15 Weapons Turned In During Guns-for-Teddy-Bears Swap

When Katherine Lane’s husband suggested Saturday morning that they swap their .22-caliber revolver for a teddy bear, she could not believe her ears.

Through 26 years of marriage, she said, her husband had insisted on keeping the weapon, even though she had wanted to get rid of it and had stored it in the garage to keep it out of reach of the Chino couple’s four children.

“Let me tell you, I was shocked,” Katherine Lane as she and son Colton handed over the gun to a police officer.

Rifles, handguns and a German-made semiautomatic pistol from World War II were among 15 guns turned in Saturday in exchange for teddy bears donated by a toy company. The guns, officials said, will be used for scrap metal after serial numbers are checked.

Prompted by two recent killings in Yorba Linda--one of a woman shot by her 14-year-old son, and another by a man who shot himself after suffocating his two children--the exchange was organized by a UC Irvine group and the Brea Police Department, which also serves Yorba Linda.

Though Student Physicians for Social Responsibility had hoped to collect at least 50 weapons, organizers said they were not disappointed.

Gun violence “is a public health epidemic of enormous proportions,” said Robert Wesley Jr., an associate professor of medicine at UCI and a member of the physicians group. “We believe many of these deaths are preventable and avoidable.”

Events like Saturday’s increase public awareness of the issue, organizers said.

“It is important to look at the root causes of gun violence,” said Mary Leigh Blekof Mission Viejo, who founded the advocacy group Orange County Citizens for the Prevention of Gun Violence after her son was killed during an armed robbery.

“But we also need to focus on the proliferation of guns,” Blek said. “I mean, my God, yesterday’s fistfight is today’s gun battle.”

The gun collection raised concerns among some advocates of citizens’ right to bear arms. One of them, Scott Moser of Yorba Linda, stopped at the UCI group’s information booth to say so.

“I disagree with what you people are doing,” Moser said. He keeps loaded weapons in a safe in his home, he said, and teaches his children to be responsible gun owners.

Most people who stopped by, however, did so to drop off weapons, and several said they were relieved to hand them over.

Kathy Green of Yorba Linda turned over a revolver she bought 25 years ago for $15.

“Now that I have three kids,” she said, the weapon “is just too dangerous to have around the house. We never let the kids handle the gun, but . . . they get curious. Now they are going to fight over the teddy bear.”

Karl Reitz of Yorba Linda brought in the hunting rifle he had used as a boy in southeastern Idaho. Back then, he said, “owning a gun was a method to provide food for oneself.”

Reitz suggested the guns-for-teddy-bears swap to the UCI group after the shooting death of the Yorba Linda woman. His 10-year-old daughter, he said, attends the same school as the youngest daughter of the victim of that incident.

“In a moment of anger, sometimes we don’t think very clearly,” he said of that tragedy. “I do not want this to happen in my family.”