c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

DURHAM, N.C. _ Our son’s baseball diamond is two blocks from the home where a community leader was recently gunned down by two youth looking to kill her sons.

Halfway through practice, the woman who coordinates baseball at this city park walks up. Her issue is the basketball goals that were taken down last summer after men exchanged gunfire while kids played baseball nearby.

The basketball players aren’t the issue, she says, but the rough crowd who hang around their games, deal drugs, break into cars and settle disputes with handguns. When the basketball goals went down, so did calls to 911. Now City Council is under pressure to put them back.

One of the dads, a policeman, says he hates having to carry his pistol to baseball practice. Parents stop talking about a new Target store and exchange worries about how to protect their children.

Next morning, while dropping off our son for a church camp, I meet Marcia Owen. She is a 44-year-old mother of two who doesn’t usually get involved in demonstrations.

This year will be different. On Mothers Day, May 14, Marcia will shepherd some 500 local people onto nine buses and lead them north to Washington, D.C., for the Million Mom March.

Most will be women, and most, she imagines, will be first-time demonstrators like herself. This is “a grass-roots effort to protect our children from guns,” she says.

Their plea is for a “sensible gun policy,” including cooling-off periods and background checks on sales of handguns, licensing of handgun owners, registration of all handguns, safety locks on handguns, enforcement of existing gun laws and limiting purchases to one handgun per month.

“Women get it,” Marcia says. This isn’t about abstract theories based on 18th century militias, or hunters’ rights, or the need of “sportsmen” to carry weapons whose sole purpose is to kill people, not deer.

“Mothers look into the eyes of their children,” Marcia says. Mothers send their kids off to schools where shootings are as likely to happen as basketball championships. Mothers send their kids out to play in a society where 60 million handguns are in private hands, where a child is more likely to die from gunfire than from any disease or accident.

For the past five years, Marcia has been attending vigils held after every homicide. She has attended about 70. “One year, we held a vigil every 10 days.”

A million moms won’t stop the gun lobby. Gun manufacturers and gun merchants will continue to pour millions into congressional campaigns. High-profile spokesmen will escalate their shrill denunciations of gun-control advocates as foolish and unpatriotic. Once the million moms _ and the men who join their march _ return to the homes where they listen nervously for police sirens, the gun crowd will ease back into action, tightening their strange grip on elected officials.

A million moms are as nothing compared to power like that. While they gather on the Mall, 50 more children will be murdered by handguns. The next day, as they bundle kids off to school, 50 more will die.

A million moms will accomplish nothing. Just as frantic parents accomplish nothing when they throw their children into cars and flee schools torn apart by gunfire. Just as parents accomplish nothing when they race to hospitals and morgues to identify their children. Just as Karen Paschall accomplished nothing when she said to colleagues at Duke University on a Monday, “We’ve got to do something about these guns,” and then on Sunday night, while talking on the telephone, was shot to death by two teen-agers who had a dispute with her sons, obtained handguns, saw a shadow inside and shot at it, hitting twice.

A million moms will accomplish nothing _ except this. They will strip away the “patriotic” mantle claimed by gun lobbyists. They will show that uncontrolled handgun sales have nothing to do with patriotism or some sacred “right to bear arms.” Handgun sales are about greed.

Greed knows how to work the system. But a million moms whose strength is the courage to look into the eyes of children will have stripped away the clever mask worn by these merchants of death.

DEA END EHRICH