NRA Sticks to Its Guns and Misses the Mark Once Again

It’s stereotyping, I know, but whatever the National Rifle Assn. is for, I always assume I’m against it. Even without knowing what it is.

The NRA’s Costa Mesa-based local chapter recently chastised me in a letter for being “hung up on the gun control nausea.” I’m among those it labels as “gun grabbers.”

So I picked up its latest newsletter, the Minuteman, to see if we shared any common ground. Two legislative issues immediately caught my eye: Trigger locks and safe storage.

Aha! Common ground it is. Here’s the NRA writing about two issues that nobody in the country could disagree on. Who could possibly oppose safety locks to keep children from firing weapons by accident? Safe storage? What other kind of storage could anybody support? Unsafe storage?

But, as I had stereotypically suspected, I was wrong. Indeed, the NRA does oppose federal legislation supporting trigger locks and safe storage.

Seems to me the NRA does a bit of stereotyping of its own: If legislation involves any control of guns, no matter how utterly reasonable, it seems dead-set against it.

But Wayne A. Morse, 54, a Boeing engineer who is president of the local chapter--and an NRA member since his teens--says I’m wrong.

On the trigger locks: Morse claims that very few of them are effective. On safe storage: Morse says the legislation places the wrong emphasis on responsibility.

“I have taught my children in gun safety that they are responsible for their own actions,” Morse said. “It doesn’t matter if someone with the gun is just 9 years old, he must be responsible for what he does with that gun.”

To me, that lets the gun owner off the hook too easy. I’m happy to see that newly proposed legislation, penalizing gun owners for not keeping their guns properly locked away, has bipartisan sponsorship. The bill would impose a jail term of up to one year and/or a $10,000 fine for any gun owner whose carelessness leads to a child getting such a gun and using it.

One of that bill’s sponsors, along with a pending bill requiring trigger locks, is California’s Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, up for reelection in November. Boxer will hold a news conference today at the California PTA office in Los Angeles to talk about gun control.

As you might expect, the NRA abhors her. It doesn’t like her opponent, Republican Matt Fong, either. Morse writes in the NRA newsletter: “Neither candidate for senator is acceptable, but we need to take out Boxer and that means everyone has to give until it hurts and then some. Bluntly put, get off your duff.”

By the way, the NRA isn’t too impressed with the gubernatorial candidates either, Democratic Lt. Gov. Gray Davis or state Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren. But, Morse writes, “currently, the Democrat is the better of the two.” You have to wonder how thrilled the lieutenant governor is with that tepid endorsement.

On the state level, Gov. Pete Wilson this year vetoed a bill tightening the huge loopholes in a law banning Saturday night specials, or cheap handguns. (The original law banned only specific models, so manufacturers get around it by making copycat models that can’t be banned.) Wilson has also vetoed a bill which would require gun owners to equip each firearm with a child safety lock.

So now we have a watered-down bill pending that would only require gun dealers to have such child safety locks on hand just in case the purchaser wants one. Who could oppose something that tame? The NRA.

The NRA recently got a huge publicity boost by naming actor Charlton Heston as its national president. But I think the group’s biggest problems lie ahead of it. Gun-control advocates like myself are finding more and more support.

The reason Boxer’s news conference is at PTA headquarters is because the national PTA, representing 7 million members, voted in June to support a federal ban on Saturday night specials. The resolution was born out of its California delegation.

Benjamin J. Hubbard, chair of the department of comparative religion at Cal State Fullerton, who writes a monthly column for The Times, notes two other recent shows of support:

The national Presbyterian Church voted at its general assembly to ask its members to voluntarily turn in their handguns. Also, the American Jewish Congress is now on record seeking national gun control legislation.

Mary Leigh Blek, co-founder with her husband, Charles, of the Orange County Citizens for the Prevention of Gun Violence, will participate in Boxer’s news conference. Their son, Matthew, was murdered by a group of street robbers in New York with a Saturday night special.

Today, they leave for a national conference of Parents of Murdered Children in Wichita, Kan. I was talking to the Bleks this week about President Clinton’s news conference on safe gun storage. They noted that at Clinton’s side was Suzanne Wilson, mother of one of the four children shot to death (along with a teacher) outside a Jonesboro, Ark., school on March 24 by two boys who got hold of a family gun collection.

Charles Blek told me that he had met Wilson at a recent conference. Kindred spirits, Blek said, they shared each other’s pain over their children’s deaths.

“She told me that one person had approached her and said that the only reason her son died was that he was struck by an unlucky bullet,” Blek said. “Can you imagine the insensitivity? Are there any lucky bullets?”

Gun violence is a subject that frays our nerve endings raw sometimes just talking about it. But I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward people like Wayne Morse, just because we disagree on such an emotional issue. And Morse is cordial with me, despite our vast differences on guns. He’s got a busy agenda ahead of him.

There’s a huge gun show coming to the Orange County Fairgrounds Aug. 22-23. It’s sponsored by Crossroads of the West from Kaysville, Utah. But the local NRA will be running many of its functions.

Also, according to Morse’s newsletter, the local NRA will be lobbying against the United Nations. According to Morse, the U.N. is on a campaign to “do away with civilian ownership and use of firearms around the world, including the United States.”

There’s one stereotype shot down: Here I was thinking the U.N. hadn’t been doing much lately.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com