City doles out free locks for gun owners

Amid the furor over gun control, calls for gun safety and President Clinton's duel with the National Rifle Association, Las Vegas has been quietly providing gun locks to all residents who want them.

"We've been practically drained," said Metro Police Sgt. Byron Stringer.

Since the end of September, the Police Department has issued nearly 5,000 trigger locks from its eight substations in Las Vegas and outlying areas.

So many people have asked for the locks that the department only has a few hundred left.

The locks, which resemble bicycle cable locks, are pulled through gun barrels to prevent the weapon from firing. When the lock is in place, the gun cannot be loaded or fired. They differ from trigger locks, which keep the trigger from being pulled on guns that can remain loaded.

The locks work on any type of gun.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation of Newtown, Conn., began "Project Home Safe" last year in Las Vegas and four other cities - Oakland, Calif., Pittsburgh, Orlando, Fla., and Augusta, Ga.

Working with law enforcement agencies, the foundation provides police stations with the locks and safety information packets to distribute to gun owners.

Officer Steve Meriwether, spokesman for Metro, said joining the program was an easy choice.

"If we save one life, obviously it's done a huge improvement," he said. "We hope that they save many lives. It's really a no-brainer to accept and hand these things out."

Twenty-five other cities have since joined the program, which has distributed 50,000 locks nationwide, said Doug Painter, executive director of the foundation, a trade group that represents about 1,800 gun, munitions and accessory manufacturers.

About 90 more cities will initiate the program by summer. It's funded entirely by the foundation, which will spend $1.6 million on the program through the first half of this year.

Painter hopes 1 million locks will be distributed in the next few years.

Since most new guns come with their own locks, the program targets people who have older guns and may not be as familiar with them as they should.

"This really emphasizes reaching out to suburban and urban residents in this country who often purchase a firearm for sale for protection and these individuals may not have as strong a safety background as hunting and sports enthusiasts," Painter said.

Congress has been wrestling with gun control legislation for more than a year, spurred in part by deadly shootings at schools. Lawmakers failed to reach a compromise last year on a bill that would have required guns to be sold with trigger locks and mandated background checks for people purchasing weapons at gun shows.

President Clinton recently urged lawmakers to convene a conference committee to work out differences.

Democratic lawmakers this week offered legislation they say would bolster enforcement of gun laws by hiring new federal agents and prosecutors and creating a national database of "ballistic fingerprints."

The package of bills dubbed ENFORCE is based partly on proposals President Clinton advanced in his State of the Union address in January. It also was presented as an answer to the National Rifle Association's frequent argument that if enforcement of existing gun laws improved, new laws would not be needed.

In Las Vegas, gun owners can go to any substation and request a lock after showing proof of gun ownership. Other cities distribute them at shopping malls. Pittsburgh included an information sheet on the program in the city water bills, Painter said.

"They just ask for the lock and we'll show them how to put it on," said Sharon Malueg, a law enforcement support technician at Metro's northwest substation.

Painter began developing the program in 1998, about a year before communities across the nation began filing lawsuits against the gun industry seeking to force manufacturers to provide effective safety devices with their guns.

"The key issue is really understanding that recently a lot of people in urban and suburban areas of the country had purchased firearms and this was an important customer group," Painter said. "We need to have specific programs for them."

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