Women Take a Stand on Guns

Million Mom March organizers expect 100,000 to 300,000 mothers and “honorary mothers” to join Sunday in a landmark demonstration in Washington, D.C., calling for more effective gun regulation. Support marches will be held in Los Angeles and other major cities.

Supporters hope this newly organized coalition of a broad spectrum of women will push gun control into the forefront of campaign issues in November. Surveys consistently show more women than men, by a margin of 20%, support gun regulation, said Tom W. Smith, a social scientist at the Chicago-based National Opinion Research Center.

Since the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., surveys have shown a 10% increase among Republican women who favor gun control, said Andrew McGuire, executive director of the San Francisco-based Bell Campaign, a victim-led gun control organization.

“The power of the gun lobby is evaporating slowly as more and more women get involved,” McGuire said. “The argument gets boiled down to its essence. It’s more an argument about what’s right.”

Not all women, however, view guns as instruments of carnage--guns and gun regulation are by no means a universal “mommy issue.” Some feminists contend guns can level the playing field in instances of domestic violence, for instance, and the National Organization for Women has not taken a stand on gun control.

An estimated 11% of all American women own a firearm of some sort, compared with 38% of men, according to a 1998 survey, Smith said. Until recently, estimates on female gun ownership varied widely and were not considered reliable. Most female gun owners are rural residents who use them more for hunting than protection, Smith said. Many hold beliefs as strong as their anti-gun sisters. A new group, Second Amendment Sisters, will hold counterdemonstrations on Sunday.

Shirley Andrews, Charlotte Austin-Jordan and Dr. Carolyn Sachs, three Southern California mothers, represent the diversity of women’s opinions on guns. Each has taken a stand she believes will help reduce violence. For two of the women, this means restricting guns; for the third, guns are an important element of personal safety.

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Shirley Andrews of Chino Hills used to shock the other mothers in the PTA when they learned what she did for a living. Soft-spoken, friendly and feminine, Andrews owns and runs Turner’s Outdoorsman, a hunting and fishing equipment chain that is also the largest independent gun dealer in California.

What’s more, she keeps about 20 guns at home, including semiautomatic weapons, rifles, shotguns and pistols.

She is a card-carrying NRA member and its third top seller of memberships.

And she taught her daughter and two sons to shoot. Her children, a teacher, an orthodontist and a land sales agent, own guns too.

“People have a total misconception of gun owners,” she said. “If you looked at our customers, you’d find all kinds of people, doctors, attorneys, engineers. Mostly the backbone of this country.”

Almost one in two American adults owns one or more guns for a total of about 200 million guns.

Andrews, 55, grew up in an isolated area in the Missouri Ozarks, where, she recalled, every home had a gun.

“That was the way we ate,” she said. “Rabbits, squirrels, deer, turkeys, frogs. We ate frog legs a lot.”

Andrews sees guns as serving the same purpose of self-reliance in urban and suburban neighborhoods as they did in the country. You can’t count on police, she said. They can never respond fast enough to stop an attack.

She has had a loaded gun pointed at her head twice. Once, a young man stole the car she was driving with her husband on vacation in Needles. He fled with the car when her husband brandished his pistol. Later, three armed, masked gunmen held up her Chino warehouse. They eventually fled, she said, presumably mistaking the shucking noise of a clock for a long gun.

Andrews was 19 and single when she moved to California with her 3-year-old boy and her boyfriend in 1965. Two years later, after they had parted, she married Bill Andrews, a Bellflower used-car salesman with whom she started the sporting goods chain. When they divorced in 1981, their five stores were sold to Jesse Turner. But Andrews said he never shared their profit-making ability, and she took back the business in 1983.

Now, she does eight figures in annual gross sales from 13 locations, but business is unpredictable. Sales flourished from 1989 to 1994, when people bought guns to protect themselves after earthquakes and riots and to stock up before anticipated restrictions from gun laws. Now, she said, the tide has turned.

California, already known for its relatively tough gun laws, passed new restrictions last year. Now there is a 10-day waiting period to purchase guns, bans on assault weapons and Saturday Night Specials, and a one-a-month limit on handguns. Dealers are required to screen for criminals with background checks.

Andrews believes the laws hurt some customers, such as women with restraining orders who want to buy a cheap gun immediately to protect themselves from violent ex-husbands or boyfriends. Salesmen said they have been forced to reduce their stock of semiautomatic weapons, which affects hunters and even Olympic hopefuls in certain shooting events.

About 10% of Turners’ customers are women, who, more than men, are interested in training and practice, she said. Andrews’ stores offer safety classes, and they promote state-of-the-art lock boxes.

“You don’t want anybody to be hurt.”

If people are killed or injured by guns sold in her store, Andrews said, she does not feel responsible. If the guns are used in accidental shootings of or by children, she said, it is a matter of irresponsible parents.

The crime guns that officials have traced to her store, she said, have almost always been stolen from the original owners.

“We don’t sell to criminals,” she said. Also, her staff is trained to spot “straw purchasers,” people who buy guns for someone else.

When guns become instruments of death, she believes it is a social, not a firearms, problem.

“A gun is a tool, and it has a good purpose,” she said.

If she hadn’t made previous plans to spend Mother’s Day with her family, Andrews said she would be marching with the Second Amendment Sisters.

Charlotte Austin-Jordan Acted After Losses

Charlotte Austin-Jordan avoids three intersections in South Los Angeles: Vernon and Arlington avenues, where her 13-year-old daughter, Ja’mee, was shot and killed; 54th Street and 5th Avenue, where her 25-year-old son, Corey, was shot and killed; and 52nd Street and 7th Avenue, where her 21-year-old nephew, Terrance, was shot and killed.

Even in a neighborhood so numbed by gunfire that children no longer flinch at the sound, Austin-Jordan’s loss is staggering. Altogether, seven family members, including her brother, have died from gun violence since the late 1970s.

Austin-Jordan, 46, who responded by founding an anti-crime program, said the neighborhood wasn’t always so dangerous.

The daughter of a nightclub owner and a homemaker, she grew up in the Crenshaw area at the foot of Baldwin Hills in a safe, working-class neighborhood frequented by entertainers such as Marvin Gaye and Tina Turner. As she came of age, her own dreams dissolved as the community succumbed to a downward spiral of crack cocaine addiction, gangs and guns. After high school, she married, had a child, divorced and had two more children. She wound up working two jobs to support them and the two nephews for whom she had assumed legal responsibility.

Handguns became popular in the ‘70s, she recalled, and by the mid-’80s, it seemed the majority of young men in her neighborhood carried a gun.

“You could be standing with a group of five, and three would have a gun, either in their waistband or the car,” she said. Despite stiffer gun laws enacted in California in the 1990s, she said anyone can get a gun within minutes or days.

Austin-Jordan became a public figure in 1988, the year her daughter and a girlfriend became victims of mistaken identity. The day after Mother’s Day, four gang members, seeking revenge for a drug deal gone awry, had gone gunning for the dealer’s sister, who drove a red Hyundai. When they saw Ja’mee and her girlfriend stopped at an intersection in the friend’s red Pontiac, they opened fire with a machine gun and a shotgun, bought over the counter. Her daughter’s body had 11 bullet wounds.

The killers were sentenced to life without possibility of parole.

Her emotions in turmoil, Austin-Jordan began a program to teach California Youth Authority inmates about the consequences of their actions to families like hers. Austin-Jordan told “60 Minutes” at the time that she couldn’t bear losing another child.

Four years later, her nephew Terrance was killed outside a friend’s house, waiting to go to dinner. It was cold, and he had put on a girl’s red jacket. Gang members passing by took the color to be that of a rival gang and shot him.

Then, in 1996, her son Corey was killed. He had gone with a friend to a convenience store where, she said, a 41-year-old gang member just released from prison asked him which gang he associated with. When he said none, the man apparently became enraged and shot him with a .22-caliber pistol using a modified bullet called a “tumbler.” Austin-Jordan said the bullet entered his body under his breastplate, struck his heart, traveled to his groin and back up to the base of his neck where it rested in his shoulder.

This time, Austin-Jordan decided to focus on ex-offenders, released from prison and returning to the community without jobs or skills. With her new husband, Kenneth Jordan, the son of First African Methodist Episcopal Church pastor Cecil Murray, she revived Save Our Future, the flagging nonprofit organization she had founded in 1992.

“It was like, ‘OK God, I guess I’m supposed to do this. Lord, please just make it happen.’ ”

In four buildings on West Vernon Avenue, they operate a variety of programs--a job training and placement program for parolees 18 to 30 years old; a day-care center; and after-school, mentoring and food programs for children. They are seeking corporate support in finding the men jobs, up-to-date computers, a van, preschool materials and more volunteers.

Fiery and determined, Austin-Jordan said she has had trouble seeing herself as a victim.

In a twist that illustrates the complexities of gun issues, she said she once fired a gun in self-defense.

After her daughter died, she said, she fell into an abusive relationship. When her boyfriend began to slap and stalk her, she said, she began to fear for her safety and that of her children. Because of her high profile as a crime fighter, she was embarrassed and often went to media interviews with heavy makeup over her bruises.

The last time her boyfriend threatened her, she asked her grandmother for a .22-caliber pistol that had belonged to a deceased uncle. She kept it in a drawer beside her bed. With her boyfriend in pursuit, she raced for the pistol, whirled around and pointed it at his head. At the last minute, she said, she turned the gun aside and fired into a wall beside him. She turned herself in to police, who took the gun but declined to file charges against her.

She never retrieved the gun and has banned guns from her home ever since.

Austin-Jordan believes the root cause of gun violence is neither guns alone nor people alone, but a deadly combination of the two.

“Guns give you false courage,” she said. “It’s an easy solution when you could have thought it out better.”

She supports the manufacture of so-called “smart guns,” which can be fired only by their owners, and she supports bans on assault weapons and cheap Saturday Night Specials.

Austin-Jordan plans to join the Million Mom March either in Washington, D.C., or in Los Angeles.

After her son Corey was killed, Austin-Jordan said, her son Derris began failing school and fell into a depression. He asked if he would die that way too. She promised him, “I’ll do what I can to make the streets safe for you.”

A month later, she moved to Woodland Hills, although she returns nearly every day to run her program.

So far, she said, her efforts are paying off: Derris, now 15, has made the honor roll for two years at Chatsworth High School. Helping others makes her feel alive again. And about 80 ex-offenders have found work through her program.

“To me, that’s 80 men not selling drugs, doing rapes or committing homicides,” she said.

Carolyn Sachs Sees How Guns Harm

Dr. Carolyn Sachs thought the 16-year-old boy in her emergency room was a suicide. As her job required, she tried to resuscitate him, though he was clearly dead. His arm had already stiffened in its last gesture, bent upward, the empty hand pointing to his temple.

Another tragic gun-related waste, she thought. A few days later, however, she felt an unexpected chill when she learned the boy had shot himself accidentally. He had been fooling around in front of friends with his stepmother’s handgun. After a few trial clicks of the trigger, he had mistakenly assumed the entire chamber was empty.

The shock of that 1996 incident made her more determined than ever to do what she could to end gun violence.

Now an assistant professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, Sachs, 33, is one of a new breed of physicians who regard gun violence as a public health as well as criminal justice issue.

“Some things like cancer we can’t prevent. It seemed to me, here’s something we can prevent and we’re not,” she said.

In 1999, nearly 30,000 people in the United States died from gun injuries, more than half a result of suicide, according to the Bell Campaign.

In 1998, there were 962 firearm homicides in Los Angeles County, a rate more than 12 times that of the next highest six industrialized nations, according to information provided by Women Against Gun Violence.

While pro-gun activists argue guns provide protection, a growing body of literature connects firearms with increased risks of suicide and homicide, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. This year, a Rand study found that firearms are kept unlocked and without trigger locks in almost half of all U.S. homes with children and guns. Nine percent of those surveyed said they keep their guns unlocked and loaded.

In addition to working her shifts in the emergency department at UCLA Medical Center, Sachs also researches domestic violence, advises forensic nurse specialists and has co-chaired the health committee for the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles. In the past three years, she has lectured 300 physicians on how to counsel patients about firearm safety.

Several organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics and Physicians for Social Responsibility have programs to guide physicians in counseling patients about gun violence.

“Most of the research now focuses on educating physicians to inquire about firearms in the home. If so, to encourage them to have them locked and unloaded. If they don’t have one to begin with, to encourage them not to get one.”

When she began her residency in 1991, Sachs recalled seeing two or three gunshot victims a week--many involving gang members in the Venice area. Now, she said she hasn’t seen one in a month or two.

On a recent Friday night, the most serious wound Sachs attended was a man who had apparently fallen off a bicycle and knocked himself out.

Her colleagues recalled images of previous gun violence that have shaken them: a failed suicide who shot off the front of her face; bystander victims of gang members spraying automatic gunfire; jealous lovers; a man shot 40 times by police; more children playing with guns than they ever imagined.

“People in nice middle-class neighborhoods have no concept of the carnage,” said Dr. William Mower, along with Sachs an attending physician in the emergency room. The average gunshot wound costs tens of thousands of dollars to treat, he said. Many victims are paralyzed and need ongoing treatment. The most frustrating, emergency room workers said, are young victims who have been shot before and whom they expect to see again.

“Even if they’re a criminal, they are human beings with real fears. They wanted a real life, and they don’t have much to return to.”

In another context, Sachs knows her patients might be people she would fear. But lying wounded and perhaps facing death in the emergency room, they are the ones who are sometimes afraid. Of the 30 or 40 victims she has treated, she recalls a teenage gang member who asked her point-blank if he was going to die. “I said no,” she said. But the bullet ended up piercing his aorta, and he did die. For a while, she said she felt guilty.

“If you’re ever going to tell a white lie, I guess that’s the time to tell it,” she said.

She felt sorry for him, as she does for all her patients. Sometimes she thinks it could just as easily be her on the gurney. It was luck that she grew up in a nonviolent neighborhood, she believes.

Sachs, a mother of three, also sometimes imagines it could be her own child hurt by guns. She worried when her oldest boy, now 4, began last year to pick up sticks and shout, “Bang! Bang! You’re dead!” to strangers and other people.

She said she tried to explain to him why guns are bad. She doesn’t know if he understood, but now he tells her that guns are bad.

On Sunday, Sachs will be marching with her mother and younger son in the Million Mom March on Olvera Street.

Whatever the ultimate solution to gun violence, she said, “it’s naive to say it’s not our problem.”

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Lynn Smith can be reached at lynn.smith@latimes.com.

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March Is Expected to Draw About 5,000 in the Southland

About 5,000 people are expected to participate in the Southern California Regional Million Mom March that starts at 1 p.m. Sunday at 1700 N. Alameda in Los Angeles. Marchers will meet at 12:30 p.m. across from Union Station at the entrance to Olvera Street. For more information, call (800) 346-2536, or contact Victoria Ballesteros at ballesteros@cs.com.

A rally in support of the march will be held at 10 a.m. at the Wilshire Federal Building. Participants will gather at 9:30 a.m. at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Westwood in West Los Angeles. For more information, call Women Against Gun Violence at (310) 204-2348 or e-mail rqs@wagv.org.

The national march will begin at 10 a.m. on the National Mall between 3rd and 7th streets in Washington, D.C. More information may be obtained at https://www.millionmommarch.com or (888) 989-MOMS.