http://www.sltrib.com/04292000/utah/45124.htm

Two Women Push Polar Views On Gun Safety
Saturday, April 29, 2000

Rebecca Oyer, left, organizer of Utah’s Million Mom March, talks with
Merlinda Bradshaw about the upcoming rally. (Rick Egan/The Salt Lake
Tribune)

BY JUDY FAHYS
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

It’s no surprise that gun control, one of the most hotly debated issues
of our times, is engaging some of Utah’s most passionate partisans — its
mothers.
And now two family-minded women have emerged as leaders in Utah’s corner
of the debate.
Political newcomer Rebecca Oyer is shepherding the upcoming Million Mom
March in Utah. Longtime activist Janalee Tobias is organizing the opposing
side — “pistol-packin’ mamas.”
While the two are on opposite sides of this nationwide debate, in many
ways they have much in common.
Both were raised Mormon in Utah and earned degrees from Brigham Young
University. Both in their 30s, they can be found at home in jeans and
T-shirts, painted toenails wiggling in sandals as they field calls from
women curious about their campaigns.
Each seems as firm and natural defending her views as a mother bear
tending cubs, and neither would dispute society should do better at
protecting kids from guns.
National statistics show more than 2,300 children died in the United
States from unintentional shootings in the past decade. And a single Utah
hospital, Primary Children’s Medical Center, admitted 89 children with
gunshot wounds during that period. Ten of them died.
While Oyer and Tobias may agree about the problem, they have different
ideas about solving it.
Tobias says the best way to protect kids is to teach them gun safety and
to allow responsible adults to be armed. In contrast, Oyer wants lawmakers
to enact stricter gun controls, including firearm registration and trigger
locks for stored guns. Tobias led a rally last weekend of “Informed Armed
Mothers” at the state Capitol. On May 14, Mother’s Day, Oyer will lead a
“mini” Million Mom March, one of about two dozen local gun-control rallies
planned in conjunction with the national march on the U.S. Capitol Mall and
marches in two dozen other cities.
The women’s political involvement certainly isn’t novel.
Utah political scientist Jean Bickmore White recalls that the state’s
suffragists mounted a similar campaign by mobilizing busy women to set aside
their day-to-day concerns to tackle a pressing political issue.
“There is a latent bunch of people who will make the time [for a
political cause] when they think it’s important,” says the retired Weber
State University professor, who sees the recent wave of school shootings as
a big motivation for mothers entering the gun-control debate.
“I would say it’s usually an odd mix,” she adds, “but in Utah politics
nothing surprises me.”
The Mother’s Day march and rally in Utah is Oyer’s first-ever foray into
political organizing.
A school administrator, Oyer lives in a modest downtown Salt Lake City
apartment with her husband, Ty, a law student. She volunteers her skills as
an English-as-a-second-language teacher and hopes to one day be a mother.
Oyer learned about the Washington march on the Internet and volunteered
to coordinate a rally and march in Salt Lake City when she learned no one
else had signed up.
The Million Mom participants want Congress to make guns less accessible
to children and criminals, she says. Gun licensing and registration in no
way would stop law-abiding Americans from exercising their gun rights, she
adds.
“That [registration] makes everyone responsible for their guns,” says
Oyer, whose father hunted and whose father-in-law is in law enforcement.
“Child-protection locks would be a nice idea,” she adds, “because there
are so many accidental shootings with curious kids.”
Oyer disputes the opposing side’s assertion that guns provide safety.
She points to a New England Journal of Medicine study that says having a
gun in the home triples the likelihood of a homicide there. And she notes
that women in France and Korea, where guns are tightly restricted, can walk
safely at night in the busiest cities, while women are at great risk in the
United States with its 65 million handguns in the streets.
As for criminals, Oyer says restricting their access to guns will help
save lives. Ty Oyer, who worked on political campaigns for Gov. Gray Davis
and other candidates in California, says Rebecca fits her new role as
activist.
“She can see and feel and understand other people’s situations,” he
says. “And she was frustrated with the gun policies.”
Organizing the rally, fielding news-media calls, developing a publicity
strategy — all of it is part of a campaign by the Oyers and a small team of
volunteers that includes Merlinda Bradshaw, whose 16-year-old daughter
Bethany Hyde was killed by a teen-aged gangster in 1998.
Tobias, the Utah mother who opposes gun control, describes her opponents
as well-meaning but misguided.
Mother of 11- and 9-year-old daughters, Tobias lives in a home in a tidy
South Jordan development. Decorated recently with holiday-colored eggs and
plush Easter bunnies lounging in and outside the house, it is a homespun
scene for this veteran of outsider politics.
Tobias has worked on campaigns for U.S. Rep. Merrill Cook and Salt Lake
Mayor Rocky Anderson, and she ran unsuccessfully for the state Legislature
and city council. She also helped start Citizens for Smart Transportation,
an effort to stop the TRAX light-rail system, and Save Our South Jordan
River, a campaign to block a local development.
She also founded Women Against Gun Control, now an international
organization, and often testifies before the Legislature against measures
that would put any new limits on guns in Utah.
While attending Ricks College in Idaho, she and a girlfriend were
cruising one night when some guys they met invited them target shooting.
Tobias later developed an appreciation for the protection guns offer when
she took a self-defense course at BYU and discovered herself feeling
overpowered by men she confronted when practicing the defensive moves.
“No one wants to be a victim, feeling helpless and defenseless,” says
Tobias, who sees firearms as a way to equalize the power imbalance between
men and women.
Tobias says gun owners are treated “like we’re some kind of trailer
trash” for their views on keeping their families safe.
“They [the Million Moms] don’t seem to care about the protection of my
family,” she says. “Unless they are here to protect my family, then, yeah, I
think they are anti-family.”
At the “Informed Armed Mothers” rally at the state Capitol last week,
Tobias recalled the horrific tale of the Pennsylvania woman who was on the
phone with 911 for a half-hour before her ex-boyfriend forced her into a
fatal collision with a train. What should you do when someone’s after you,
she asked the crowd, call 911 or get your 9 mm pistol?
“Get the 9 mm,” the crowd shouted.
Most importantly, says Tobias, gun-control has failed to curb violent
crime and it cannot stop the moral decay blamed for gun violence. “If you
want to get to crime, you have to get to the root causes,” she says. Tobias
plans to take part in a countermarch on the U.S. Mall when the Million Moms
gather there on Mother’s Day.
Whether she and Oyer will ever find the opportunity to sit down together
and address the issues underlying gun violence remains to be seen. In the
meantime, Utahns can expect to see the two women rallying to persuade the
public they — and not their opponents — have the solution on how to make
streets safe again.