ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 15, 1996 TAG: 9607150056
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
BOB DOLE has second thoughts about repealing the ban on assault-style weapons.
President Clinton makes a second run at trying to find dealers illegally supplying teen-agers with guns.
Sniff the air. Is that the smell of gunpowder carried on a hot summer wind - or is it the scent of smoke generated by the heat of a presidential campaign?
Not that the domestic arms race - the race to gun shows, gun stores, street corners, anywhere guns are sold, to buy increasingly lethal weaponry - is a contrived concern. Good heavens, the country only has the highest rate of gun homicides in the world: 44.6 per million people. As opposed to, say, Canada's 8.4 or England's 0.8.
The question is not whether the problem is deadly serious. It is.
But how serious are the politicians?
Citizen Dole finds himself in the awkward position of having promised the National Rifle Association last year that he, as Senate Majority Leader Dole, would push through repeal of the assault-weapons ban and send it to the president by the end of this summer.
Dole, of course, is no longer in a position to move legislation. Worse, from the perspective of someone running for president of all the United States rather than senator from Kansas, alignment with the gun lobby is at odds with the views of most Americans, who want effective gun controls.
So Dole now says: Forget about the ban; it doesn't work anyway. The whole nation should adopt Virginia's instant background checks on firearm purchasers.
Dole may look as if he's distancing himself from the NRA, but he's not straying far. The gun lobby has favored such instant checks as a less objectionable alternative to waiting periods on gun sales.
In fact, the checks are better - considerably better - than nothing. In Virginia alone, they've stopped 10,000 gun sales. But they don't provide the cooling-off period that a five-day wait would.
Clinton's teen-sales proposal is just a recycled initiative from 1993, GOP critics say, but that's unimportant. The important question is whether it would do anything to get guns out of the hands of juveniles, some heedless enough to kill over trivialities, some brutal enough to kill as a business tool of the drug trade.
Surely November's election will come too soon to know the impact on youth violence in the 17 cities where the computer traces will be tried - which should suit candidate Clinton just fine. The hope of reducing violence is about as potent a vote-getter as actual progress, and a heckuva a lot easier to produce than real restrictions on the manufacture and sale of a product designed expressly to kill people.
By now, too, Americans have learned that the president is a lot better at spinning out ideas - good, bad or indifferent - than at putting them into effect. With a Congress controlled by the opposition party, perhaps that's inevitable, but this Clinton characteristic was becoming manifest even before the GOP congressional takeover a year and a half ago. Clinton says he favors computer traces of guns in teen hands, but how committed will he be to bringing it about nationally?
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENTby CNB