The Moving Target of Gun Control
Commentary: As key Republicans shift their semiautomatic thinking, real gun control may not be as far off as the NRA thinks
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What caused the Littleton massacre? That's the question that consumed the U.S. House of Representatives for three tumultuous days this spring. Why had two young men walked into their Colorado high school and shot 13 people to death and then killed themselves? Liberals blamed guns; conservatives blamed the cultural disintegration of society.
When the debate was over, the House killed legislation that would have required criminal background checks on anyone making a purchase at a gun show. The National Rifle Association celebrated. President Clinton bitterly called it "a great victory for the NRA," and the Washington Post ranked it as the NRA's "most dramatic legislative victory in years." The verdict was unanimous -- and dead wrong.
Littleton exploded the politics of gun control. It detonated the anxiety over kids and guns stirred up by other school shootings. It prompted voters and politicians to worry less about the right to bear arms and more about public safety. Above all, it changed the way we think of killers in this country. Alongside the stereotype of the urban black thug, white America now perceives a new menace: the suburban introvert who has no rap sheet but carries an enemies list. We are becoming less afraid of some faceless "them" and more afraid of the kid next door -- a fundamental shift in the politics of guns.
The simplistic rap on the NRA -- that it is soft on criminals -- obscures the gun control debate's true Maginot Line. The NRA has long argued for locking up criminals and depriving them of firearms. What it refuses to accept are laws that inconvenience "law-abiding" gun buyers. The political effect of the recent school shootings has been to shatter this dichotomy by demonstrating how easily law-abiding citizens can get guns and blow away their neighbors. To understand how this shift has transformed the issue, consider the evolution of the two House leaders directly responsible for defining the GOP's positions on crime: Judiciary Committee Chair Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and Crime Subcommittee Chair Bill McCollum (R-Fla.).
Root causes
In 1993 and 1994, when the House debated the Brady Bill's provision for background checks on handgun purchasers and a Democratic bill that banned assault weapons, Hyde and McCollum mocked Democrats for treating crime as a "social problem" with "root causes" that could be addressed through "social welfare spending" on such things as midnight-basketball programs, arts and crafts classes, jobs programs, and mental health counseling. Instead, the two Republican leaders called for more prisons, death penalties, and mandatory minimum sentences. Young people, they suggested, committed crimes not because they had guns but because they were wicked, and gun laws would therefore frustrate only law-abiding purchasers. The problem "is not repeating rifles," said McCollum, "it is repeating offenders."
This year, as Littleton showed suburban parents a new culprit not so different from their own children, Hyde and McCollum changed their tune. "Congress must address the cultural influences that cause young people to become violent," declared Hyde, blaming movies, music, and video games. "Let us examine what it is in the psyches of these young people that made them want to kill." McCollum, lamenting the peer rejection that had led the Littleton boys to kill their classmates, implored his colleagues to "address the more fundamental underlying causes of teenage violence." He even embraced treatment of mental health problems and efforts to "redirect these disturbed teenagers before they engage in some violent and tragic act."
Rehabilitation
Six years ago, McCollum dismissed hardened juvenile offenders as unsalvageable. "Only about 7 percent of young offenders are responsible for up to three-quarters of violent crimes committed by juveniles," he argued. "Those young people, I submit, are not going to be reformed and rehabilitated with boot camps or anything of that nature ... they need to be taken off the streets and locked up." This year, however, McCollum complained that juvenile courts focus too much on repeat offenders, neglecting those minor delinquents who might be saved from "a spiral of increasing crime."
Juveniles
Increasingly, conservatives agree that it's too great a safety risk to allow teenagers to handle firearms, whether or not they have broken the law. After the Littleton shootings, Hyde and McCollum voted for mandatory childproof safety locks on handguns, and McCollum offered an amendment to stiffen penalties on "adults who illegally transfer firearms to juveniles." "We must turn our attention to the loopholes in the gun laws of this nation that have become very apparent in the aftermath of the tragedy at Columbine," McCollum told his colleagues. Hyde agreed that there were "too many guns too easily accessible to kids, and we have to do something about it."
Conservatives assume that restrictions on teenagers' access to guns will never apply to adults, but their own arguments undermine this distinction. They already contend that teenagers who commit serious crimes should be prosecuted like grown-ups, and Hyde's post-Littleton legislation would have raised the minimum age for handgun buyers from 18 to 21, further blurring the distinction between minors and adults. After McCollum proposed to outlaw juvenile possession of semiautomatic assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition clips, Hyde offered an amendment to prohibit the import of such clips altogether. Although Hyde titled this ban the Juvenile Assault Weapon Loophole Closure Act of 1999, it applied to everyone regardless of age. Such outright bans on weapons breach the right's long-standing position that gun bans should apply only to criminals, as well as its fallback -- that gun bans for juveniles shouldn't apply to adults.
Technology
As more and more compact, semiautomatic guns flood the land, it becomes easier for anyone to bring them into a crowded building and kill many people quickly. The policy championed by Hyde and McCollum in the early 1990s -- that of locking up anyone who has killed once in order to prevent him from killing twice -- no longer suffices, because by the time people such as the Littleton culprits expose themselves as murderers, they have already claimed their second, third, or 13th victim. If killers can't be locked up until it's too late, weapons must be locked up instead. "We no longer live in a society where mass murder of the kind committed at Columbine High School is unthinkable," observed Hyde as he offered his ban on large-capacity ammunition clips. "The increasing frequency of mass shootings with weapons that can only be described as high-tech killing machines compels us to act now for the public good."
Waiting periods
Six years ago, McCollum repeatedly labeled the Brady legislation a "waiting-period bill." He argued that while instant background checks to catch criminals were acceptable, cooling-off periods to delay gun purchases by angry law-abiding citizens were not. At the time, McCollum urged his colleagues to abolish state-mandated waiting periods as soon as the instant check system was set up, at which point buyers should have to wait "no more than five hours in a single day." This year, the NRA stuck to the single-day limit, but McCollum didn't. He and Hyde proposed a three-day waiting period for background checks on people making buys at gun shows, reflecting a new willingness to impose what one conservative colleague, according to the Washington Post, unhappily called "additional burdens on law-abiding gun owners."
As Littleton and similar tragedies break down the old dichotomies and heighten citizens' fears about their law-abiding neighbors, gun control will gradually advance from felons and teenagers to the general population. Some states may copy recent legislation from Connecticut and allow guns to be taken away from citizens who lack criminal records but who pose "a risk of imminent personal injury" based on factors such as an involuntary commitment to a mental health institution, alcoholism, a history of violence, or cruelty to animals. Others states may prohibit anyone from buying more than one gun per month, as California did in July. Still others, taking their cue from presidential hopeful Bill Bradley, may use zoning laws to bar gun shops from residential neighborhoods.
While the conservatives' dichotomies dissolve, however, liberals must rethink their own. For too long, they have blamed guns alone. When the NRA argues that people who want to kill can find other means of doing so, it is correct. The problem of weapons proliferation has spread from guns to bombs and bomb-making information. In confronting these threats, liberals remain as stubborn about the First and Fourth Amendments as conservatives are about the Second.
After Littleton, McCollum proposed that the dissemination of bomb recipes to people who "intend" to do harm be outlawed, and Hyde proposed to restrict the distribution of violent movies and video games. Both proposals were constitutionally flawed. But in a world in which instructions for building explosives are just a mouse click away, ingredients are in ordinary garages, and trench coats and school lockers can hide weapons capable of mowing down dozens of people in seconds, gun control advocates must ask themselves whether they're willing to take on the ACLU as well as the NRA.
Finally, there's the issue of the entertainment lobby. The music and movie industries, on which Democrats rely for much of their campaign money, joined other business groups in lobbying vigorously against Hyde's proposal to restrict violent media. The theory underlying Democrats' speeches against the measure -- that purveyors who market violence should bear no legal responsibility for what sick minds do with their products -- eerily echoes the NRA's arguments in support of weapons manufacturers. As more cities sue gun makers for designing and distributing their wares in ways that facilitate violence, liberals who have raised hell about Big Tobacco and Big Guns will find Big Media's marketing of mayhem hard to defend.
