Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 10, 1993 TAG: 9312140261
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Neither God nor James Madison has yet cast bolts of lightning upon members of Congress who had the temerity to question the true meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. A few may fall in the next election, to be sure, but the likely prospect is that, public opinion now being solidly in favor of some degree of control over who may buy guns, and what kind, most voters instead will reward those who did the right thing.
The revelation that Senate Republicans can be shamed, after all, suggests that, Oliver North notwithstanding, the GOP has not lost its conscience altogether.
Even the NRA itself, according to various reports, and especially its rank- and-file members, seems to have been on the brink of supporting the Brady Bill, and might have done so but for the intractable obstinacy of its leadership.
The Brady Bill, now signed into law, is not merely ``symbolic.''
The slow development of public demand for gun control, though it has been incremental, underlies everything else about the Brady Bill. Rising outrage at violent crime, at a time when the incidence of other forms of crime seems to be falling, brought reaction from a Congress that, fearful for its fate at the polls, has shied away from the issue for decades.
But urban slaughter - 424 killed in Washington, D.C., alone this year - and especially slaughter with handguns and assault rifles has aroused such fear and loathing among the American public that it came at last to insist, as it rarely does, that Congress ``do something.''
``Something'' turned out to be the Brady Bill, which has been around for seven years and was even passed by the House; but George Bush threatened a veto and GOP Senate leader Bob Dole threatened filibuster, and until this year the bill lay pining.
Then, apparently having killed it again with a repulsive filibuster, Senate Republicans discovered, to their horror, that voters from every section of the nation were furious. Progressive GOP members implored Dole to revive Brady, and - for whatever reasons - he agreed, permitting at last the up-or-down vote the public demanded. (His fear of defeat in the 1996 New Hampshire presidential primary if he supported any form of gun control unquestionably played a part, so he was left - and is left still - with a dilemma.)
But the important point remains: The Senate GOP drastically miscalculated the sentiments of the country, and only its shocked realization that it had drifted far out of the hallowed ``mainstream'' brought it back.
Meanwhile, according to The Christian Science Monitor, the NRA, whose rank and file many believe were ready to back Brady, seemed about to yield and only stopped short when it failed to get Democratic agreement that Brady would pre-empt all state laws stricter than itself. This may prove to be, as Dole's ambivalence did, a classically fatal blunder. Supporting Brady might well have restored the NRA's waning public favor; its diehard opposition may condemn it to the obloquy it deserves.
Finally, Brady is more than the merely ``symbolic'' action many choose to call it. Mild and reasonable as its provisions seem, they promise to slow, even if only a little, a trade in weapons that has become the nation's shame. Virginia law, along with similar laws in California, Florida and Maryland, appears to have helped halt over-the-counter sales of 47,000 handguns to ineligible would-be purchasers.
That is more than symbolic. No one will ever be able to say for certain, but many of those non-sales may have kept people alive. Now the task is to build - from Virginia, Maryland, California and Brady.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB