DATE LINES
Ervin, Michael & Hill, John R.
DATE LINES Gun Lobby Targets the North Shore... NORTHFIELD, ILLINOIS Philip Andrew was proud to offer himself as the symbolic focal point for a gun-control movement emerging on suburban Chicago's...
...The group has worked against Minneapolis police chief Anthony Bouza, Baltimore County chief Cornelius Behan, and Richard Boyd, former president of the Fraternal Order of Police...
...The News/Voice had never been attacked like this before, and there are no solid suspects, though investigations continue...
...I was shot in my kitchen and the necessity of handgun control hits home for me...
...The Highland Park News/ Voice, a community newspaper, ran an editorial in strong support of a local handgun ban right next to its news story reporting the forum...
...What I can do," he says, "is have something good corrie out of all this...
...Ken Cooper of the Highland Park Liberty Committee thinks a ban on guns is a prelude to genocide...
...A few days later, shots were fired through the News/Voice's windows, wounding an elderly woman...
...Their ideas of confiscation of guns are both communist and Nazi in their origination...
...If you don't like the NRA positions, then shut up or change your position...
...Cooper says about a hundred of his Jewish relatives perished in the Nazi Holocaust and recalls his grandmother's tales of turn-of-the-century Russian pogroms in her Polish village...
...He has spoken at many forums across the country and has never heard the Nazi-dupe argument anywhere except those Chicago suburbs with large Jewish populations...
...He wants Illinois Governor Jim Thompson to assemble a task force composed of victims like Andrew and of activists both for and against guns to draft legislation making it more difficult to obtain— and easier to lose—gun permits...
...Later, she killed herself in his attic...
...The blissful insulation of the North Shore had been penetrated, and some local residents joined with such organizations as the League of Women Voters and the National Council of Jewish Women to heal the wound...
...He also disclaims and denounces the shooting at the Highland Park News/Voice, saying it must have been done by "kids or drunks...
...There is no question why they are taking us [police chiefs] on separately...
...Despite the NRA's eleventh-hour smear campaign, Bergstrom was unanimously appointed police chief by the Tarpon Springs city council last spring...
...Philip Andrew is collecting signatures in Winnetka...
...Adolph Hitler is alive and well and is coming to Northfield today...
...it said...
...Mike Beard, president of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, thinks the' opposition's tactics have National Rifle Association written all over them...
...But this [gun-control activism] is the one good thing I can do...
...I'm here as a victim, not as a representative of any organization," Andrew said...
...If police selectively choose which laws they will enforce and which they won't, you don't have a democratic state anymore...
...All Jews must turn in their guns immediately...
...Bergstrom says the NRA's logic is twisted, that he was only enforcing a law written by the city council...
...It's hard to find much good when people are shot and a child is killed...
...Timm wouldn't object to an outright ban on handguns, but he doesn't see much hope for that in a state legislature that voted down three gun-control measures just days after the Winnetka tragedy...
...It's a standard political tactic that you play to your audience," says Beard...
...Residents of Highland Park and most other North Shore communities are going door-to-door with petitions for a ban on handguns...
...He also says the "fact sheet" circulated by the Highland Park Liberty Committee is almost identical to those of other local pro-gun groups and the Illinois Rifle and Pistol Association, which, is an NRA affiliate and the leading gun lobby in the state...
...The message is very clear," says Bergstrom...
...Chiefs David Wadman of Omaha, Nebraska, and Joseph McNamara of San Jose, California, have also felt the wrath of the national gun lobby...
...But Philip Andrew also experienced a terrifying invasion of his home...
...Everybody in the village suffered horribly except the one family that happened to have a shotgun...
...In one case, Bergstrom helped to prosecute an Oak Park service-station owner who fired a gun at two men he said had robbed him...
...The NRA wants to remind us just how powerful they are...
...The owner was acquitted on the charges, but the two alleged robbers were never caught...
...The forum also featured activists from Oak Park and Morton Grove, who led successful efforts to impose strict bans on handguns in their communities...
...But a powerful, if unlikely, enemy stood in his way: the National Rifle Association...
...Achtung...
...It's easier to get an FOID card in Illinois than it is to get a driver's license," says Winnetka police chief Herbert Timm...
...To get into the temple, Andrew had to pass through a line of pickets with signs reading Get Out...
...Officials at the NRA office in Washington, D.C, wrote to the group's 400 members in Tarpon Springs, urging them to oppose Bergstrom's appointment as police chief...
...Bergstrom's sin...
...NORTHFIELD, ILLINOIS Philip Andrew was proud to offer himself as the symbolic focal point for a gun-control movement emerging on suburban Chicago's affluent North Shore in the wake of Laurie Dann's shooting spree at a Winnetka elementary school...
...The NRA lambasted Bergstrom, saying he prosecuted the victim instead of the criminals, and urged Tarpon Springs residents to keep him from "bringing his campaign against law-abiding gun owners to Tarpon Springs...
...Bergstrom figured that, given the job of permanent chief, he could implement sweeping changes and salvage the force...
...Resistance will be met with arrest, fines, imprisonment, and confiscation of property...
...He had been police chief of Oak Park, Illinois, and enforced that city's strict ban on handguns...
...Nazi Gun Grabbers and Disarmed Amerika: A Communist Party Platform Plank Since 1926...
...Murder had touched Winnetka for the first time in three decades...
...Laurie Dann burst into his kitchen, shot him in the chest, piercing both lungs and scraping the lining of his heart...
...But this budding campaign has drawn unusual opposition...
...One of her neighbors happened to have a shotgun and he placed himself outside her door and protected her home," says Cooper...
...For six months, the forty-nine-year-old officer had presided over the department, which was plagued by troubles stemming from the firing of the previous police chief amidst charges of corruption, politicization, and low morale...
...Bergstrom wanted to be named chief of the police department here in this town of 13,000 people just north of Tampa Bay...
...Over the past couple of years, the NRA has picked similar fights...
...And the gun that almost killed Andrew was lawfully owned by Dann—a simple matter of obtaining an application for a Firearms Owner Identification card from any gun shop or police department and submitting it with a $5 fee...
...Jews who fail to comply will suffer the severest sanctions...
...The situation was dismal enough for a grand jury to recommend that the city disband the police department...
...An anonymous leaflet emblazoned with swastikas circulated...
...Andrew, a twenty-year-old shot by Dann as she took refuge in his home, gave the opening speech at a gun-control forum here, in the same Jewish temple where services were held for the eight-year-old boy Dann killed...
...Michael Ervin (Michael Ervin is a free-lance writer in Chicago...
...Cooper, however, says, "These people are being used by the anti-gun establishment...
...The State of Illinois has revoked the so-called Bill of Rights...
...That's what police in a democracy are supposed to do-enforce a law that the elected officials write," he says...
...John R. Hill (John R. Hill is a free-lance writer in Temple Terrace, Florida...
...and Sets Its Sights on a Police Chief TARPON SPRINGS, FLORIDA Keith Bergstrom calls it a classic battle, "a David-and-Go-liath contest in local government...
Vol. 52 • September 1988 • No. 9
