Billboard Campaign Pushes Gun Ownership

With one eye on the East Coast terror attacks, a Fullerton-based pro-gun lobby has rented 300 billboards across California in a controversial campaign pushing its belief that a heavily armed populace is a safer populace.

Judging by a run on guns statewide, the California Rifle and Pistol Assn.’s campaign could find a receptive audience.

State Department of Justice officials said Friday that the number of people buying guns jumped by more than 50% the week of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon over the previous week, and have remained about 32% above the previous year.

Although backers of the billboard campaign stress that they planned their ad buy during the summer, the Sept. 11 attacks accented their point that Americans now have recognized how vulnerable they are.

“We looked at these things and thought about whether the message is still applicable, and decided it was truer than ever,” said Chuck Michel, a lawyer and spokesman for the 70,000-member California Rifle and Pistol Assn., a state affiliate of the National Rifle Assn. “In light of what happened in New York City, people have stopped taking for granted their own security.”

The billboards, which started going up Oct. 1, carry a photo of a multiethnic group of about 20 smiling people and the slogan: “Society is safer when criminals don’t know who’s armed.” Michel declined to divulge how much the group is spending, but said the campaign will cost “in the six figures.”

Gun-control advocates dismissed the campaign as opportunistic.

“It’s a rather disgusting attempt to wrap themselves in the flag,” said Luis Tolley, western director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “This is going to backfire on them and be seen as a pretty cheap attempt to score points. . . . The last thing people want is to have to worry about whether the guy sitting next to them at a Dodgers game is carrying a gun.”

One of the first signs to go up is near the Metrolink tracks, west of the Costa Mesa Freeway in north Orange.

Billboard Stands Near 2 Gun Dealers

The billboard stands across from a small strip mall with two gun dealers, an auto parts store, a bar and Mr. Ed’s Barber Shop, where military and hunting paraphernalia line the paneled walls and the occasional prankster calls up whinnying like a horse before asking to talk to Wilbur.

Mr. Ed’s owner, Michael Adams, a boyhood hunter and Vietnam War vet, approves of the billboard he can see out his shop window. He thinks, though, that Americans should be armed to protect themselves from government, not as a deterrent to crime.

He cited his trips to Mexico, where guns are tightly controlled.

“I’ve noticed the swagger of the soldier and the policeman when he has the gun,” Adams said. “But I don’t believe everybody should have a howitzer.”

Al Zwicky, draped in plastic as Adams snipped his graying hair, disagreed. A boyhood hunter himself in rural Illinois, Zwicky gave up guns when he moved to Orange County in 1957.

“I raised three boys,” said Zwicky, 68, the snip of Adams’ scissors competing with up-tempo jazz from a radio at the back of the shop. “When I got out here in urban areas and saw what guns were used for, I didn’t want to have one in the house. Out of sight, out of mind.”

At the nearby World of Warriors, guns are never out of sight.

Owner David Cox, 63, has spent the last decade selling military weapons from the past, such as the .30-caliber M1 rifle, notable for seeing service in World War II, the Korean War and the early days of Vietnam, he said.

A lifetime NRA member--but not the California affiliate--Cox said he applauds the timing of the campaign and its underlying message.

“The timing is no worse than the timing that these anti-gun people have,” Cox said. “Any time someone gets shot, they say we need more gun laws. There are too many as it is; they can’t enforce the ones we have.”

And an armed citizenry, he said, would make streets safer for all.

“We live in a country where people prey on people,” Cox said. “The weak are always at the mercy of those that are stronger. There’s an old saying: God created man, but Colt made them equal.”

State officials said about 9,200 people a week have been buying guns since the Sept. 11 attacks, up from an average of 6,950 for the same period in 2000 and 6,041 the week before the attacks.

Still, that remains far below 11,500 people who weekly sought to buy guns in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, said Michael Van Winkle, a Justice Department spokesman.

“We haven’t talked to enough people to attribute the increase to the terrorist attacks,” Van Winkle said.

But many customers are being clear, gun dealers say: They are arming out of fear.

“There are a lot of people concerned about the possibility of civil unrest and the possibility of having to be on your own for a while,” said Randy Garell, president of Grant Boys in Costa Mesa, where sales are running 50% to 70% above normal for this time of year. “They’re buying anything and everything. Firearms. Ammunition. . . . A few tents, oddly enough, and this is not tent season.”

High Visibility Is Praised by Members

The spurt in gun sales came before the Rifle and Pistol Assn. mounted its campaign, which is similar to one the group conducted in 1995 in its continuing--and so far unsuccessful--drive for laws allowing people to carry arms in public. Michel said the campaign was revived this summer after group members complained that the gun-control lobby had a higher profile.

“The members appreciate this kind of visibility,” Michel said. “It’s in response to the roughly $10 million that’s been spent by the gun-ban lobby in the last five or six years to promote an anti-gun message.”

Eventually, there will be about 150 of the billboards in Los Angeles and Orange counties, 50 each in San Diego and Sacramento counties, and 50 scattered between Sacramento and Bakersfield.

Stephanie Spence could see one of the billboards from her back patio in Orange, if she looked. But she hasn’t. And she doesn’t need to see the sign, she said, to know it’s a bad idea.

“You can’t arm everybody--that’s dangerous, especially right now,” said Spence, 37, a mother of two and an administrative assistant for the Heritage Family Fellowship Church in Anaheim. “People are trigger-happy, on edge. I’d be more scared that the littlest thing could set them off. Look at road rage.”

Spence said that she believes people have a right to own weapons, but that there are certain people she doesn’t think should be allowed to carry them.

Former Gun Owner Stresses Training

Down the street, neighbor Roger McElroy, 57, was less certain. A former hunting guide and current marine engineer, he at one time owned guns and thinks only people trained in their use should be allowed to have them.

“Fifty percent of me says that makes sense,” McElroy said from a chair in his garage, the overhead door open to the sunny morning. “But 50% of me says it’s totally cockamamie.”

For that matter, he said, so is the timing of the campaign.

“Is it morally appropriate? No,” McElroy said. “It just riles people up.”