Some Gun Owners Take 2nd Look at Fingers on Other Triggers : Responsible users see their way of life threatened and call for public understanding. Voices that acknowledge the need to curb violence emerge.

Ever since the 1700s, when Winchester was on the frontier of the Far West, the Shenandoah Valley has been a place where people lived with guns. They were part of manhood and citizenry, and even today, you’ll hardly find a home that doesn’t have a shotgun oiled and ready for the grouse season--and perhaps an heirloom rifle or two in a closet, forgotten behind the vacuum cleaner and winter coats.

Here, respect for guns runs deep.

Dan Blye, who sells guns and jewelry from his shop on Winchester’s Loundon Street, collects military weapons, from which he has learned about history and craftsmanship and adventure. Twice a week all through the winter you’ll find Toby Warren, shotgun in hand, on some mountainside in pursuit of grouse. Bird hunting, he knows, is one of the rewards God saved for man.

Across the border in West Virginia, insurance agent Bill Miller has 20 guns at home, secured in a locked steel case. His passion is target shooting at a nearby range.

It is to these people that President Clinton appealed in his State of the Union Address when he called for a ban on assault weapons. He said he understood their culture, one that he grew up with himself. “I say to you, I know you didn’t create this (crime) problem, but we need your help to solve it.”

But to many Americans, gun ownership is a big part of the problem. One in three Americans identifies crime as the major problem facing the United States. According to a recent Times Mirror Poll, 57% of Americans now believe that controlling guns is more important than protecting the right to own them.

As deaths from firearms and violent crime rates rise, gun owners increasingly are feeling a sting of public disapproval akin to the scorn that drove smokers outdoors and curbed sales of fur coats.

Blye, Warren and Miller are three of the 65 million Americans who own the 210 million guns in the nation. Like most rural Americans, they treat their weapons with reverence and are perplexed by the epidemic of crime and the reaction it is spawning. They sense that their way of life is threatened, by mayhem in the streets of Washington, D.C., just a two-hour drive down Route 50, and by the growing calls for firearms restrictions.

They are the voices calling for responsible gun ownership and public understanding of what that means.

Blye considers it a great injustice that responsible gun dealers should be held accountable for the violence in our cities. “You don’t blame the fire on the match,” he says.

“Most of the people I sell guns to I’ve known for years, so there’s no problem. But someone I don’t know wants to buy a gun, first thing I do is try and determine their attitude,” Blye says. “If there’s any hint they might not be stable or there’s reason to question their character, I refuse them. Women come in wanting a handgun for self-defense, and if they’ve never picked up a gun before, I try and talk them into pepper gas instead.”

Warren, a farmer and former schoolteacher, remembers when, in the 1950s, at age 15, he sent $36 off to the Golden State Arms company in California and received by return mail, no questions asked, a .45 semiautomatic handgun.

“Anybody, deranged or otherwise, could buy a gun in those days,” he says, “but people didn’t abuse gun ownership then like they do today. Guns are just tools, dangerous tools like chain saws, and we were brought up understanding that.”

In his spare time, Warren teaches firearm safety. To ensure that his young students comprehend the finality of their actions, he begins each new class by placing a pumpkin on the ground, six feet away. He squeezes off a shotgun round. The pumpkin explodes, leaving nothing but scattered clumps of pulp. “The kids,” he says, “never forget that. Never.”

Miller is teaching his 6-year-old son how to handle and shoot a .22 rifle.

“Learning to respect guns and use them properly isn’t an isolated thing,” Miller says. “It’s just an element of what you learn growing up--like discipline, doing your chores, taking responsibility for your own actions. It’s what I call citizenry. But I’m not sure kids today are learning those lessons as well as we did.”

Among such gun fanciers, the fact that more and more guns are in the wrong hands is alarming.

“I’m sensitive to the fact that the majority of people who have handguns today shouldn’t, and with the way things are going in our cities, I’m not sure that confiscating all handguns isn’t a good idea,” said Jim Wilder, a computer program analyst who keeps a 9-millimeter Taurus semiautomatic pistol on the top closet shelf of his Alexandria, Va., apartment. “The only gun I wouldn’t want to see confiscated, though, is mine.”

Wilder finds the romance between man and his gun in our society “mystifying and a little spooky.” Many historians believe that it stems from our Colonial heritage as a militia society and from our frontier days when citizens armed themselves in situations of social conflict to enforce vigilante justice that preceded the arrival of a resident sheriff.

“Certainly, America has some very special attitudes toward gun use,” said historian Richard Slotkin, author of “Gunfighter Nation.” “The key one, I think, is that we have come to the view that you are allowed to use a gun for private purposes, for self-defense or whatever, as opposed to the notion in militia societies like Israel and Switzerland where you are entrusted with that gun by society for social purposes.

But that concept of self-defense is critical to gun owners such as Wilder and Phil Murphy. Murphy, who lives in Tucson and legally carries a .45 revolver in his car, has twice faced down burglars breaking into his parents’ home. The last one he held at bay with his Colt Sporter rifle was 19 years old and had a rap sheet with 34 felonies. Murphy said the officers who responded to his 911 call to make the arrest treated him not as “a crazed gunslinger” but as “a citizen who recognizes his responsibility to the community.”

“Law-abiding gun owners are the only ones you can count on in a crisis,” Murphy said. He cites Tian An Men Square as an example of what can happen when the populace is disarmed.

The growing controversy over whether the freedom to own guns has limits has led to a substantial growth in the National Rifle Assn., which now claims 3.3 million members. But the NRA’s strict ideological interpretation of the Second Amendment and its belief that guns have no more relevance to the soaring crime rate than watermelons has nudged the organization, in the eyes of many gun owners, into the fringes of extremism. Only about one in 20 gun owners and one in six hunters are NRA members.

“I think the NRA has fallen out of step with society,” said former member Dick Murphy, a retired Army officer and two-tour Vietnam veteran. Once each autumn, he drives from his North Carolina home to a primitive lakeside cabin in Maine, where he hunts for two weeks. “Personally, the idea of having to register my guns wouldn’t bother me a bit. I have to register my car, don’t I?”

Last fall a group of gun owners, many of them former military officers, split from the NRA and founded the American Firearms Assn. as a moderate voice for the gun lobby. Ernest Lissabet, president of the Virginia-based organization, said the AFA supports the constitutional right of law-abiding Americans to own firearms but also believes that “common-sense legislation” is needed to limit the “weapons of war” on the streets.

“Arming the entire populace may have made sense in 1776, but I’m not sure it’s entirely a good idea today,” said Lissabet, a park ranger and skeet shooter.

Lissabet noted: “The NRA says, ‘It’s the criminals, stupid,’ and I say, ‘Yes it is, but it’s also the guns they have.’ They say, ‘Well, they get them from illegal sources,’ and I say, ‘True, but when we have some common-sense legislation, over the long run, not the short run, it will begin to put the squeeze on that source.’ Let’s not forget that, as gun owners, we’re still a minority in this country.”