ON THE LINE
Ervin, Michael & Steif, William & Spitler, Patricia
O N T H E L I N E A Priest for Gun Control DENVER Father Marshall Gourley collects guns. Not because he likes guns— in fact, this Denver priest has called them the "demons" of modern society—but...
...He wasn't even sure who his representative was...
...In addition to its rallies, GUARD has also begun holding five-minute work stoppages at 11 a.m...
...The site tops an underground aquifer that supplies water to the area...
...I didn't care about their bottom line...
...When elected five years ago, Hoyte vowed to carry on Burnham's program...
...Patricia Spitler (Patricia Spitler is a free-lance writer in Evergreen, Colorado...
...Most participants turn in their guns without taking the money...
...These were the same folks who gave us Karen Silkwood...
...Last year, the Council lobbied the state legislature for a ban on assault weapons...
...at first, he did...
...The plan violates NRC regulations and IIlinois statutes prohibiting disposal in populated areas...
...I wanted them to get it out of here," he says...
...But after some modification to discourage those with ulterior motives, the collection effort continues...
...We've resigned ourselves to violence as a part of our lives...
...about his own optimistic assumptions...
...But activists were few in those days, Rennels says, especially on his own city council, which repeatedly refused to take a stand against Kerr-McGee...
...Democracy is not negotiable...
...At a loud and emotional city council meeting on March 5, they pleaded for someone to do something...
...Last April, the Colorado Council of Churches supported Father Gourley with a statement signed by fifty-nine nuns and members of the clergy from various denominations...
...I wasn't a rocket scientist," says this mother of two who had just moved to town at the time...
...Finally, in January, GUARD was established, recruiting a cross-section of leaders from all walks of life...
...Enter a restaurant and all of the waiters are Indo-Guyanese...
...Some 42 to 45 per cent of the 700,000 people are of East Indian extraction, descendants of indentured workers brought to the colony for the sugar and rice fields, after Britain freed its black slaves in 1834...
...In 1955, Afro-Guyanese leader Forbes Burnham broke away from the PPC to form the PNC...
...Enter a government office and all of the employees are Afro-Guyanese...
...We are emphasizing that the truth will set you free," says McCormack...
...TAG people think they will be close to final victory if the state wins, since Illinois has been tougher than the Federal regulators on Kerr-McGee...
...Michael Ervin (Michael Ervin is a free-lance writer in Chicago...
...How could the Federal Government even consider burial in a residential neighborhood...
...The usual official response to race questions has been to finesse them...
...The outcome will show whether the creators of toxic waste can just leave it where it lies, no matter how many people live nearby...
...Kerr-McGee lost a court challenge of the city's right to stop construction of the clay tomb...
...At a height of forty-five feet, Mount Thorium would be the tallest structure in town...
...More significant than the disarmament effort in his home parish, though, is Gourley's formation of a coalition of Denver churches dedicated to persuading individuals to reject the instruments of violence...
...The organizers of TAG met in his dining room last December when they concluded that the "acceptable" channels through which they had been fighting Kerr-McGee for more than a decade were leading them nowhere...
...A month later, another drew 8,000 in the hot, late-afternoon sun...
...But even considering such action was quite out of character for Balocca...
...Suddenly, when the opponents thought they had lost and had decided on the resistance that would result in arrest but not victory, they found they had won...
...That's where GUARD comes in...
...We speak about the need for solidarity, about getting over our differences and concentrating on our similarities...
...If the Government said it was okay, I be-lieved my Government wouldn't allow anything dangerous in my town...
...It was a cause of great anguish to me," says Gourley, "and forced us to consider whether we'd made a serious blunder...
...If they can do it here," he says, "they can do it anywhere...
...Indo-Guyanese are the backbone of the People's Progressive Party, which Cheddi Ja-gan formed in 1950 to seek independence for the country...
...he wants to bury the guns instead...
...A return to democracy is an absolute priority," says Georgetown lawyer David de Caires, who started an independent, twice-a-week newspaper in late 1986...
...The last straw was a hearing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety Licensing Board to consider approval of Kerr-McGee's disposal plan...
...Not because he likes guns— in fact, this Denver priest has called them the "demons" of modern society—but because he was horrified by a rash of gun-related deaths in his community, which is mostly Hispanic...
...His reference to "some politicians" means Cheddi Jagan and his People's Progressive Party, which for forty years has had the support of most Indo-Guyanese...
...The first Georgetown rally drew 4,000 people...
...Then came a series of meetings and a booklet listing desired reforms, including an end to police brutality, an end to army impoundment of ballot boxes, ballot-counting at polling places, a new list of registered voters, and other measures to ensure "fair and free elections...
...Under Burnham, the free press was systematically stifled...
...Afro-Guyanese, led by President Desmond Hoyte, run the People's National Congress, the political party that's been in power since independence was achieved in 1966...
...She too made plans to chain herself to the fence to stop the bulldozers...
...Kerr-McGee's stubbornness affirms for Balocca that this battle is bigger than West Chicago...
...GUARD represents a grass-roots demand for democracy," says Andrew Morrison, a seventy-one-year-old Jesuit priest who edits the weekly Catholic Standard which, until 1986, was the only independent newspaper in Guyana...
...there is little social mingling and minimal business mingling...
...GUARD, in which the priest plays a prominent role, wants to open up the electoral process...
...each Tuesday to remind Guyanese of the need for reform and to bring racism into the open...
...The company's plan to encapsulate the waste surfaced about the time the town's former mayor, Gene Rennels, took office in 1977...
...The Reverend Gilbert Horn, Council executive director, predicts eventual victory...
...Assian went to TAG's first meeting last January and is deeply involved today...
...No one uses it at the intellectual level, though some politicians use it...
...A few days later, in a heavy rain, 600 people showed up for a TAG rally...
...there'll be no real economic progress without it...
...Gun control is not the first issue Father Gourley and his church have taken on...
...GUARD began holding rallies in June in Georgetown, a city of nearly 200,000, and in smaller communities...
...William Steif (William Steif, a former foreign correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, reports often from abroad for The Progressive...
...Kerr-McGee's idea is to leave the waste where it is and build a clay mound to contain it...
...I just felt I couldn't look my children in the face and say I let this happen," she explains...
...To date, Father Gourley and other local church leaders have collected and turned over to police more than a hundred weapons in a campaign to denounce firearms and their attendant violence...
...TAG gained new supporters by the scores as rallies and actions became larger and more spirited...
...It is true foolishness," they continued, "for us to stand by, to say nothing, and to do nothing more than bury the dead...
...She also blames the Afro-Guyanese—and British and American officials obsessed with the Cold War and fearful of Jagan's Marxism— for fashioning the electoral system that has kept Burn-ham's party in power since independence...
...At times, Father Gourley has been forced to think twice KARL GEHRING/THE DENVER POST Father Marshall Gourley is tired of burying the victims of firearms...
...When he first asked his parishioners at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church to turn in their guns, reactions were mixed...
...When asked about race, for example, Prime Minister Hamilton Green responds, "Burnham did all he could do to remove race as an element in our society...
...He and several other members of the Thorium Action Group (TAG) were going to chain themselves to the gate of the closed-down Kerr-McGee plant in the heart of town to keep bulldozers from beginning construction of a clay tomb for several tons of tailings of radioactive thorium on the premises...
...GUARD is so heartening," says Father Morrison, "because we live in a society of fear...
...They joke that it will vitalize the town's economy by creating a ski resort...
...The effort failed, but the group vows to bring up the issue again and again...
...He went on to become the first president, serving until he died in 1985...
...TAG people call it "Mount Thorium...
...Most West Chicagoans initially were simply apathetic...
...Next came a petition drive, which garnered more than 60,000 signatures...
...He raised donations to offer $100 for each weapon turned in, but that plan faltered when one man accepted the money for a relatively worthless gun and announced to the news media that he would use it as a down payment on an AR-15 rifle...
...GUARD is seeking reform at every level," says Michael McCormack, executive secretary of the Guyana Human Rights Association and of the Guyana Council of Churches...
...For four years, Illinois has been trying to take jurisdiction from the NRC, and that issue will be decided soon...
...You can't deal with the world in a belligerent manner," he says, "without some of that coming home to roost...
...He never wrote to his representative in Congress...
...Now, for the first time in South America's only English-speaking nation, a movement has begun to bring racism to the surface, examine it, and eliminate it from national life in a search for a more democratic, more representative governance...
...The basic conflict is and always has been between the urbanized Afro-Guyanese and the Indo-Guyanese who still work the sugar and rice fields and also compose the merchant class...
...Privately, everyone acknowledges that race is a factor in this society...
...Guyana's next national election will be held sometime before next spring, and Hoyte is a candidate for re-election...
...Kerr-McGee was the last operator, from 1967 to 1973...
...But most recognized the need to call attention to the lethal nature of guns, and agreed...
...The Kerr-McGee plot borders residential areas, a nursing home, and a park, and is within a few blocks of four schools...
...And the Illinois attorney general joined the court battle, arguing that Mount Thorium would violate state water-pollution standards...
...In exchange, he agreed to tough re-forms demanded by the International Monetary Fund and is now busily privatizing the economy...
...The two groups live in separate, ghettoized neighborhoods...
...Gourley believes the key to ending the bloodshed lies in our willingness to reexamine our preconceptions about the world we live in...
...The catalyst for her was the same as for Balocca and the hundreds of others who wouldn't even sign a petition before February, when the NRC's licensing board gave Kerr-McGee permission to start construction on March 6. It appalled them, because they knew the permit violated the Commission's own regulations...
...Bringing Racism into the Open GEORGETOWN, GUYANA Race and racism have ruled politics, and much of life, for the twenty-four years since Guyana gained independence...
...But the key, he adds, is that with GUARD, "We've started to speak about the racial issue for the first time...
...It was Burnham who created the "cooperative republic" of Guyana and nationalized 80 per cent of the country's businesses, using a vaguely Marxist mold...
...immigration policy, and foreign policy in Central America have also been concerns...
...The next morning, as construction was set to begin, the city slapped Kerr-McGee with a stop-work order for failing to obtain proper municipal permits...
...As a government, we are strict as can be to see that race is not a factor, we're scrupulous in avoiding racial appeals...
...TAG was on a roll...
...This is the most tangible sign of the victory being won, so far, by TAG...
...Protest against nuclear weapons, U.S...
...This is a jarring change in Guyana's politics...
...Their descendants, today's Afro-Guyanese, make up about 40 per cent of the population...
...Do not carry guns, do not purchase them, and if you have them, turn them in," they advised...
...Every election since independence, he says, has been rigged...
...But by 1988, Guyana was in such desperate economic straits that Hoyte turned to the Western powers for aid...
...It'll lose in Colorado...
...West Chicagoans were so oblivious to the dangers of thorium that many used it as filler dirt...
...The bulldozers never went to work and they sit idle on the Kerr-McGee grounds today, as idle as the plant itself...
...The tailings are the byproducts of business conducted on the site since 1931 by three companies...
...First, the association published an open letter demanding reform and signed by thirty-six prominent Guyanese...
...Publicly, no one has—until GUARD...
...Janet Rosenberg Jagan, a Chicagoan who has been married to Jagan since 1943, recalls "terrible massacres" of Indo-Guyanese in the early 1960s, brought about "by racial strife...
...These moves toward a market economy have won approval from the United States and other industrial nations, but they are less interested in strengthening Guyana's shaky democratic process...
...The gun lobby is losing battles all the time," he says, 'it's not a monolithic steamroller...
...the last other independent newspaper was put out of business in the early 1970s and supplanted by a government-run daily...
...Victory Over Kerr-McGee WEST CHICAGO, ILLINOIS On March 6, 1989, Dan Bal-occa took off from work because he planned to get arrested for the first time in his life...
...Unfortunately, people continue to be thrilled by guns...
...Nancy Assian admits that's how she felt...
...And the movement—Guyanese Action for Reform and Democracy (GUARD)—is getting surprising support from both Afro-Guyanese and East Indian-Guyanese, who are the bulk of the multi-ethnic population...
...The National Rifle Association unwittingly proved his point when it issued a standard rebuttal claiming Gourley's actions would only increase crime...
...The Council also supports compulsory firearms-safety education, a ten-day waiting period for gun purchases, and a mechanism for background checks on purchasers...
...The process wasn't working anymore," says Balocca...
...Like most TAG members, the twenty-eight-year-old computer-systems analyst had never done anything more politically decisive than voting...
...Civil disobedience wasn't necessary...
...There was even a citizens' group in support of the company's plan...
...This is not the OK Corral or the wild, wild West," he says...
...His quick response: "If guns decrease violence, then we should have no crime at all by now...
...This is only the first step in what Gourley sees as a long struggle...
Vol. 54 • October 1990 • No. 10
