Shooting Down Gun Control
STUART, PETER C.
A FAILURE OF NERVE Shooting Down Gun Control by peter c stuart Washington Anyone standing vigil these past 10 years on the grassy knoll of Arlington National Cemetery where Robert F. Kennedy lies...
...In addition, what had once been scorned by House Crime Subcommittee Chairman John Conyers Jr...
...Supreme Court (in a 1939 case, U.S...
...The political impotence of gun-control partisans was graphically demonstrated in the recent congressional skirmish over a set of modest regulations proposed by the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms...
...Even such thoughtful Western liberals as Senator Frank Church (D.-Idaho) Representative Morris K. Udall (D.Ariz...
...I think we are past time having a handgun control...
...Finding itself in the ironic position of being out-NRAed, the Association is retaliating by taking pot-shots at its new competitors through its publications...
...Justice Department and White House officials worked closely with gun-control leaders from the start, consulting their opposition counterparts almost as an afterthought, and the resulting proposal reflected this: It would outlaw the production and sale of new Saturday Night Specials as well as the transfer of existing ones...
...Top Presidential assistant Hamilton Jordan was still blunter in a comment to a writer for New Times Magazine: "Carter will really go on gun control and really be tough...
...The legislation that was passed made a stab at policing two of the shadier corners of the gun market—mail-order weapons and cheap, concealable "Saturday Night Specials" manufactured abroad...
...impose a three-week waiting period in handgun purchases for police checks of the buyers...
...If not understandable, this masochistic failure is at least explainable...
...A FAILURE OF NERVE Shooting Down Gun Control by peter c stuart Washington Anyone standing vigil these past 10 years on the grassy knoll of Arlington National Cemetery where Robert F. Kennedy lies buried would have gazed across the Potomac upon a capital presiding over dizzying national change...
...The high-powered gun lobby, meanwhile, has been engaged in an unusual round of sniping within its own ranks...
...One, the National Council to Control Handguns, was launched by a savvy DuPont executive whose son had been a victim of the random shooting by the "Zebra killers" in California...
...One hundred and seven years of shooting down attempts at handgun control with a lethal combination of mailbags of angry letters and veiled political threats had given the National Rifle Association (NRA) the image of a smooth-running, well-disciplined fighting machine...
...Judge Bell allowed as how "I have long thought we ought to have handgun control as distinguished from sportsmen's weapons...
...The group with the closest ties to the White House, the National Gun Control Center, was absorbed by another organization...
...Then, almost inexplicably, the cocksure attitude that had marked the beginning of the Administration's pursuit of gun control suddenly turned into timidity...
...the two terms have been practically synonymous...
...The NRA has boasted, with some justification, that it can besiege a President or Congress with half a million letters on 72 hours' notice...
...And the U.S...
...v. Miller) has interpreted the Second Amendment as applying to the legality of states operating National Guard units...
...But the swift rise of several upstart gun-owner groups associated with the ultra-conservative political movement known as the "New Right" has relegated the NRA to the "Old Right...
...Dissidents, apparently angered by plans to move the organization's headquarters from downtown Washington to pristine Colorado Springs, Colorado, ousted the leadership for, of all things, not being militant enough...
...The Citizens Committee, for its part, brashly bills itself as the "real gun lobby...
...Americans were deluded into believing that they finally had an effective antidote to the madness...
...oppose handgun controls, probably because polls show that support for them is weakest in the West...
...He would have watched the United States end 15 years of war in Southeast Asia and 23 years of isolation from China...
...give birth to the environmental and women's rights movements...
...The regulations would merely have required serial numbers to be stamped on newly manufactured handguns and tighter reporting of gun transactions, to help trace the lost and stolen weapons so often used in crime...
...The third, the National Gun Control Center, was the brainchild of Morris Dees, candidate Carter's national finance director, and Joseph J. Levin Jr., who later became a transition-team liaison at the Justice Department...
...At the same time, the gun-control lobby started losing some of its momentum...
...It dealt with nothing more, but soaked up the public outrage unleashed by the murders of the Senator and, just two months earlier, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr...
...A crime involving a gun occurs somewhere in the United States every two minutes, a handgun death every hour...
...It is a phony issue, since the U.S...
...For as long as anyone can remember, the "gun lobby" has meant the NRA...
...Excellent," exulted gun-controllers...
...Yet the country that has wrought these fundamental accomplishments has been stymied by a relatively uncomplicated problem of particularly painful interest on this Arlington cemetery slope: the private handgun...
...It is barely publicized, but law-enforcement groups are among the oldest supporters of gun control laws...
...Organized gun owners claim a constitutional right "to keep and bear arms," a phrase from the Second Amendment that has been incorporated into the name of the new organization outstripping the NRA's lobbying efforts...
...Conference of Mayors was beset by an internal attempt to rescind its handgun-control policy and program...
...and Representative Thomas S. Foley (D.-Wash...
...For since the Senator, former U.S...
...The period corresponding roughly to the campaign had seen no fewer than three new national gun-control groups spring up, each with impressive leadership and backing...
...We do not seem to be making as much progress in that area as we should...
...Attorney General and brother of the assassinated President John F. Kennedy was gunned down on June4,1968 by a snub-nosed .22 caliber Iver Johnson Cadet pistol, 120,000 other Americans have been killed by handguns—twice the nation's death toll during half again as many years of organized shooting in Indochina...
...Thus there was reason to think things would be different by the 10th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's slaying...
...The proposed legislation, ready to go to Capitol Hill since late last year, has never left the White House—and it probably won't in 1978 because of fears of saddling Democrats with a controversial issue in the upcoming Congressional elections...
...Yet in our rights-conscious nation—Americans have been proclaiming their rights from the colonial era's "inalienable Rights" to today's civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights—the arms "right" prevails...
...What really underlies the absence of an effective national handgun control law for yet another year, however, is a failing that goes beyond the White House's loss of courage or the gun-control movement's internal setbacks: Neither the Carter Administration nor the professional gun-controllers have been able to mobilize the consistent public opinion majority in favor of handgun curbs—a steady 65-75 per cent margin for gun registration according to a variety of polls over the past decade—into practical political support for legislation...
...The competition has been extravagant, and occasionally nasty...
...1 doubt that we'll do anything this year," the domestic policy staffer handling the matter, Annie Gutierrez, conceded to me as the legislative session entered its summer homestretch...
...A position paper cranked out during Carter's campaign put him on record as favoring "registration of handguns, a ban on the sale of cheap handguns, reasonable licensing provisions including a waiting period, and prohibition of ownership by anyone convicted of a crime involving a gun and by those not mentally competent...
...But after a withering gun-lobby counterattack, including a fusillade of 300,000 letters from the NRA, the regulations mustered just 80 defenders in the 435-member House of Representatives...
...it was quickly to become the most visible anti-gun outfit...
...The church-based National Coalition to Ban Handguns lost the valuable Federal tax exemption entitling it, as an "educational" group, to tax-deductible contributions...
...The only thing that may get us another gun-control law," says a pro-control lobbyist, despairingly, "is another assassination...
...The President's Georgian friend and choice for attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, was drawn out on the subject at his confirmation hearings by Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass...
...hound a President for the first time into resignation, then defeat his replacement at the polls...
...Whatever the case, with the anti-gun forces seemingly flourishing and the pro-gun lobby busy bickering, the Carter Administration last autumn drafted a handgun bill for Congress...
...The man the voters ultimately elected, though, was the lone contender in an originally large field to espouse curbs gun-control advocates regarded as meaningful...
...Even after escaping two close-range assassination attempts with handguns just 17 days apart in 1975, Gerald R. Ford, displaying greater personal than political courage, was out on the hustings a year later insisting that "the law-abiding citizens of this country should not be deprived of the right to have firearms in their possession...
...The Republican Presidents who occupied the White House for the next eight years showed no interest in genuine gun control...
...Carter's stance made him the most outspokenly pro-gun-control Chief Executive since Lyndon B. Johnson, and statements by his closest associates suggested that the President meant every word of what he said...
...Although a weak and flawed gun-control bill cleared the House of Representatives on the day Robert Kennedy died, and later became law...
...Repressive," retorted gun owners, who this time appeared headed for defeat or at the very least a tough battle...
...Cashing in on the computerized mailing lists of conservative donors compiled by Richard A. Viguerie, former fundraiser for Alabama's Governor George C. Wallace, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms reported spending three times more money to lobby Congress in the first quarter of 1978 than did the NRA ($150,050 to $44,710...
...A second rival, the Gun Owners of America, nearly matched the NRA with $39,872...
...In the vast stillness left by this silent majority, the almost fanatical fury of those Americans who own handguns (at most, one in five) rings loudly indeed...
...and impose a new standard of political ethics...
...Only unlikely candidate Fred R. Harris, the former Democratic Senator from Oklahoma, had taken anywhere near as hard a line...
...Congress has subsequently rejected handgun registration, either in committee rooms or the chamber of one house or the other, no fewer than 16 times...
...demythologize the FBI and CIA...
...Outsiders—as well as many of its own 1 million members—were therefore startled when the presumably monolithic NRA last year was shaken by a coup...
...Another, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, embraced 28 religious, educational, labor, and public-service groups...
...D.Mich...
...Peter C. Stuart reports from Washington for the Christian Science Monitor...
...The NRA has also had to cope with an external challenge from some of its allies...
...Because the crime aspect is poorly perceived, gun control is debated as a "rights" issue...
...as "the invisible lobby" started to show surprising strength...
...and hike dealer license fees from the present $10 to $500 to weed out marginal operators...
...Gun-control advocates also have been unable to sell their cause as the crime-fighting device which, stripped of its emotionalism, it basically is...
...That vote—a nadir for the gun-control movement in a year of once-soaring ambitions—occurred on the day after the 10th anniversary of Robert Kennedy's handgun assassination...
Vol. 61 • September 1978 • No. 18
