Anti-Gun Activists Learn to Avoid Loaded Words

Orange County has been slow to test the nation’s powerful gun lobbies by passing local laws restricting firearms, the latest political technique of gun-control groups that has swept through other cities in the state.

But the county’s few anti-gun groups have found a new approach to promoting their cause: gun violence as a public health problem rather than a political issue.

Persuading local lawmakers and residents to regulate the free flow of handguns is a long educational process, said Mary Leigh Blek, a Mission Viejo activist whose son was shot and killed during a 1994 holdup in New York.

“We don’t say ‘gun control,’ ” said Blek, who founded Orange County Citizens for the Prevention of Gun Violence with her husband. “We say ‘gun responsibility.’ I think some people have a negative connotation about the word ‘control.’ They don’t want to be controlled. But they do respond to the word ‘responsible.’ ”

Blek and other anti-violence advocates pull out a stream of statistics--all of which are disputed as distortions by the gun lobby.

They cite a 1993 study by the New England Journal of Medicine that having a gun in the home makes it three times as likely that a family member or friend will be killed by a firearm and five times more likely that a family member will commit suicide with one.

According to statistics kept by the Orange County Health Care Agency, which run through 1995, gun injuries have surpassed automobile accidents as the major cause of death for teenagers and young adults.

And a 1996 poll by the Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence Against Kids found that a healthy majority of county voters indicated that they would support some regulation of handguns, with 87% of residents saying they want their city to ban handguns.

*

Moved by such numbers, activist Daria Waetjen helped start the Violence Prevention Coalition of Orange County in 1996.

The groups, particularly Blek’s, have been irksome to gun advocates in other counties, but not as much so in their own home base, said Chuck Michel, a civil rights attorney with the Fullerton-based California Rifle and Pistol Assn.

“Philosophically, Orange County is in line with self-reliance, and that includes using guns for self-defense,” Michel said. “I think conservatives recognize that the ultimate goal of organizations like Blek’s is to take handguns out of private ownership. That falls in the whole spectrum of big government versus personal responsibility.”

The issue of gun control may not have gripped residents in Orange County, where 244 gun dealers are licensed to do business, but Waetjen said she finds a receptive audience when she talks to parents about the danger of guns for children.

“We need to do a community education campaign that really allows parents to understand that more guns kill kids than anything else,” she said. “Behavior only changes when people are informed.”

To date, 33 cities and four counties have joined West Hollywood in banning what are called “junk guns” or “Saturday night specials”--handguns that come with low price tags.

Lake Forest began discussing such a ban but tabled the item until lawsuits against West Hollywood are resolved.

Sayre Weaver, a Brea-based attorney, successfully defended challenges to West Hollywood’s ordinance, to the surprise of gun lobbyists. Plaintiffs--the National Rifle Assn., the California Rifle and Pistol Assn. and a local pawnshop among them--are appealing.

*

It is interesting, Weaver said, that the central argument against gun control cited by advocates--that the right to own guns is guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution--did not come up in the court case against the ban.

“The courts have consistently held that the 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with the individual’s right to bear arms,” she said.

The amendment was added to the Bill of Rights because states, fearing the potential power of the federal government, wanted to be able to field their own armed forces, she said. In this sense, the people’s right to bear arms refers to the state, not the individual.

“It’s kind of a terrible myth,” Weaver said. “It creates this emotional content to an issue that shouldn’t be there.”

Michel rolls his eyes at such arguments, countering that the Supreme Court has never made a definitive interpretation of the issue.

His and other groups failed to stop the local handgun bans in 1996, when the trend started, because they simply did not believe judges would allow it to go through.

But after a strong campaign in 1997, they stopped the flow and only three cities adopted such bans, he said.

Likewise, Michel added, the statistics used by the Bleks are terribly distorted, counting young adult gang members and drug users as children and manipulating the numbers.

Criminals, and suicides, will always use what’s available for their ends, he said.

But Blek and others remain optimistic about the prospects for their cause, even in Orange County.

“Things aren’t happening at the state level as much as we’d like,” Blek said. “But the more we educate the public, the more they want to do something. They are a little more responsive at the local level.”