Politics/Democrats Misfire on Guns
Norquist, Grover G.
Democrats Misfire on Guns by Grover G. Norquist n a two-week span at the end of last / year, President Clinton won passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), defeated the...
...Attorney General Janet Reno is now calling for federal gun registration and licensing ("Just like cars...
...Forty-six percent of Americans believe the Brady Bill will "not reduce gun-related crimes significantly," against only 33 percent who believe it will...
...CI 80 The American Spectator February 1994...
...In 1982, a California gun-control measure on the ballot brought a flood of gun-owners to the polls and helped Republican underdog George Deukmejian defeat Democrat Tom Bradley for governor...
...Handgun Control Inc., has 300,000 members...
...Gun-control advocates point to the primary victories of Democrats Tom Andrews of Maine in 1990 and Mike Synar of Oklahoma in 1992 as proof of the power of their issue...
...An April 1993 Harris poll showed 89 percent of Americans supporting passage of the Brady Bill "to require a waiting period for the purchase of handguns so that the authorities can check who is buying a handgun...
...Clinton announced his opposition to a balanced budget amendment proposed by Senator Paul Simon (D-Ill...
...Coverdell's 17,000-vote margin is more than accounted for by the National Rifle Association's decision to mail its 90,000 Georgia members three times in support of Coverdell and then to phone each member to get them to the polls...
...More importantly, asked whether new gun control measures or "stricter penalties for criminals and reduced parole" would best fight crime, 75 percent of Americans favor tougher sentences and only 20 percent favor more gun control...
...The Terry campaign was run by Tom King, a consultant still smarting from the narrow escape of his previous client, Oklahoma Democrat Mike Synar, who was also opposed by gun owners...
...played a key support role in 1980, 1984, and 1988—sat out the presidential election...
...In 1992, gun opponent Beryl Anthony, a member of the House Democratic leadership, was defeated in a Democratic primary by gun-owner activism...
...Florio's Republican opponent Christine 78 The American Spectator February 1994 Todd Whitman lost the NRA's endorsement by backing the Brady Bill and the Florio assault-weapon ban, but the NRA made more than 300,000 get-out-the-vote phone calls to likely Whitman voters, and on election day Whitman won by only 27,000 votes...
...gun owners often do...
...Since Clinton's election in November 1992, the gun issue has cost the Democrats one Senate seat and two governorships: • In a Georgia runoff three weeks after Clinton's win, the gun issue elected Paul Coverdell over incumbent senator Wyche Fowler...
...History should have warned Clinton, or at least congressional leaders, of the dangers of reading raw poll numbers in The American Spectator February 1994 79 "support" of gun control...
...With more than 3.3 million dues-paying members-900,000 of them added in the last 12 months—the NRA dwarfs other political organizations...
...This is a larger political army than the combined staff of the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, all in one state...
...But they'll have to reckon with the president's willingness to get more gun control today at the expense of fewer Democrats in the House and Senate tomorrow...
...In the New Jersey governor's race, incumbent Jim Florio attempted to make the NRA the issue for opposing his vaunted ban on so-called assault weapons...
...Savvy Democratic politicians understand the implications, particularly those who, like Speaker Tom Foley of Washington and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, come from rural and gun-owning states...
...White House strategists decided to postpone welfare reform (the planned feint to the right in time for the 1994 congressional elections) to concentrate on health care...
...The U.S...
...In October1988, one month before George Bush crushed Michael Dukakis, Gallup released a poll showing 91 percent of Americans supported a federal waiting period for gun purchases...
...the National Federation of Independent Businesses has 600,000 members...
...George Allen came out in favor of stricter sentencing and opposed parole for violent offenders, and won by a seventeen-point margin...
...B ut reading the polls literally is a mistake...
...Reagan's turnaround primary victories in North Carolina and West Virginia in 1976 were aided by strong NRA mailings criticizing Jerry Ford's support for handgun bans...
...Two Democratic senators paid for their "yes" votes on the Gun Control Act of 1968—Joe Clark in Pennsylvania in 1968, and Joseph Tydings in Maryland in 1970...
...No more," he says...
...Harris found 82 percent of Americans supporting a proposal that all handguns be registered by the federal government...
...It's a useful rule: the crime issue always trumps the gun issue...
...One loss for gun owners occurred in Maryland, where a referendum to repeal a commission that would ban certain weapons was defeated in 1988 through electoral skulduggery...
...it was defeated, 69-31...
...The same year, Massachusetts gun control advocates put Measure 5 on the ballot to ban many handguns...
...First, these numbers are not new...
...Asked a stand-alone question on guns, the public has always overwhelmingly supported gun control...
...As a candidate, Clinton had robbed the Republicans of the issue by soft-pedaling his support for the Brady Bill and rejecting suggestions that he supported Michael Dukakis's stated goal of disarming the civilian population...
...For his part, George Bush lost the gun issue in 1989, when he pushed through an executive order banning the importation of some "assault rifles...
...If these appointees spent only four hours a week on their own time doing political work, that would create the equivalent of 400 full-time political activists for the 1994 and 1996 elections...
...The White House optimism degenerated into giddiness...
...Chamber of Commerce has 215,000 members...
...that would require a 60 percent vote of both houses to borrow money and a simple majority to raise taxes...
...Frank Luntz, pollster for the Perot and Giuliani campaigns, showed that 88 percent of Americans believe a citizen has the right to own a gun, 78 percent oppose a gun ban, and 83 percent believe citizens have a right to self-defense...
...But sleeping or not, the NRA is a giant...
...the Republican National Committee roughly 300,000...
...The ideological mask of "New Democrat" was being cast aside, not only by staffers and cabinet members, but by the president himself...
...The past year's elections provide a reality check on gun control...
...Joycelyn Elders called for the legalization of drugs...
...The get-out-the vote offices of the repeal campaign were raided by the police and the get-out-the-vote phone banks were stopped on election eve in a purported effort to stop violations of a ban on "walking around money...
...Meanwhile, state constitutional amendments have strengthened the rights of gun owners in North Dakota, Maine, West Virginia, Utah, and Nebraska...
...Democrats Misfire on Guns by Grover G. Norquist n a two-week span at the end of last / year, President Clinton won passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), defeated the bipartisan Penny-Kasich legislation that would have made $90 billion in real spending reductions over a five-year period, and won passage of the "Brady Bill," which requires a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases...
...Second, such data is almost always misleading because the questions are asked in a vacuum...
...They may try to slow the liberal clamor for gun registration and confiscation...
...Terry gun control ads actually ran on Rush Limbaugh's radio show...
...Nowhere was Democratic hubris more evident than on gun control...
...NRA ads ran ten times a day on sixty-eight radio stations...
...The New Jersey governor is the most powerful governorship in the nation, with roughly 4,000 political appointments...
...Clinton's staff began bragging that they could win "anything" if they focused on it for a two-week period...
...The gubernatorial victories of John Dalton in Virginia in 1977 and Bob Martinez in Florida in 1986 are credited by the candidates themselves to the gun issue...
...In Virginia, attorney general Mary Sue Terry was twenty-nine points ahead in the gubernatorial race when her campaign began to run pro-gun control ads across the state...
...Clinton now believes that gun control is a political winner, and recent polls seem to support him...
...It was an expensive loss for Clinton and the Democrats...
...The hitch is that people who "support gun control" in polls seldom vote on the issue...
...In 1992, the National Rifle Association—which had Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...But examples of incumbents defeated by challengers on the wings of anti-gun resources or issues are rare...
...N eal Knox, a director of the National Rifle Association, argues that eight years of Ronald Reagan, an NRA member, and four years of Bush have lulled some gun owners into a false sense of security...
...Now people are waking up to the danger...
Vol. 27 • February 1994 • No. 2
