After December's impeachment follies, it did not seem possible that
congressmen could be any more out of touch with the people they were elected to
represent. Then came last week's debate on juvenile violence and gun control.
Watching the House fulminate into the wee hours of the morning about the
''cultural causes'' of violence, only to cast a few meaningless votes denouncing
Hollywood and embracing the Ten Commandments, was positively surreal.
Were these guys all out hunting squirrel last month when the public forced
their Republican colleagues in the Senate to reverse themselves and get behind
some moderate regulations on firearms?
Is their attention span really so short that they think Columbine is already
yesterday's news, only eight weeks after the slaughter of 13 and the suicides of
two teenage gunmen in a Littleton, Colo., high school?
No one expects an easy consensus on gun control. Americans differ too
fundamentally on the meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Those
who think the framers were talking about a militia will never agree with those
who interpret the right to bear arms as authorization to carry a concealed
weapon. But, as the millennium turns and this nation grows more violent, it
serves no one's interests to carry out this debate at the extremes.
That's just where it occurred last week.
On Friday, a bizarre coalition of liberal Democrats and conservative
Republicans formally killed a bill designed to help keep guns out of the hands
of children and criminals. But efforts to regulate firearms really died the
night before when 45 Democrats joined Republicans to squeeze out a 218-211 vote
to limit the regulation of sales at gun shows.
It was a Democrat who did in gun control this year. It's no secret that
Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan has been seething at Bill Clinton for
five years about the Republican takeover of the House. He blames the loss of
Democratic control of the chamber on the vote to ban assault weapons, a ban he
supported under duress and has regretted ever since.
Fair enough. It was a tough vote for Dingell, an enthusiastic hunter and a
former board member of the NRA, an organization that poured millions of dollars
into the campaign to defeat Democrats that year. Dingell paid a price when the
House fell to the GOP, losing his chairmanship of the Commerce Committee.
But this week he debased the legislative process and the chamber he has
served for 44 years, the longest tenure of any House member. Dingell's line in
the sand was a piddling provision to mandate a 72-hour waiting period to check
the background of buyers at gun shows.
Is that really so onerous? The same waiting period is in effect for those who
buy handguns under the Brady bill. Dingell characterized a three-day waiting
period as ''harassment of law-abiding citizens.'' Please. What law-abiding
citizen has so urgent a need for firepower that he can't wait 72 hours to
reassure his neighbors of his unblemished record?
The polarization in Congress on gun control frustrates the national will to
have a rational conversation about the limits of individual freedom and the
measures necessary to ensure public safety. Voters are not nearly as fixated as
Dingell on fears about his party's political prospects in 2000 and his personal
desire to regain a powerful committee chairmanship.
If there was a moment that made one wonder last week whether a rogue virus
had infected the House, it was when gun control opponents - including Dingell -
gave a standing ovation to Representative Carolyn McCarthy, the New York
Democrat whose husband was killed and son critically wounded during a shooting
spree on the Long Island Railroad in 1993. She argued passionately and tearfully
that any small inconvenience to gun buyers caused by the longer waiting period
she championed was more than offset by the gain in public safety.
Why the disconnect between her words and their votes? Why the gulf between
her grief and their deeds?
Maybe the answer is the power of the NRA. Or maybe it's time to call in the
CDC.
Eileen McNamara's e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED].
aybe it's not a
political problem, but a medical one. Maybe the Centers for Disease Control can
explain better than the National Rifle Association how the US House of
Representatives went from tone deaf to stone deaf in only six months.
This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 06/20/99.
� Copyright
1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
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