Pro-Feuer March Puts Spotlight on Gun Issues

Councilman Mike Feuer on Wednesday joined a demonstration outside a North Hollywood gun store that has urged its customers to support Deputy Mayor Rocky Delgadillo, Feuer’s opponent in next week’s runoff election for Los Angeles city attorney.

Flanked by sign-waving supporters, Feuer denounced B & B Sales for displaying, for a time, a “Delgadillo for City Attorney” sign on its marquee and distributing fliers urging a vote for the deputy mayor.

“This exemplifies that the battle lines are drawn,” Feuer, who has written several city measures to crack down on guns on the street, told supporters. “Let us stand together for common-sense gun rules.”

As he spoke, demonstrators waved signs reading “Shame on Rocky” and “NRA, go away.”

Gun store owner Bob Kahn said Feuer and others of “the left wing” want “to stifle everybody else’s opinion and their right to express it.”

Kahn then offered coffee to the demonstrators and invited them to come back.

“You’re good for business,” Kahn said. His store earned accolades during the 1997 North Hollywood police shootout with bank robbers by giving guns and ammunition off its shelves to officers whose weapons were no match for those of the robbers.

Kahn said the store was helping Delgadillo because one of the managers went to high school with Delgadillo, whom he called “a great guy.”

The fliers urged voters to “Help Defeat Mike Feuer, L.A.’s most anti-firearms rights council member. . . . Your vote June 5 for Rocky will help preserve your gun rights.” A small line at the bottom said it was “compliments of the Santa Clarita Volunteers.”

Feuer said the group is affiliated, at least informally, with the National Rifle Assn., which sent political mailers opposing Feuer to its local members during the April primary.

But an NRA spokeswoman at the organization’s Fairfax, Va,, headquarters said no one there has heard of the group. She said the NRA had nothing to do with the fliers distributed at B & B Sales.

“The NRA’s got nothing to do with this,” Kahn agreed.

Delgadillo, who called “vigorous enforcement of our gun safety laws” one of his top priorities, accused Feuer of falsely implying he was “in the pocket of the gun lobby.”

“I grew up in a neighborhood where people were affected by gun violence,” Delgadillo said in a statement released by his campaign during the demonstration.

“No one will fight harder than I will to get guns off our streets. That’s what I told Mike Feuer, and that’s what I told the NRA. To say anything else is just opportunistic politics,” Delgadillo said.

Feuer was joined during the demonstration by Fernando Del Rio, whose daughter was shot to death two years ago, and leaders of Handgun Control, the Million Mom March and Women Against Gun Violence.