[Mb-civic] inspiration

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

I found this story inspiring--thought y'all might
too...
--mha atma


Lawyer Uses Skills to Zero In on Gun Lobby
A soft-spoken La Habra Heights attorney goes to court
to win limits on the sale of firearms.
By Sandy Banks LA Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-profile7nov07,1,1439574.story?coll=la-headlines-california
PROFILE | SAYRE WEAVER
November 7, 2005

It's hard to imagine Sayre Weaver as the California
gun lobby's Public Enemy No. 1. Slight and
soft-spoken, the Yale-educated attorney doesn't march
or testify or legislate. 

She litigates. Relentlessly. With a laser-sharp focus
that has delivered a series of body blows to an
industry long accustomed to beating back efforts at
gun control. 

For 10 years, Weaver has been working to staunch the
flow of "Saturday night specials" — cheap
handguns that cost less than a good pair of sneakers
and are the weapon of choice in the criminal milieu. 

In 1996, she helped West Hollywood officials draft and
defend California's first local ordinance aimed at
curtailing handgun sales. That success, despite a
well-funded challenge by the gun industry, emboldened
dozens more cities to tighten limits on weapons sales,
making California a national leader in restricting
handgun access.

"These are guns that have no legitimate sporting
purpose," says Weaver, who lives in La Habra Heights
and practices in Brea. "The gun lobby had bamboozled
everybody" into believing that restrictions violated
constitutional protections. 

"But there are all sorts of ways to regulate firearms
dealers, in the same sort of way you regulate liquor
stores: You have to operate out of a business
district, you have to have a local license, you have
to provide security measures, you can't have minors in
your store without an adult…. 

"It's not an issue of putting them out of business but
raising their level of responsibility. My task was
convincing local governments that there are aspects of
their operation that are well-suited to regulation." 

For her efforts, Weaver, legal director of the
Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, was among three
activists honored in San Francisco last month by the
California Wellness Foundation with its 2005 Peace
Prize for violence prevention. 

"Some communities had more gun dealers than
McDonald's" when Weaver's campaign began, said
foundation consultant Laurie Kappe. "When she
prevailed in West Hollywood, that opened up a
willingness among others to take on the [National
Rifle Assn.] and the gun industry. Sayre did such
terrific legal arguments, it showed others this was a
fight worth fighting."

Weaver seems an unlikely leader on such an emotional
issue.

"Most gun control advocates come from a place of
passion that's right on the surface," Kappe said.
"Sayre's thoughtful, precise, very measured in the way
she talks. She brings a surgeon-like precision to
something that often gets clouded by emotion."

Unlike many gun control activists, there is no
personal tragedy propelling Weaver. She grew up around
guns. Her father was a sportsman who taught Weaver and
her brothers and sisters to shoot. "There were always
rifles around the house," she said. 

But her parents also taught her to take nothing at
face value, to question assumptions and trust her
instincts when something feels wrong. And she felt
something was dreadfully wrong early in her legal
career in the late 1980s when she worked in Compton as
a deputy district attorney. 

Almost every case she prosecuted involved guns in some
way — drug trafficking, domestic violence, parole
violations. "That made me aware of how gun violence
can decimate a whole community," she said.

In 1990 she went to work as a specialist in
constitutional litigation for Richards, Watson and
Gershon, a Los Angeles law firm that represents cities
and public agencies. There, she was enlisted by West
Hollywood officials to defend the city's gun sales
restriction. Her research led her to realize "how
little I knew about gun regulation in this country;
how little most people knew," she said. "I thought
this was an area where I could make a difference."

Since then, she has become one of California's
foremost legal authorities on firearms legislation,
winning two landmark cases — in West Hollywood
and Alameda County — that established the right
of local governments to restrict handgun possession
and access. 

Her legal efforts dovetailed with other forces to
combat the dominance of the gun industry lobby, which
had long held the state Legislature in a stranglehold
with its financial and political clout. 

"There were community efforts, like the Million Mom
March. And there was polling data, showing that the
public was for gun control," recalled Kappe. "The
combination of community activism, legal strategies
and public support made cities more willing to pass
their own ordinances. And once there was critical mass
of cities and counties, the Legislature saw it was
politically feasible and took over."

Kappe likens it to the no-smoking movement: "Community
by community, you restrict access without banning it.
And finally, the Legislature takes notice." 

Weaver calls it an example of "the trickle-up theory"
— a grass-roots campaign powered to success by a
weary populace fed up with gun violence. 

She has no patience for arguments by gun enthusiasts
that sales restrictions threaten their rights.

"This is not a benign product. A gun is a tool and it
ought to be subject to consumer safety regulations,"
she said. "The great freedom associated with their
manufacture and sale benefit a very few at the expense
of a great many." 

Weaver's work has brought "odd sorts of threats" her
way. "But the people who react vehemently against me
are those true believers who think any kind of gun
regulation means you're trying to take our freedom,"
she said. "Those are crazy people I can't do anything
about."

These days, Weaver spends most of her time holed up in
a spartan office with her computer, law books and a
wall map that traces the route — from manufacture
to murder — of a 9-millimeter Glock, the weapon
used by white supremacist Buford Furrow to spray a San
Fernando Valley Jewish community center with bullets
and shoot a letter carrier to death in 1999.

Weaver is suing the gun's manufacturer and
distributors on behalf of the mother of the mailman
and the families of three children wounded in the
rampage.

Furrow, an ex-convict on parole at the time of the
shooting, is now serving five life terms in prison.
The gun he used was marketed by Glock as a "pocket
rocket," easily concealable and aimed at the illicit
market, the suit alleges.

Weaver's job has been made more difficult by last
month's Congressional approval of a bill shielding gun
manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits by crime
victims. But Weaver plans to challenge the
constitutionality of the measure and its application
to her case.

"We'll be fighting it on every front," she said.
"We're not going away. We're not giving up." 

Her ability to weather setbacks and willingness to
work in the trenches inspires her admirers. 

"She could be a six-figure-plus attorney someplace,
with her background," Kappe said. "Her devotion to
this cause has turned the tide for us. It really helps
to have a lawyer who's willing to stand up to the gun
lobby." 

But Weaver says "making six figures was never anything
of great interest to me." She lives simply but
comfortably with her husband, William P. Phelps, a
professor of constitutional law at Whittier Law
School. Her free time is spent caring for their two
dogs and supporting animal rescue groups. 

The joy of being a lawyer, she said, is "the great
opportunity you have to follow your ideals, to apply
your knowledge to something you care about and help
make the world a better place."

At a glance 

•  Sayre Weaver was named after her father,
Howard Sayre Weaver, a 1948 graduate of Yale who was
initiated into the Skull and Bones society alongside
George Herbert Walker Bush, former president and
father of the current commander in chief.

•  Weaver was born in Bangkok, Thailand, where
her father served with the U.S. Foreign Service. She
spent her early childhood in Munich, Germany. The
family returned to the United States and settled in
Connecticut when she was in the second grade.

•  She graduated from Yale in 1975 and earned her
law degree from the university in 1984. She was part
of the university's first women's crew team in 1972.

•  Her two dogs are both mixed-breed "part-Chow
mutts" she rescued from the streets. 

•  Weaver will donate the $25,000 award that
comes with her California Wellness Foundation Peace
Prize to two nonprofit groups: $20,000 to the
Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (of which she is
legal director) and $5,000 to Girls Leap, a mentoring
group founded by her sister, a Wellesley College
professor, to train college students to help at-risk
teenage girls avoid violence and abuse. 

•  She and her husband have a "hideaway cabin in
the Midwest." It's their favorite vacation spot
because "we only like to go where we can take our
dogs." 

Source: Times staff reports






		
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