‘Bullets Don’t Stop’ : One That Paralyzed Her Son in ’90 Still Drives Her, Says Gun Control Activist

Glenda Lee-Barnard learned that her son had been shot when she arrived home one afternoon from a walk. The news came as a message on her answering machine. It didn’t say whether the 12-year-old was alive or dead.

But the sketchy information she got in that instant five years ago was hard for her to believe. No one in her family had ever been touched by violence. And she had intended to keep it that way by raising her two children in one of America’s safest cities.

In September 1990, however, her son David Lee lay fighting for his life, accidentally shot by his stepbrother at his father’s Claremont home. He wound up being paralyzed from the mid-chest down.

“It’s just devastating what a bullet can do to a kid and to a family,” said Lee-Barnard, 49. “If there was ever a moment in time for my life to change, it was that moment.”

Indeed, the injury did more than put her son, now 18, in a wheelchair. It also launched the Thousand Oaks mother of two on a crusade against gun violence.

She helped fight for two new state laws, one requiring safety training for gun buyers and the other holding adults responsible when children are injured by guns left within easy reach.

She has become an outspoken critic of the cheap, easily produced handguns known as Saturday night specials, working toward a ban on their sale and manufacture.

And she has campaigned for legislators who have promised to champion gun control issues, serving most recently as Ventura County manager of Democrat Brad Sherman’s successful congressional campaign.

“All I do and the reason I live is to work for the reduction of gun violence,” said Lee-Barnard, who will serve as Sherman’s local field representative when he takes office in January. “When something like that happens to your son, it gives you the strength to move mountains. Bullets don’t stop. They keep going. One is still going in my life.”

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The voice on the scratchy 911 tape is choked with panic.

With a police dispatcher trying to make sense of what’s happening, David’s 15-year-old stepbrother screams for an ambulance. The teenager tells the dispatcher he just shot his little brother. David can be heard in the background crying for his mother.

“That one hurts every time,” said Lee-Barnard, her eyes filling with tears as she listened again to the recording of the emergency call made moments after her son was shot.

She knows every word by heart, having played the 911 call often--for audiences she hopes will support her drive to curb gun violence and for youngsters she hopes will get the message that guns are serious business.

The shooting happened the day before the start of the school year. David’s parents had long been divorced, and the youngster was visiting his father. The boys had been left alone, and that afternoon they came across a .38-caliber handgun that had been purchased for home protection.

The gun accidentally went off, and a single bullet traveled through David’s right biceps, pierced his chest under the armpit and finally stopped just under the skin on his back.

The tape of the 911 call chronicles the panic that ensued. David’s stepbrother tried to stop the bleeding. In his hysteria, in between cursing and apologizing for what he did, the teenager cries out that he never should have touched the gun.

The call ends with David dragging himself to the phone and telling the dispatcher that he can’t move his legs.

“And he never walked again,” Lee-Barnard said.

The adjustment has not been easy. Lee-Barnard said her second marriage snapped under the strain. David, who spent one year in the hospital and four more adjusting to life without use of his legs, recently set out on his own. He is living with his girlfriend’s family in Palo Alto, working toward a high school diploma and a sense of independence.

“Taking the bullet was the easiest thing about the whole ordeal,” he said. “I just really felt it was time to get out and do things for myself. Things just weren’t working out down there, there were too many bad memories. I needed to get out on my own and make a fresh start.”

For mother and son, a fresh start is hard to come by.

“This is what we’ve gone through for five years,” Lee-Barnard said. “You can’t give my son his childhood back, and you can’t give me a normal family back. Nothing can ever replace what has been taken away. I tell you, there’s a lot of grieving to be done and it never stops. But in between, I get things done.”

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Immediately in front of her is legislation at the state and federal levels that would regulate the way handguns are made. If enacted, those laws would effectively halt production of Saturday night specials.

Lee-Barnard said that is the reason she worked to elect Sherman.

To that end, she tapped her friendship with Sarah Brady, chairwoman of Washington-based Handgun Control Inc. Brady’s husband, former White House press secretary James Brady, was paralyzed in 1981 by a bullet meant for President Reagan.

Sherman won the Bradys’ endorsement on his way to winning the 24th District congressional seat earlier this month in an area that stretches from Thousand Oaks to Van Nuys and Malibu.

Now, along with Sen. Barbara Boxer, Sherman has promised to push legislation next year that would regulate the manufacture of handguns--though such a proposal likely faces an uphill fight in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Lee-Barnard said she supports the right to own firearms, including most handguns. But she said she will continue to work to outlaw the cheap and easily concealed Saturday night specials--although her son was injured by a different type of weapon. In addition, she continues to preach her anti-gun violence message in schools in Ventura County and the inner city.

“In every state there’s a mother like me who will take it further and who will take issue every time a bullet goes out of a gun and into a child,” she said.