"George Loper, who publishes perhaps the premier Democratic web site in Virginia, is looking for a few good sportsmen.

Actually, any sports man or woman will do if they support Mark R. Warner, the Democrats' nominee for governor.

And they can be players of "almost any kind of sport," Loper said Monday after bagging pictures of Charlottesville Mayor Blake Caravati as the founder of "Bogey Golfers for Warner."

The Charlottesville political webroaster is creating an online menagerie of local characters who loosely consider themselves sportsmen for Warner to spoof a real group that bears arms.

Loper's group bares arms in sports garb and doesn't think too much of firearms as a political issue in the state.

"I think the whole 'Sportsmen for Mark Warner' is an interesting gambit because I don't know anyone who is coming out against sportsmen," said Loper, who supports Warner for governor, Del. Jerrauld C. Jones of Norfolk for lieutenant governor and Roanoke state Sen. John S. Edwards for attorney general.

"I don't think hunting is part of the whole gun control movement," Loper said. He said Warner is smart to go after sportsmen and not to make a big deal out of guns.

"I think Mark Warner was right when he just stayed out of it and said, 'I'm for sportsmen and sportsmen are for me,'" Loper said.

Loper and Caravati, who also supports Warner, Jones and Edwards, criticized Del. A. Donald McEachin, one of three Democrats vying with Edwards for the attorney general nomination in today's primary, for raising guns as a primary issue.

"I don't think it's on target," Caravati said of McEachin's blasts at Edwards and fellow candidate Del. Whittington W. "Whitt" Clement for votes that were not 100 percent zero tolerance for no guns in or around schools. The more rural legislators opposed a legislative effort to make sure that even the guns of hunters could not come on school parking lots in locked vehicles.

"It shows perhaps his lack of sensitivity to some of the rural areas of the state," Caravati said of McEachin.

McEachin said recently he is raising gun safety issues and not threatening the sport of sportsmen.

"Zero tolerance in Wythe County is a lot different from zero tolerance in Hampton Roads," Caravati said.

Caravati said he didn't bring his guns to pose as a sportsman for Warner because he is at least as comfortable with golf clubs.

"They are just as dangerous, really, in my hands," the mayor said.

Loper said Virginia Germino, Russell Perry and Ginger Greene, a trio of local Democrats, plan to pose for the Warner web page with the sports paraphernalia of their choice.

"I am hoping to get some hunters over here" to pose for the web page for Warner with the long guns of their choice," Loper said. He said just about anything may qualify as a sport for the purposes of the Warner-backer web page.

His political web site can be found at www.loper.org/~george" (Bob Gibson, June 12, ,2001).