Rural-Urban Divide Over Guns Grows

DENVER — Rancher Lucy Meyring says the new Westerners sipping their microbrewed beer in Denver don’t give a tinker’s damn about her way of life.

They could never understand the kind of terror she felt one miserably cold morning last spring when she had to grab her rifle and fight off a pack of coyotes that was ripping into her calves, threatening to destroy her livelihood, she said in her distinct rural twang.

“Most people don’t have any comprehension of our way of life, our worries, or what makes us tick,” said Meyring, who owns 750 “mother cows” with her husband, Danny. To city folks, she believes, milk comes from the Safeway and hamburgers from McDonald’s.

Whether she’s right or wrong, such a rural-urban disconnect has become increasingly pronounced in Colorado and the interior West in recent years. As the annual migration of 55,000 Californians and other out-of-staters settle in Colorado’s cities and resorts, the newcomers frequently clash with lifelong Westerners over land use, the environment and--most intently for the last year--over guns. The clash is at the heart of a cultural divide that many experts believe goes a long way toward explaining the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between pro-gun and anti-gun forces.

Now, in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, discord over guns has reached a fever pitch here, as well as in the nation’s capital. There is practically no neutral ground anymore, according to comments from nearly three dozen ranchers, hunters, gun collectors, competitive shooters, firearms dealers, gun opponents, politicians and academicians.

People are choosing sides, with the pro-gun forces clearly on the defensive.

Colorado’s firearm opponents, who draw most of their strength from the Denver and Boulder areas, on Thursday launched Sane Alternatives to the Firearm Epidemic, a lobbying organization with two former governors--John Love, a Republican, and Dick Lamm, a Democrat--as honorary chairmen. Its goal is to surpass the National Rifle Assn., member for member and dollar for dollar.

People who never gave a second of thought to the gun debate have joined protests and are offering to help efforts to limit gun access, at a time when 40 people die statewide each month by gunfire--a mortality rate second only to automobile accidents.

“Get rid of them all,” said Heather Bradford, a 22-year-old Littleton mother who was paying her respects at the makeshift memorials in Clement Park. “I once thought adults should have one in the house for protection. But didn’t those boys get their guns from adults?”

Shelly Taylor, 28, a convenience store manager in Littleton, said she pulled all the gun magazines off the store’s rack. “It’s a family store, and we didn’t want to promote guns,” she said. “It wasn’t much, but maybe it will do a little bit to discourage guns.”

In another surprising twist, some gun opponents shed their passivity and made threatening phone calls to gun advocates, including state House Majority Leader Douglas Dean (R-Colorado Springs). The threats disturbed Dean so much that he considered ending his political career, a close aide said last week.

On the other side, the National Rifle Assn. claims 60,000 members in rural and suburban areas across the state, and Richard Bowman, president of the NRA-affiliated Colorado State Shooters Assn., says he’s mobilizing his 1,200 active members into organizing efforts in every county.

The Columbine shooting, which left the two killers, 12 students and one teacher dead, has gun advocates reeling. Although no one is throwing down their weapons, many worry about the strong anti-gun reaction nationwide.

Last week in Washington, publiccriticism forced Senate Republicans to reverse positions and support mandatory background checks for purchases at gun shows. The Senate also passed an import ban on large-capacity ammunition clips and restrictions on assault weapon purchases by juveniles.

Here at the grass roots in Colorado, gun owners face even stronger pressure, given the harsh reality that the nation’s worst school shooting in history happened in a pro-gun stronghold. At the very moment gun opponents are emboldened, pro-gun lawmakers are in retreat.

The Columbine shooting immediately derailed three pro-gun bills that were steaming toward enactment. The far-reaching measures would let people carry concealed weapons, preempt cities from passing laws more restrictive than the weak state gun laws and bar local government suits against gun makers.

Ten days ago, Republican Gov. Bill Owens and two key GOP legislative leaders who were carrying pro-gun bills said they are through with the issue.

Assistant Senate Majority Leader Ken Chlouber, a Western Slope Republican from Leadville and a longtime gun advocate, said in the Rocky Mountain News, “I’ve told everybody from the NRA to the PTA that Sen. Chlouber is through discussing guns for a long, long time.”

The pro-gun collapse spoiled an opportune moment that had been 25 years in the making. It was the first time in that stretch that pro-gun Republicans had controlled both the Legislature and the governor’s office.

Now, gun opponents believe the moment is theirs. The tabled gun measures had been so sweeping--one proposal would have allowed concealed guns in schools--they generated the most controversy in the history of Colorado’s gun control debate, state Sen. Pat Pascoe said. And that was before Columbine.

Gun owners and dealers are decidedly nervous about reaction from the Columbine shootings. Marjorie Aab, a gun show promoter, speculates that may partially explain a big attendance drop at her annual Weld County Gun Show on Saturday in Greeley, a small town amid the vast farm fields about 60 miles north of Denver.

Throughout the morning, dealers and customers groused about gun control and bemoaned how the public’s outrage over the shootings is targeting guns. Some were clearly worried that the Senate Republicans’ about-face on the gun-show legislation demonstrated the intensity of the public’s animosity toward guns.

“They are more afraid of not being elected than protecting the 2nd Amendment,” said one dealer who refused to be identified.

Gun shows are the grass-roots social event of the gun culture. There, people speak of guns and the 2nd Amendment with religious fervor. At the Weld County show, men in western denim and cowboy boots meandered among tables stacked with deadly firepower.

They ogled Intrate TEC-9 semiautomatic pistols and a rack of Hi Point 9-millimeter carbines that are virtually identical to the ones used in the Columbine killings.

They leafed through specialized manuals such as Guerrilla Warfare, Special Forces and Survival and got a big chuckle at a bumper sticker display with such witticisms as “Ted Kennedy’s Car Has Killed More People Than My Gun Has” and “1000 Killed,” accompanied by a drawing of a cat in the cross hairs of a rifle scope.

William Reibsame, editor of the Atlas of the New West and associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said guns are the quintessential symbol of the cultural divide that pits New West urbanites against ranchers, farmers and hunters, who feel increasingly pushed aside by the newcomers.

More than three-quarters of Colorado’s yearly growth rate is in the urban areas, where the communications, engineering and business service industries have been exploding as the traditional oil industry flagged. The fastest-growing region is the Western Slope, where skiers in Vail, Aspen and other resorts, retirees and second-home buyers have created a tourism and construction boom that has supplanted the mining and logging industries.

In the debate over guns, polls reveal a wide disparity between Denver and the rest of Colorado. A Denver Post poll in April (before Columbine) showed six of every 10 residents opposed letting people carry concealed weapons, while a statewide Rocky Mountain News poll a month earlier showed seven of every 10 supported the measure.

Many urbanites love howling coyotes but are wary of guns, because they are instruments of so much murder and mayhem. Ranchers and farmers love guns but are wary of coyotes, because they prey on livestock and poultry.

“There is an urban outrage at some of the practices at controlling predators,” Reibsame said. “There is a popular notion that we should let the wolves live, which happens to contrast with a century-plus of attitudes that we need to eradicate them.” Ranchers also have to control abundant herds of elk and deer that compete for the same forage cattle need. Many ranchers, including Meyring, the Walden rancher, lease rights to outfitters who organize hunting trips on their land.

To them and to farmers, guns are as essential as horses and ropes or pitchforks and plows. On the other hand, gun opponents’ responses sometimes have a let-them-eat cake ring.

If ranchers are worried about the elk and deer hogging the forage, let the state game and wildlife folks deal with it, said the Rev. Jerry Rohr, pastor of the Light of the World Catholic Church in Littleton. If hunters need a gun, let them find something else to entertain themselves, he said.

Indeed, hunters are on the decline across the West. “Fathers who hunt are not teaching their kids to hunt,” Reibsame said.

Even with the number of Colorado hunters inflated by out-of-state visitors taking advantage of the state’s unlimited hunting license policy, the percentage of the population that hunts has declined from 9.2% in 1995 to 9% in 1998. An even bigger decline is expected this year when the Division of Wildlife plans to sharply limit buck deer hunting to boost a dwindling population.

That spells trouble for gun forces, because hunters carry a certain middle-class respectability and are a key constituency.

Mike Gutirrez, product development director for an alternative fuels company, is seriously worried about that future after Columbine. He’s an NRA admirer, a hunter, an avid competition skeet shooter and a two-term past president of the Colorado Skeet Shooters Assn. Both sports are integral parts of his relationship with his son.

Until Columbine, he never felt gun control constituted a real threat to his hobbies and the role they play in his family. Now he does. Standing in the driveway of his Littleton home about to depart for his son’s Little League game, Gutirrez said, “I feel very nervous about everything that’s going on, and how it could affect me and my sport.”

Despite the gulf that separates gun advocates from gun opponents, Gutirrez says the two sides need to compromise. He suggested requiring a hunter to have a safety certificate, be a member of a hunting club and to pass a safety course, or passing other laws to make people handle guns responsibly.

“That sure would have kept that young lady from giving those boys those guns,” he said of the Columbine shooters. “And I don’t see how that would infringe on my rights.”

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