Clinton Way Out Front on Gun Control : Violence: He’s following his own instincts and bypassing regular policy-making machinery. His vigorous advocacy surprises aides.

WASHINGTON — In his calls for more aggressive restrictions on guns, President Clinton has leaped beyond his Administration’s regular policy-making machinery and followed his own political hunches and convictions about where the volatile issue is headed.

For several months, officials at the White House, Justice Department and other agencies have been weighing how to follow up the recently approved Brady handgun-control bill--and have come up with mostly incremental plans for further legislation next year.

But in recent days Clinton has bypassed usual study-and-comment procedures, surprising aides and rattling some gun rights advocates, with encouraging words about such controversial proposals as federal licensing of handguns and expansion of police “stop and frisk” powers. Aides believe that those measures are further from reach than others being developed.

“The President has decided to get out in front. There’s no doubt about it,” one Administration official said.

Underscoring the new prominence of the issue for the Administration, Clinton talked Thursday with big city mayors and police chiefs, while Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala spoke publicly on the need for more action to counter violence.

“We have to move, and I believe we are prepared to move,” Clinton told officials from 35 cities at a White House meeting.

Clinton’s thinking recently has been stirred by suggestions that have come from other government officials and those on the front lines of crime fighting.

The mention of gun licensing last month by Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and New York Mayor-elect Rudolph W. Giuliani spurred Clinton’s interest. The two local leaders, both Republicans, said that they would favor the idea of testing and licensing gun owners to ensure that, like automobile owners, they know how to operate the devices.

After Clinton first mentioned his interest in the proposals in California last weekend, some aides sought to play down his support, evidently concerned that the President not get too close to a potentially explosive idea.

But he seemed to have no such hesitation, mentioning it again Wednesday when he said that he would consider proposals for a national “amnesty” on illegally held guns and even more radical proposals to expand police powers to stop and search individuals for illegal guns.

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Aides said these ideas came strictly out of channels and may have been designed by Clinton to attract attention and invigorate debate. They hadn’t been previously discussed with Reno or with Paul Begala and James Carville, Clinton’s top political consultants.

The President has long felt confident of his own instincts on an issue that has been a difficult one for Southern Democrats.

As a governor with presidential ambitions in 1990, Clinton battled the National Rifle Assn. in Arkansas by twice vetoing an NRA-backed bill that would have preempted Arkansas cities from enacting handgun waiting periods or other gun-control legislation.

Angered, the NRA publicly threatened to settle its score with Clinton in the 1992 Democratic primary in Texas, a state fabled for its staunch opposition to gun control. But Clinton won the Texas primary.

Clinton’s new thinking on guns comes amid a rhetorical campaign against violence that seems to grow broader with the passing of every week.

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The President in recent weeks has used a Memphis pulpit where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached to urge black Americans to battle violence in their communities; last weekend, at a Beverly Hills fund-raiser, he implored Hollywood to consider the dangerous effects of violent films on young people with weak family and community support.

Proposals to license guns push a hot button with gun rights advocates--in part because they seem to bear out the gun lobby’s longstanding predictions that gun-control interests plan to first register guns, then confiscate them.

The Administration is talking about licensing guns, rather than registering them, in part to avoid renewing old associations that have brought down many state and federal gun control initiatives--including California’s hard-fought 1982 Proposition 15, which sought to freeze the number of handguns in the state.

But the licensing procedures under consideration would be more limiting than simple registration, since they would require owners to demonstrate that they can use their guns safely, as well as provide information on them.