THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507290002
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: C5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
Several things can be said about the Waco hearings into the deaths of David Koresh, his followers and law officers who attempted to arrest him.
First, President Clinton is suspect as a tutor on the proprieties of the hearings. Maybe, as the administration says, the National Rifle Association did buy and pay for the hearings. The gun lobby has a historical loathing for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms which marred a sometimes impressive record with terribly botched raids on Koresh's compound. And, also, the NRA is known for its ability to intimidate politicians who think bad thoughts about controlling guns which, its own cult teaches, do not kill people.
But Waco involves failures by Clinton himself and his highest aides. They failed to impose restraints on events publicly tracking toward the deaths of more than 80 people. The president left the decision - and the blame - to Attorney General Janet Reno, who assumed it too much and embarrassingly often.
There's also the pot-and-kettle aspect; during decades of legislative dominance, Democrats tormented Republicans with marginal hearings and, as in Iran-Contra, trivialized important matters with petty posturing and sermonettes for the evening news.
Professing innocence of such, congressional Republicans now insist: (1) They are not playing to the paranoia of wacko militiamen holding the New World Order at bay. (2) Their real aim is not to degrade further the ATF but to air the agency's failings and then fix it.
We'll see - and see best by watching the demeanor of the NRA which calls so many signals for the Republican Party. Their embrace is so tight and so bound up with money and anti-government fervor that it's hard to imagine their policies diverging.
Does the NRA want a shrived and supple bureau enforcing firearms regulations? Would it like the bureau's records computerized for efficient searching as it tries to track guns used in crimes, and to monitor 200,000 gun dealers with only 200 inspectors? Or does the NRA, working its will through a compliant Congress, prefer to keep the bureau in a crippled condition?
It is widely reported that the gun lobby got a pledge from Ronald Reagan to break up the bureau, but drew back aghast when he moved to honor it because the lobby realized enforcement functions would be transferred to other agencies better equipped to carry them out.
Despite his own vulnerabilities, the president ought to keep up his fire on the committee. His chronic diffidence on issues has left too many of them muddled. In a country where even children go armed, there needs to be clear understanding of what helps and what hinders enforcement of the few firearms regulations that exist. The blunders of the ATF and the FBI clearly need to be exposed but with the end in view of strengthening the effectiveness of those agencies.
That aim will not be served well by limiting the hearings to the shortcomings of the ATF. There ought to be a look at legislative history bearing on whether Congress has intended ATF to do well - whether, that is, it has provided the tools to do the job.
A Washington Post report says ATF street agents, many of them Vietnam combat veterans, feel as they did on returning from war years ago - ``abandoned by their own government.'' Politics-as-usual can never be a decent response to a statement as dismaying as that. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB