Looking Ahead Following a Big Senate Win
3/9/2004
Feature Story
by Dick Dahl
Gun-violence-prevention groups had different opinions about the tactics that ultimately led to the March 2 defeat in the U.S. Senate of a bill that would have provided unprecedented legal immunity to the gun industry. But in the end, after National Rifle Association (NRA) executive vice president Wayne LaPierre and executive director Chris W. Cox sent an e-mail urging senators to scuttle the bill, the strategy resulted in an unexpected victory.
That morning, Senators John Edwards and John Kerry had returned to Washington from the presidential campaign trail and Super Tuesday activities to vote on two amendments that were strongly supported for strategic purposes by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. One, offered by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., called for a straight reauthorization of the 1994 assault-weapons ban, which is scheduled to expire in September. The other purported to close the "gun-show loophole" and was a compromise of two bills that had been introduced by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Jack Reed, D-R.I. By noon, the weapons-ban amendment had passed 52-47 and the loophole amendment by 53-46.
Gun-rights groups had already grown alarmed by the Feb. 25 passage of an amendment, introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that would require gun manufacturers to provide child-proof locks with each firearm they sell. Combined with the amendments passed on the morning of March 2, the immunity bill had become weighted down with measures that alarmed rank-and-file members of the NRA and other gun advocacy organizations.
In their e-mail letter encouraging senators to scuttle the bill, LaPierre and Cox wrote that "we have said from the start that we will not allow this bill to become a vehicle for added restrictions on the law-abiding people of America." They also warned that senators' votes on the bill that they were now recommending for defeat "will be used in our future evaluations and endorsements of candidates for the U.S. Senate." (A copy of the NRA's letter to senators is at
www.csgv.org.)
According to Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center, the NRA's plan was to simply strip the amendments, either in conference committee or back in the House, and then bring back a "clean" immunity bill for another vote at a later date. "But you started to see all this e-mail traffic from the far right," she says, "and clearly they either weren't understanding the strategy or they weren't acquiescing to the strategy. And they all started agitating to kill it."
Meanwhile, some observers believe that the White House played a role in encouraging the Senate to jettison the immunity bill. "I think the White House made the call," says Mark Karlin, chairman of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence. "The NRA just doesn't fall on its sword like that. They're a bare-knuckles organization. They don't just suddenly commit harakiri."
"I had assumed there was some strategizing between the White House and the NRA," says Robert J. Spitzer, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Cortland and author of the book, "The Politics of Gun Control." "But who was actually calling the shots, I'm not sure."
President Bush had already voiced his support for a continuation of the assault-weapons ban and the McCain-Reed compromise on the gun-show loophole. He also said that he supported the immunity bill, but stipulated that he wanted to sign a "clean" bill with no amendments attached. At a White House briefing prior to the Senate action, Bush put himself in a defensive position trying to answer why he would not favor a bill that provided all three things in one package.
"I think they started to realize they were in a weird spot, and I think the NRA started to realize they were putting Bush into a box," Rand says.
Nevertheless, she believes that a White House role in the decision to abandon the bill is conjecture. But she argues that the NRA and the Bush administration alike are under growing pressure from gun owners for a variety of reasons. "First, (Bush) signed campaign finance reform. Second, they thought they were actually going to get laws overturned and court rulings that they have Second Amendment rights, so they've been getting cranky. And now they thought the NRA was prepared to take this deal on assault weapons."
The amendments were characterized by the gun lobby as "poison pill" measures designed to make the immunity bill more unpalatable to its supporters. But on the gun-violence-prevention side, there was also concern about them, but for a different reason. Many activists believed that those amendments, especially the Feinstein amendment to continue the assault-weapons ban as is, are weaker measures than they should be, and that passage of them would pre-empt future attempts to enact stronger legislation.
Looking to the Future
In the wake of the March 2 action, however, the victory has been hailed as a sign that gun control still has political strength on Capitol Hill. So the next question is: What now?
Rand says there's no chance that the immunity bill will come back this session after the debacle of March 2. She doubts that there's enough momentum to bring any gunshow-loophole bills to a vote. But the assault-weapons ban is looming as an issue that will surface in presidential campaign politics whether President Bush or presumptive Democratic candidate Kerry want it to happen. "It lapses in September, so just because of that fact, there will certainly be discussion in the fall election campaign," Spitzer says. "I don't think either candidate will be anxious to bring the gun issue into the campaign, but the fact of the deadline plus continued effort in Congress to renew the ban will push it into the fall campaign."
Feinstein has pledged to make every effort to secure straight continuation of the ban, even though many critics have described the existing ban as weak, containing too many exemptions and loopholes. Dennis Henigan, director of the Brady Center"™s Legal Action Project, acknowledged that criticism several days prior to the Senate vote, but indicated that the amendment represented a hard strategic reality. Prior to the vote, Henigan said, "The issue now is not whether the assault-weapons law should be strengthened. The issue now is to do something to keep assault weapons off our streets, and this amendment is a referendum on that."
Rand, however, says that may mean that Brady and other backers of the Feinstein amendment are now on record as favoring a straight reauthorization. "It might be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. Once you've taken that position it might be difficult to say, 'I didn't really mean that. I really meant to have a stronger position.'"
She says that if the ban expires, that doesn't mean that a bill for a stronger ban can't be introduced next year. "If it turns out that we have a Democratic president, we're on firmer footing in trying to push for something stronger."
Looking Ahead Following a Big Senate Win. Feature article, Join Together Online (
www.jointogether.org), March 9, 2004.
Looking Ahead Following a Big Senate Win (Anti-gun BS alert)
