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

DATE: FRIDAY, April 12, 1991                   TAG: 9104120937
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A/6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BRADY BILL

It certainly won't do enough toward that end. The bill would impose a seven-day waiting period on retail handgun purchases; local police could use the interval to check on the background of those who apply to buy a gun.

But nothing in this federal law would require authorities to act. It wouldn't apply to the 20 states that already have a waiting-period or background-check law. In other states, police could simply lay aside the form filled out by the buyer.

Oh, within 30 days they'd have to destroy the form. Under this law, apparently it would be more important to strike such information from the record than to act on it.

Such loopholes are common in the gun-control laws Congress periodically musters courage enough to pass. Our senators and representatives fear the single-mindedness and the retributive power of the gun lobby. Overnight, it can flood their offices with angry letters, and woe to the politician who incurs its disfavor; the late Lee Atwater could have learned something from the National Rifle Association about negative campaigning.

The gun lobby likes to point to high crime rates in metropolitan areas with gun laws as evidence that the laws don't work. But local and state laws are undermined by the lack of uniform federal legislation; criminals buy weapons in jurisdictions without gun-control laws and carry them across state lines. Of 315 guns police seized in New York from October 1988 through January 1989, 300 came from other states - 79 from Virginia.

Part of that picture may have changed since late 1989, when a law went into effect in Virginia requiring not a waiting period, but an instant computerized check on the background of gun purchasers. In the first year the system was in effect, police nabbed 86 would-be gun buyers who were fugitives from justice; one was wanted for murder. New Jersey police say their state's mandatory background check has screened out some 10,000 felons in 20 years.

Yet the gun lobby maintains these laws do nothing to keep guns out of criminals' hands. They do plenty unless they're shot through with loopholes. They'd do plenty more if federal legislation reduced interstate traffic that exploits differences in state laws.

The Brady Bill should be passed, if only for the sake of the cooling-off period it would provide to deter hotheads from arming themselves and keep more domestic quarrels from ending in tragedy. It remains a weak bill that ought to be strengthened. But if enacted, and if it survives a threatened presidential veto, it could be a framework for later, more effective restrictions.