Official urges residents to use free gunlocks

Police departments are giving away the locks.
& lt;a href=mailto:gwin@vindy.com & gt;By HAROLD GWIN & lt;/a & gt;
VINDICATOR SHARON BUREAU
SHARON, Pa. -- Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll thinks that gunlocks save lives and she's taking that message across the Commonwealth.
She stopped in Sharon City Hall on Thursday, where she was joined by the three Mercer County commissioners, the mayors of Sharon, Farrell, Greenville and Mercer and police officers from Sharon, Hermitage, Southwest Regional and Linesville departments to promote Project ChildSafe.
The program uses U.S. Department of Justice funds to buy and distribute gunlocks for free.
It's a national effort sponsored by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, whose national program coordinator, Steve Alger, said 19 million gunlocks are to be distributed across the country, including 875,000 in Pennsylvania.
The locks are a length of plastic-coated cable with a lock that secures both ends of the cable. One end of the cable is inserted through the gun's working mechanism and then into the lock, rendering the weapon unable to be fired.
The locks work on all types of guns, Knoll said.
"With this," Knoll said as she held up one of the locks, "We're going to save a person's life."
Citing cases
She cited two recent cases, one involving a shooting death, that could have been prevented had a gunlock been in place.
One involved an 8-year-old boy who took a handgun to school in the Woodland Hills School District because he had been threatened by bullies.
Fortunately, school officials learned of the presence of the weapon and confiscated it before anything happened, she said.
The other case involved a young boy in Pittsburgh who took a parent's handgun from its hiding place and was shooting out the window. A bullet from that gun struck and killed a mailman on his route, Knoll said.
If those guns had been secured with a gunlock, neither case would have happened, she said.
Jim Houston, secretary of the Mercer County Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, said his group wholeheartedly supports the program.
The locks are available at any police department, and no paperwork is required to get one. Mercer County police departments have been handing out the locks for the past several weeks.