By Debbie Howlett
USA Today
March 11, 1993
This month, Hayward Long is featuring a Beretta 9mm semi-automatic pistol as Gun of the Month at the Blue Ridge Arsenal in Chantilly, Va.
"A nice little weapon," he says. "Good price."
Long, upset by a new state law restricting gun sales to one a month, sees his promotion as a way to challenge the rapidly growing belief that a homicide lurks behind every blue steel barrel.
"The answer is not in restricting (gun) sales," he says. "It's in tightening up background checks on owners."
But lawmakers from New Jersey to Virginia to Texas have turned to restricting gun sales, especially semi-automatics, to combat the exponential growth of violent crime.
And they're finding support.
"The guns of Waco and the bomb of New York City are too readily available to the common criminal," Stephen Higgins, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms told a congressional panel Wednesday. "We must deal with the criminals or they will deal with us."
Even the Brady Bill -- federal legislation mandating a five-day waiting period on gun purchases as well as background checks on buyers -- has been resurrected. And President Clinton has promised to sign the bill as soon as it hits his desk.
Reportedly considering a guns tax to help pay for a new health care plan, Clinton is no Second Amendment absolutist. "We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately own handguns and rifles ... that we are unable to think about reality," he said last week.
Acting Attorney General Stuart Gerson, who describes himself as a conservative Republican, told an FBI symposium last month: "The private use of handguns today, especially in street crime, has nothing to do with the literally stated intent of the Second Amendment."
No group argues more forcefully for the right to bear arms than the National Rifle Association, which became a political power in the '80s.
Now, the NRA is losing to gun control advocates in Virginia and New Jersey, where the GOP-led Legislature likely won't be able to overturn a ban on semi-automatic weapons.
"The NRA has gone from being omnipotent to merely powerful," says Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center and author of NRA: Money, Firepower and Fear. "They've begun losing battles, but not in anyway should you start writing them off."
NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre downplays the significance of recent legislative defeats, attributing them to heightened fear and frustration about crime.
He says the renewed fight has activated the NRA, and as many as 2,000 people a day are joining.
"I want to get rid of criminals with guns," he says. "They (NRA opponents) just want to get rid of guns."
And while the NRA has won a fair share of battles the past year -- in Georgia, Utah, Colorado -- they've lost many, unheard of in the 1980s.
The losses, says Sara Brady of Handgun Control, came because "people are beginning to realize this group that used to be motherhood and apple pie is the real villain. They have fought everything common sense dictates."
Until 1988, according to a Handgun Control summary of recent legislation, "The NRA had a virtual stranglehold on state legislatures."
But then Maryland banned Saturday night specials. A year later, California lawmakers shocked by the mass killings in a Stockton schoolyard banned the sale of all military style semi-automatic weapons. Since then, 20 states and dozens of cities have enacted gun control laws.
In New Jersey, a 2-year-old ban on assault weapons is being challenged again. Monday, the state Senate is expected to defeat a measure that would overturn it.
Even so, Gov. Jim Florio, who advocated the ban, finds irony in having to fight to keep the law: "American fighting men and women are in Somalia trying to take dangerous weapons out of the hands of civilians to protect people and the state Legislature in New Jersey is fighting to make them available."
A key battle over guns looms in Texas, the only state where more people died from gunshot wounds than traffic accidents in 1991.
A range of bills from legalizing concealed weapons to outlawing semi-automatic weapons are in the legislative hopper. The standoff in Waco also has improved the prospects of state Rep. Glen Maxey, a Democrat from Austin, who has proposed banning assault weapons.
"People are so anesthetized to violence today, they never look at the root cause: the ease of getting guns," says Maxey. "When something like Waco happens, it puts a different spin on it. It makes people realize."
The NRA realizes the futility of arguing -- in the face of events like the Waco standoff -- the constitutional right to own such guns as military-style assault weapons.
The new approach is to become crime fighters.
LaPierre, who took over the NRA a year ago, is trying to shift the group's focus and, in the process, clean its tarnished image. He wants to make the NRA "the No. 1 crime-fighting organization" in the country.
"If anyone is callous or cynical it's the politicians" offering "cosmetic solutions" because real ones cost too much money, he says. "No one wants to solve the violent crime problem more than the NRA."
But gun control advocates may have beaten the NRA to the punch.
Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder says his one-gun-a-month provision would have created a firestorm on its own. It succeeded, he says, because it was part of an anti-violent crime package. "We made the point that one of the biggest sources of violence is handguns," Wilder says. "And the public just said, `Enough is enough.' "
The measure came about in response to stories portraying Virginia as the supply point for gunrunners up and down the East Coast.
But gun store owner Hayward Long, a retired Washington, D.C., police officer, scoffs at the idea the one-gun-a-month law will keep weapons from violent criminals, who most often buy guns on the street.
"It's strictly political rhetoric," he says. "None of these laws will have any effect on the flow of guns."
Andrea Stone contributed to this article.
Copyright 1993 USA Today