Not yet. It was a measure of the NRA’s lobbying power that so modest a bill, aimed at such obvious targets as assault weapons, barely cleared the Senate on a 50-49 vote. The guns have little legitimate use except in combat and have become the weapons of choice of terrorists, drug dealers and organized crime. Police across the country have broken with the NRA to call for the ban. In poll after poll, by margins of 70 percent or more, the public agrees, especially since the massacre of five children in a schoolyard in Stockton, Calif., last year.
The vote came on one measure in a sweeping crime bill that also aims to authorize the death penalty for 30 federal offenses, limit death-row appeals and curb money laundering. As passed, the ban on assault weapons would be far from complete. Five of the listed brands of guns were covered by George Bush’s 1989 executive order banning imported assault weapons; the other four are domestic. There are at least two dozen other models on the market.
In the past, the NRA has argued in all seriousness that semiautomatic weapons such as the Uzi and the AK-47 are legitimate hunting and target guns. Now the group downplays that case but insists that banning guns won’t reduce: crime and that people have a constitutional right to choose which guns they want to buy. Since the Stockton shootings, however, such arguments encounter a rising fear of assault weapons. California, Virginia, Connecticut and Maryland have passed controls on assault guns, and two weeks ago New Jersey legislators voted the nation’s toughest bill, requiring most owners of semiautomatic guns to give them up.
After last week’s victory, the forces of gun control began talking again about the Brady bill, a proposal for a seven-day waiting period on handgun sales that failed in the House in 1988. But even if the assault-weapons ban survives in the House, the crime bill could still reach the president in a form he won’t accept. Bush hasn’t outright threatened a veto based on the assault-weapons clause, but he made it clear he doesn’t like that feature: what he wants, he said, is “a good, strong anticrime bill,” and Congress should “stop adding matters of this nature.”
