave because of mental illness in 1988. It was shortly before a morning shift change when he returned to the plant to say a gruesome goodby.

Besides the AK-47, which can shoot 40 bullets a minute, Wesbecker had two MAC-11 semiautomatic machine pistols, a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, a .38-caliber revolver, a bayonet and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, according to police.

He carried the AK-47, the SIG-Sauer 9 millimeter and extra ammo. The rest was stashed in a gym bag under a stairwell. Police said Wesbecker, having shot 20 people, apparently was heading for the arms cache when he stopped, put the pistol under his chin and squeezed the trigger.

His shots killed eight others.

Among the survivors, Mike Campbell, a tennis player who at 51 could easily pass for 40, was luckier than most, though grievously wounded in both arms and both legs. His left knee was pulverized.

As the couple’s five daughters arrived one by one at the hospital, and collapsed one by one in horror, Betty Campbell’s fury welled. “I promised myself: ‘I am going to do something about this.”’

A day later, she faced reporters and television cameras for the first time, her eldest daughter, Mary Campbell Ford, in tears beside her, and bristled.

“You see the devastation?” she said. “And anybody who thinks a private citizen needs an assault gun, please justify it to this child, to my husband and to his grandchild. You will not justify it to me.”

After 13 days in the hospital, Mike Campbell went home to the house he and Betty have rehabilitated over 10 years. A hospital bed awaited in the living room, as did an electric wheelchair and a new cordless telephone.

Doctors say the best Campbell can hope for is to walk with a cane within the next three years. Then, Campbell said, doctors will assess the amount of regrowth to bones in his knee; if there is enough, he might be a candidate for an operation that would allow him to walk nearly normally.

For now, Betty Campbell said Mike will be able to sit in the gazebo, his favorite place, and watch the falling leaves of autumn, his favorite time of year.

She will be watching the Legislature.