THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 25, 1996 TAG: 9603250136
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Pushed by GOP leaders, the House voted 239 to 173 Friday to repeal the 2-year-old ban on some semi-automatic assault-type weapons; but Sen. Robert Dole shows no enthusiasm for bringing the issue before the Senate.
``It's not a priority,'' he said.
That was all, a brief dismissal of a bill he had said he would back when he was angling for the National Rifle Association's support of his presidential candidacy.
It was the assured, pragmatic majority leader in the realm he rules, with no nonsense from people pestering him with questions. This is the Dole so much to be preferred to the sometimes abstract candidate on the hustings.
The House Republican leaders didn't notify Dole they were bringing up the bill, nor did they allow public hearings. They confined debate to two hours that were filled with bitterness heightened by displays of near-distraught emotion.
What probably lay in store for the bill in the Senate was demonstrated Sunday when a member of CNN's Capital Gang asked Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan his views on assault weapons. ``It's about the kids,'' Moynihan said. ``I would as soon have an assault weapon in my house as a rattlesnake in the closet!''
House Speaker Newt Gingrich had promised NRA heads a vote on the bill, and GOP leaders told their troops to get the matter out of the way. Like Macbeth on the subject of murder, they counseled: If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.''
So much better than to have it come up later, nearer the election, with parents weeping for children lost to multiple bullets and gold-braided police chiefs testifying to the lethality of assault weapons.
So they did it quickly.
And we miss hearing, at least any time soon, Sen. Dianne Feinstein give what she had promised would be ``the mother of all filibusters'' against repeal of the ban.
We are denied the chance of comparing her oratory to Huey Long's on pot likker in the 1930s or Strom Thurmond's flight on Dixie in the 1950s or a mini-filibuster by Robert Byrd at most any time on the kings of Greece.
By no stretch of the imagination, except in some Jurassic Park, would hunters use an assault weapon. It would obliterate a deer.
These guns slaughter people as when someone sprays a subway car or a gang unleashes death on a busy street. It is not American hunters, but NRA heads, who resist taking any gun off the civilian market, no matter how monstrous, lest it be a wedge toward removing them all.
Founders, framing the Second Amendment, surely did not mean it to preclude sensible precautions to keep guns from lawless hands.
The need is to disarm criminals, not hunters or householders. by CNB