
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 5, 1991                   TAG: 9104050650
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GUN CONTROL/ REAGAN HITS SAWDUST TRAIL FOR BRADY BILL

AS A CONSERVATIVE, Ronald Reagan is slow to alter his convictions. Ten years after John Hinckley Jr.'s bullets wounded him and crippled his press secretary outside a Washington hotel, the former president has embraced a gun-control measure, the Brady Bill.

His odyssey has been quiet if not secret. Until recently, there had been nothing public to indicate a change in philosophy by the lifelong member of the National Rifle Association. In the months just after he was shot, then-President Reagan continued to oppose any form of gun control.

For that matter, his press secretary, Jim Brady, even disassociated himself at first from the efforts of his wife, Sarah, to get such a bill through Congress. Since then, the disabled Jim Brady has joined the campaign to require a seven-day waiting period nationwide on gun purchases.

Sarah Brady says she learned in 1988 that Reagan, then in his eighth and last year as president, supported the concept. But she was reluctant to ask him for an endorsement.

However, when she broached the issue to him, Reagan insisted: "Quote me - quote me anytime!" And last week, at a public ceremony, he openly described the waiting period as "just plain common sense," adding that "with the right to bear arms comes a great responsibility to use caution and common sense."

Better late than never, perhaps. But it risks being too little, too late. Common sense says the man should have been vocal a lot earlier about this.

Reagan hid his conversion under wraps, then years afterward remained passive about legislation named for a man who was disabled for life and almost killed in his service. It is somehow characteristic of the former president that he kept his counsel about gun control, then waxed enthusiastic when Sarah Brady finally brought it up. Doubtless he thought she'd never ask.

Fortunately for the rest of us, Reagan's words (like those last week endorsing the Brady Bill) are usually much clearer than his motives.

Edmund Morris - who has been working on a Reagan biography since 1985 under an agreement that allowed him into White House meetings - calls him "the most mysterious man I have ever confronted. It is impossible to understand him."

Join the club.

by CNB