‘Bell Campaign’ Targets Gun Violence, NRA

Using as its model Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the group that transformed drunken-driving laws across the country, a new national organization aimed at preventing gun death and injury will make its debut today at press conferences in eight cities, from Honolulu to New York.

The Bell Campaign bills itself as a grass-roots counterpoint to the National Rifle Assn., with education and advocacy as its primary goals. Its founders are relatives of gunshot victims who chose as their symbol a bell, both to toll in memory of those killed by guns and to peal as a call to action for those who would restrict the weapons.

Said Mary Leigh Blek, who with her husband, Charles, will head the western regional office in Long Beach: “The bell represents freedom in our country, and we want to be free from gun trauma.”

The Bleks--whose 21-year-old son, Matthew, was killed five years ago by a robber wielding a “Saturday Night Special” junk gun--first tolled the bell in Denver at a May 1 protest during the NRA’s annual meeting.

The group will turn its attention to this week’s expected battle in the House of Representatives over a measure, recently approved in the Senate, requiring one-day background checks at gun shows.

Other policy objectives include more stringent licensing and registration of handguns, as well as longer waiting periods and a requirement for potential gun owners to provide proof of safety training.

The campaign will work toward a national ban on assault weapons and Saturday Night Specials. It will lobby for greater federal oversight of gun manufacturers and stronger community monitoring of local gun markets.

In Washington, NRA spokesman Bill Powers refused to venture any opinion about the Bell Campaign. “I don’t have any thoughts about it,” he said, adding: “There are groups on all sides of all issues.”

The Bell Campaign is funded by a three-year, $4.3-million grant from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, a San Francisco-based philanthropy whose executive director is Andrew McGuire. McGuire’s favorite cousin was killed by a gun when he was 12. As head of the Trauma Foundation at San Francisco General Hospital, McGuire has worked on injury prevention for more than 20 years.

McGuire said a major priority of the Bell Campaign will be combating ignorance about the gun industry and the role of guns in society. Few people are aware, he said, that gun violence is the leading cause of death among young people, or that 36,000 people are killed and 100,000 injured by gunshots each year.

“Americans respond to corporations that lie, corporations that put the profit motive over human life--and no one knows about the gun industry,” said McGuire, a founding member of MADD. “What the gun industry has had all this time was a sort of shill figure out there called the NRA.”

Bell chapters have also been organized in San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

In Long Beach, Mary Leigh Blek had a ready retort to suggestions that the Bell Campaign blames guns for an overly violent society.

“We’re not saying that guns cause the violence,” she said. “What we are saying is that guns increase the lethalness of the violence so out of proportion that yesterday’s fistfight is today’s gun death. We have to address the issue of the easy access and availability of guns in our society.”

Blek predicted that the strong feelings of many gun owners would be outmatched by the passion of the families of gun victims.

“Things are going to change; we have reached the critical mass,” she said. “We love our kids more than the gun lobby loves their guns.”