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."
