Moms For Gun Control

By Amy Dickinson/Washington

If there were a recipe for creating a late-blooming activist--take a devoted parent, add a worst nightmare, mix with official intransigence--Carole Price, 37, would be the final product. The Maryland mother of three says she "hadn't organized anything more complicated than a car pool" until gun violence ripped into her family. On Aug. 20, 1998, Price's son John, 13, was accidentally killed by a 9-year-old neighbor boy wielding a 9-mm Luger pistol that he had found in his home. Since that day, Price and her husband John have put themselves on the front lines of the war over gun safety.

After her son was killed, Carole Price was stunned to learn that in Maryland it was only a misdemeanor to leave a loaded gun accessible to a child. She started attending gun-control rallies and was host at meetings in her home. After she showed up with a TV news crew at a local Republican fund raiser that was raffling off a 9-mm handgun, Price gained the attention of other local media and legislators.

Her testimony before the Maryland legislature helped push through a new law that requires trigger locks and a firearms-safety course for all new handgun owners. When the measure was signed into law last week, President Clinton traveled to Annapolis to praise the Prices' efforts.

Since November, Carol Price has been an organizer of the Million Mom March on behalf of "commonsense" gun control, scheduled for Mother's Day on the Mall in Washington. Donna Dees Thomases, the New Jersey publicist and mother of two who launched plans for the march, says that Price's public anguish speaks for thousands of families branded by gun violence--and furious at legislative inaction.

--By Amy Dickinson/Washington