Monica Yant Kinney | Matron's cause: Tough gun laws

At lunchtime today, Lynne Korman Honickman will start screaming.

On a stage at LOVE Park, the Philadelphia philanthropist who is married to one of the wealthiest men in town will tell anyone in earshot that she has put her money and mouth behind an issue that should have more people like her outraged: gun violence.

It's not just a black problem or an inner-city problem. When kids kill kids with weapons as easy to get as water ice, it's everyone's crisis.

"What child in the United States should have to cringe in fear walking to school, running around on a playground, just being?" the 71-year-old Honickman asked.

"We voted people out of office in this state because we didn't think they should take a raise. Why don't we care that kids are dying? All the children are our children."

Honickman was just warming up when we met yesterday at her 33d-floor office in the Rittenhouse. We've corresponded for months, and I confess it took me a couple e-mails to realize that the gutsy grandma urging me to keep writing about the bloodshed was a woman so well-known and wealthy she could afford to look the other way.

Instead, after six years of owning the domain name www.momsagainstguns.org, Honickman launched her own assault.

Through the Internet, she seeks 50,000 signatures from Pennsylvanians telling lawmakers LOUDLY that they want tougher gun laws in a state where everyone says that will never, ever happen.

As a younger woman, Honickman marched on Washington for civil rights. That sense of purpose endures in Moms Against Guns' motto:

"Bad things happen when good people do nothing."

When she told her husband - Harold Honickman, the Pepsi bottler who was long ranked as one of Forbes' 400 Richest Americans - he said, "You're not going to take on the NRA, are you?"

(She isn't. She swears.)

When she told her friends, they said, "You've got to be kidding."

(What's funny about polls in which 71 percent of Pennsylvania voters - and 61 percent of gun owners - support a statewide limit on handgun purchases to one per month?)

When Honickman met with elected officials, they kindly suggested even a woman of her means would die trying to get anything done on guns in Harrisburg.

(To her credit, Gov. Rendell, urban legislators and mayors from Lancaster to Scranton haven't had much luck, either.)

"I said, 'Thank you for sitting down with me. I'm still going to spin those wheels.' "

Jane Golden, who has known Honickman for years through her work with Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, isn't surprised: "She really believes one person can make a difference."

As a child in Frankford, the lone Jewish girl in her school, Honickman took some hits.

"Did I get beat up? Yeah," she recalled, not terribly fondly. "But it was fists then. No one killed you."

Today, silly scores get settled with guns in the city and suburbs. Teenage revenge fantasies feature firepower.

"Pennsylvania's high rate of gun violence is a national disgrace," Honickman wrote on her Web site. "And each time a child pulls the trigger of a gun and kills another child, two families are destroyed."

With 324 homicides this year in Philadelphia, that's 648 families in ruin.

With her money and mojo, Honickman hopes to unify the array of antiviolence groups, saying, "We're all talking about the same things."

She also hopes to show women from all walks of life they have power to wield their voices and votes.

"Those 10,000 men will do what they came to do," Honickman said, thrilled with the turnout of Sunday's rally. "Women should, too."

Listening to Honickman talk - and wondering how much of those millions she'll spend - I allow myself to think the way she thinks.

Why couldn't mass agitation across the state nudge a bunch of "commonsense" bills idling in legislative committees?

Honestly, how would a law requiring gun owners to register their weapons or report lost or stolen guns to police threaten anyone's Second Amendment rights?

"Who am I to try to put a dent in this senseless violence and misuse of guns?" Honickman wrote in her founder's message. "I am a mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, friend and citizen of Pennsylvania. I am a Philadelphian and I am a voter.

"But most important, I am angry and I am scared. I am outraged by the lack of change."

To learn more about Moms Against Guns, go to http://go.philly.com/momsEndText