Supervisor Daly is pictured above. He favors ceding exclusive gun rights to people he can't stand. Go figure.

This is another early design with more radical voters in mind. I took a photo of this photo of a Panther, which caught my eye at a party.

From the get-go, this was not going to be a cliched Left-versus-Right debate. Not while I'm around.

Another early design prior to the measure's official letter designation. It was a hit with some Peace & Freedom delegates I met at a kick-off event, last year, for the San Francisco Peoples' Organization (SFPO).

This one was the favorite of a retired police lieutenant. Prop H was unique in that cops and commies alike were opposed to the measure. (I'm neither, but I'm against any cherry-picking of our Bill of Rights, regardless of who's attempting it, be it Daly or Bush.)

This one went through several drafts. My younger hip-hop friends dug it. Conservatives in the gun camp didn't care for it. No surprises there.

I wasn't too surprised when the SFPO came out in favor of H. Their official exhortation to "stop the bloodshed" by voting for this law was just plain stupid, however. In Washington DC, where handguns had been outlawed for years, people were 2-4 times more likely to get murdered over there than here. So much for "gun control." (Update: DC's gun ban was overturned by the Supreme Court on June of 2008.)

John Candido, one of the SFCAP activists and affiliated with the Veteran Police Officers' Association, is one of the most honorable guys I know. Prop H was and is a personal affront to him. So we met over a home-cooked meal & brainstormed on this tri-fold mailer. I wanted it to read/sound differently from the usual campaign rhetoric, so I gave it the feel of a noir pot-boiler, since the protagonist is a cop from the old days.

The City Hall wonk pictured is Bill Barnes, a legislative aide and political operative who prodded Daly and others into sponsoring the measure and campaigned for its passage. Originally, it was a generic cartoon wonk, but since having met & heard Barnes, I thought I'd use his own smug mug, instead. Gotta hand it to him, he did a great job of exploiting local fears and ignorance, thereby bamboozling the City. Only problem is, he's not chased the NRA out of SF, as was his stated objective. Instead, they've increased their profile and membership in town and made more money off the issue. They ought to have put Barnes and Daly on the cover of American Rifleman as the '05 Men of the Year.

I'm told that on the eve of Augusto Pinochet's coup in Chile, then-President Salvador Allende, in a desperate 11th-hour radio address, exhorted the citizenry to fight the military takeover. Problem was, his government had passed a gun ban earlier during his time in office. Oops.

Another mailer that got away. There was some fear, reasonable to be sure, that we'd inflame the other side into spending millions in advertising to counter our message. I favored screwing our courage to the sticking place and forging ahead, letting the other side blow millions on bullshit if they wanted to, but there wasn't enough money available for much printing, anyway, rendering the point moot.

The hands belong to a professional make-up artist whose husband is a hunter. She modeled in exchange for a business card design. I did manage to recycle the mailer's imagery, when I was contracted to design a newpaper ad in support of a Right-to-Keep-and-Bear-Arms (RKBA) initiative, which proponents are looking to place on the state ballot. You can view it by clicking here.

On the eve of the election, SFCAP did manage to purchase some ad space in the SF Examiner. My initial draft is pictured above, using a pic I took of a rally against the measure at the Hall of Justice. What was finally approved for printing is pictured below.

To this day, I believe we would have done better, if we'd been bolder in our campaign and invested more in original advertising. But then again, one never really knows how these things will play out until they do.