O.C.’s Gun Lobby Draws on Its Six Shooters in Congress

When the battle finally turned last month and Congress approved the Brady bill, backers of the ballyhooed gun-control law still couldn’t bust down one bastion of enduring opposition--the congressional delegation from Orange County.

To a man, the six representatives from the county voted against the hotly debated five-day waiting period for handgun sales, citing everything from states’ rights to irritation over unfunded federal mandates. The bill was approved in the House on a 238-189 vote.

Although opinion polls showed that 90% of all Americans favored the bill, the Orange County contingent hardly had to take heed. Instead, each one could vote their conservative conscience knowing that Orange County--though deeply divided over the issue--remains a region of vocal gun advocates.

A third of all Orange County households has a gun, according to a 1992 poll by The Times, and the county has the distinction of having two representatives on the 75-member governing board of the powerful National Rifle Assn. Groups such as Gun Owners of California count Orange County as their strongest base of urban support in the state.

“Our congressmen knew we were behind them from the beginning,” said T.J. Johnston, an Anaheim resident and NRA board member. “They knew they weren’t standing alone, except among their peers in Congress.”

But the gun-control lobby suggests that the Orange County lawmakers were sadly bowing to the wishes of a vocal minority.

“Despite what that delegation to Congress may think, the 10% of the American people who didn’t want the Brady bill don’t all live in Orange County,” said Jeff Muchnick, legislative director for Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “It’s one of those areas where the NRA was able to make more noise than the average citizen. I think the representatives in Orange County made a mistake. It’s something that people wanted everywhere.”

Johnston and other gun rights advocates dispute such claims, but don’t deny they’re willing to get vocal about Second Amendment rights to bear arms.

To that end, Johnston in 1989 founded the aggressive Gun Owners Action Committee, which proudly displays a take-no-prisoners approach to advocacy. One day each year, members brazenly hold a shooting demonstration with semiautomatic weapons to protest a state ban on the guns. They’ve flooded city council meetings to voice opposition to gun-control proposals. In 1989, the group paid $1,000 to have a plane fly over Anaheim Stadium during the baseball All-Star game trailing a banner that read: “The Chinese Don’t Have a Second Amendment.”

That sort of fervor hasn’t abated. Before the Brady bill came to a vote, Johnston and others in the Orange County gun lobby did everything possible to retain the faithful and convert other congressmen. They wrote letters and telephoned congressional district offices. When a local newspaper held a call-in opinion poll on the issue, they flooded the phone banks, helping push opposition to the Brady bill to more than 80%.

“Just in the home stretch I know we did two written communications to the district offices, at least one fax alert, and we had two communications to our members” to motivate them to call Congress, said John Stoos, executive director of Gun Owners of California.

Gun advocates knew Orange County congressmen were familiar with their arguments against the bill--that it was a worthless gesture that would only keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens and not criminals. But they also wanted to remind the local lawmakers of political battles past.

During recent elections in Orange County, gun advocates have been a solid presence, walking precincts and stuffing envelopes for their local representatives. They’ve also been generous with campaign contributions: Since 1991, the NRA and other gun groups have contributed more than $25,000 to the Orange County congressmen.

“Many of our representatives know us by name; we’re involved in their elections,” Johnston said. “We get out and help them get elected, and we make sure they know what we want.”

Orange County’s federal lawmakers are quick to assert that election assistance has nothing to do with their opposition to gun control. They contend their positions on nearly all issues, gun control among them, are grounded on bedrock ideological beliefs--unlike the wishy-washy ideals they attach to moderate peers.

“Frankly, my vote isn’t affected one iota by who supports me,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach). “I’ve been saying the same thing on guns since I worked for the Orange County Register” as an editorial writer during the late 1970s.

Some played down the notion that they were even lobbied. “The truth is, I don’t get lobbied on anything,” said Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove). “When you’re a person of conviction--and this goes for staunch liberals too--you don’t get lobbied. People know you’re not going to sway.”

It wasn’t always that way for Dornan. When an earlier version of the Brady bill came up in 1991, the daredevil congressman--who has never feared the political high wire--voted for it. Dornan explains that he was confident the bill would fail, and saw his vote as an opportunity to poke Democratic foes who scoffed at the notion of a similar waiting period for abortions.

Stalwarts in the gun lobby were hardly amused--and they told Dornan so.

Although Dornan remembers that there was “some curious head scratching and some questions” after his 1991 vote, gun advocates contend they made their point a lot more forcefully. “We savagely went at him and let him know it was a very big mistake,” recalls Johnston, an unbending true believer who is trying to tug the NRA toward a more uniformly militant stance.

Today, gun advocates are happy to have friends such as Dornan safely back in the fold. “Unlike a lot of people in Congress, the Orange County guys weren’t wimps,” said Stoos of Gun Owners of California. “They stood tall.”

While the delegation voted in chorus, their opposition differed somewhat in tone.

Most felt the bill would do little to affect criminals, who they say get guns through theft or the black market. They also suggested the issue was meaningless for their constituents because California already has a 15-day waiting period, which was approved by the state Legislature in 1991 and is unaffected by the Brady bill.

They also noted that all sides of the debate agree the Brady bill is largely symbolic and does not represent much of a cure for the national epidemic of violent crime. Last year, for example, background checks in California were credited with preventing 5,763 sales in the state--but violent crime has continued to rise.

All agreed that the best solution is to get the country on-line with an electronic system to run an instantaneous background check on prospective gun buyers. Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside), whose district includes a large portion of South County, voted for the Brady bill in 1991, mostly because of provisions for the automatic system, but backed away this time because those provisions were virtually eliminated.

“He’s not real thrilled with the idea of limiting 2nd Amendment rights, but there are problems that need to be addressed, and the instantaneous background check was one way to do it,” said David Coggin, chief of staff for Packard, who was traveling out of the country and could not be reached for comment.

Rohrabacher, meanwhile, fully supports a constitutional right to bear arms, but saw the Brady bill more as a fight over states’ rights. “I don’t believe the federal government should be mandating this type of law to the states,” he said. “If the states want a waiting period, fine. If they don’t, then fine. The federal government shouldn’t be interfering with that.”

Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) said he sided against the bill largely because it represented another “unfunded federal mandate” by requiring states to conduct background checks on gun buyers without being refunded the cost.

“Imposing all manner of well-intentioned requirements without providing funds runs the risk of making matters worse,” Cox said, noting that money for police on the beat could be siphoned off for the background checks.

Dornan, meanwhile, said he didn’t take a role in the Brady bill debate because “there are bigger fights to come,” such as a looming anti-crime bill now meandering through Congress. That bill, Dornan said, will hopefully yield a new law that will allow authorities to “toss criminals in jail and throw away the key” when a gun is used in a crime.

“We need to come down on them so hard that people start going back to fists or blackjacks or knives,” he said.

Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), who was rewarded for his faithful devotion to the 2nd Amendment with more than $10,000 in contributions from the gun lobby during 1991-92, and Rep. Jay C. Kim (R-Diamond Bar), whose district includes portions of north Orange County, would not return phone calls about the Brady bill.

But when it counted last month, they were there with the rest of the Orange County delegation to vote against the gun-control legislation. Johnston said the delegation’s stance was just as the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have liked it.

“Orange County is basically a conservative place that wants government to get back in the box that was designed by the founding fathers,” Johnston said. “Every time the Clintonistas pass some new regulation, we’re standing alone against the tide. We’re very, very pleased our representatives have the backbone to stand up to the social engineers.”