A Major Gift for Mother’s Day : Anti-gang group comes up with a potentially lifesaving idea

Casting about for a Mother’s Day present? An organization in Wilmington has an interesting suggestion. It is seeking to give mothers peace of mind.

How? By encouraging gun owners to give up their weapons and place them in the hands of clergy at some churches in Wilmington and Lomita. Mothers and Men Against Gangs--Support Service knows all too well the toll that gun violence has taken: The group was founded three years ago by mothers who each had lost a child to gunfire.

The group is urging people to turn in their firearms to local churches--no questions asked--and give Mother a card today saying they did it for her. The churches will pass the guns along to the police.

Eleanor Montano, president of Mothers and Men Against Gangs, is no Pollyanna. She knows that violent gang members are not likely to respond to her proposal. Montano’s ambitions are far more modest. She is hoping that a wide spectrum of firearm owners--including former gang members and those who bought a gun just “for protection”--will surrender their weapons after realizing that they will indeed be safer without those potentially lethal instruments. She is hoping that they will realize that the gun that now sits in their closet or on their night table is far likelier to be used on themselves, their children or other innocent victims than it is to be used successfully against an assailant.

She’s right. Many gun manufacturers now regard women--with their very real fears of crime and violence--as a lucrative new market. Yet according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a handgun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the family or an acquaintance than an intruder. And because the nation is now awash with guns, that means a huge number of needless deaths.

That’s why a group of community leaders, most of them women, met last month in Los Angeles to address gun violence and gun control as a particular issue for women. Their aim is to counter the gun industry’s marketing campaign by educating women about the very great danger that gun ownership poses to them and their children.

Montano’s Mother’s Day gun give-away idea grew from her participation in the conference. We hope it will be the first of many efforts by women to truly protect themselves and their families, not by buying a gun but by educating about the dangers of firearms and pushing for much stricter controls.