Feinstein Emerges as Leading Foe of Firearms Industry : Politics: Senate approval of amendment to ‘tag’ explosives has cast legislator in key role. Her brushes with violence help fuel her campaign.

For nearly two decades, scientists have possessed the technology to “tag” explosives, a method that could enable law enforcement officers to track a terrorist bomber almost as surely as if they had a fingerprint.

And for virtually all those years--even after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing--the firearms industry and the National Rifle Assn. have succeeded in making sure such explosive markers were never required by law.

Then on the Senate floor this week, legislation requiring manufacturers to include the tiny bits of colored plastic in their explosives sailed to passage without a single dissenting vote.

What happened? “On the floor, I could feel a recognition that we had the votes for it,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who carried the explosives-tagging amendment included in a counterterrorism bill passed by the Senate on Wednesday. “In the wake of Oklahoma City, the dynamic has shifted so dramatically. My sense is there has been a sea change.”

The Senate bill would greatly expand government authority to combat domestic and foreign terrorism. Two notable provisions--the explosives-tagging requirement and language restricting release of information on how to build bombs--were brought by Feinstein in what observers say is as much a testament to the changing times as to the senator’s ability to outflank even the most potent lobbyists.

Even the firearms industry concedes that Feinstein has emerged as one of its most effective foes, noting her unlikely success last year in winning a ban on military-type semiautomatic assault weapons. “She is viewed as an extremely anti-gun senator and a nemesis,” said James J. Baker, lobbyist for the firearms industry and the NRA. “Obviously she is effective. Is she a force to be reckoned with? Clearly.”

The same tenacity that has led some Democrats to regard her as being less than a team player, that cost her an important committee assignment and placed her at odds in 1993 with the White House, has put her lately at the forefront of gun control and anti-terrorism debate.

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“If we knew her secret, we’d bottle it,” said Jeff Muchnick, spokesman for the Coalition Against Gun Violence in Washington. “She’s really been out front on this issue of working to reduce growing violence. She’s done an amazing job.”

The weeks that led to Feinstein securing some of the bill’s most controversial language--against odds once thought insurmountable--provide something of a window into the second-term senator’s style, a persistence that sometimes borders on bullheadedness.

Days after the Oklahoma City bombing, Feinstein and fellow Judiciary Committee members gathered at the Capitol to discuss ways to prevent such unspeakable acts. A copy of the “Terrorists’ Handbook” was dropped into their laps. Flipping through it, Feinstein was stunned to find explicit instructions on where to steal chemicals for a bomb, what time to enter a building, how to break a lock, what to wear to the burglary and what to say if caught. The senators were also told about something called the “Bullet ‘n’ Board” on the Internet. It contained a step-by-step guide on making a bomb from a baby food jar, a toilet paper roll and a box of laundry detergent. Common among the data were instructions such as this: “If you want to blow up a bomb on the White House lawn, here’s how.”

Sen. Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat and committee member, recalled Feinstein’s astonishment, and his own thoughts at the time that government was powerless to censor such material.

“I remember her sitting there looking at us and saying, ‘You mean you can do this?’ ” Biden said in remarks to the Senate. “All of us who were supposedly, hopefully, good lawyers, all looked and said, ‘1st Amendment problem, senator.’ . . . We all kind of went on to other things.”

Back at her office, Feinstein, who is not an attorney, ordered her staff to contact liberal and conservative constitutional law experts around the country. The result was an amendment that unanimously passed in the bitterly divided Senate this week, making it a crime to distribute bomb-making information if one knows it will be used for a criminal purpose.

“She did it,” Biden conceded. “I compliment her. And remind me, if I ever forget, never to underestimate her. She always gets it done. We are all better for it.”

Feinstein objects to the characterization that she is taking on the NRA or any other lobby, contending that her concern is curtailing crime on whatever front, a drive shaped by a past that is rife with death threats and near-misses.

As a San Francisco supervisor and then mayor in the 1970s, Feinstein presided over a city virtually gripped by violence. After newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was kidnaped by a Northern California terrorist group in 1974, the police assigned a full-time bodyguard to Feinstein’s daughter, Katherine, anticipating that she might be next.

Feinstein, then a supervisor, became the target of a group called the New World Liberation Front, which authorities linked to at least 70 bombings. The group listed her name in an ultimatum that began: “The following dogs will be put on a death warrant.”

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Shortly before Christmas that year, the group planted a bomb in a window box outside the bedroom where Feinstein’s daughter was sleeping. The detonator misfired, authorities said, when the temperature dropped below freezing that night, a rare occurrence in San Francisco.

A few months after that, the windows of Feinstein’s vacation home near Monterey Bay were shot out, and for a time she carried a .38-caliber pistol in her purse.

In 1978, the assassination of George Moscone elevated her to the office of mayor. Less than a year later, Feinstein was walking precincts for reelection when a man approached her on the sidewalk, pointed what looked like a pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. It was a cigarette lighter; he casually clicked it off and walked away.

Seldom would her tenure in elected office be as turbulent, but those days clearly shaped her as a legislator.

“As mayor, I sent undercover officers through metal detectors at San Francisco International Airport to see if they could smuggle in a gun,” she said in a recent interview. “I knew what it would be like to be someone on that plane, and I didn’t want that to happen to anyone on my watch. Now as a U.S. senator, my watch is the whole nation.”

Whatever goals Feinstein scored in the anti-terrorism bill remain several steps from becoming law. The House is scheduled to take up its version of the bill next week, and the prospects for Feinstein’s provisions are uncertain.

Nor were they won without concessions. Feinstein agreed to exempt gunpowder used for small-arms ammunition from the explosives-tagging requirement to appease the NRA and win over Sen. Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan).

The restrictions on disseminating bomb instructions are being fiercely opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and will doubtless be challenged in the courts if they become law, a scrutiny Feinstein says she welcomes.

“Oliver Wendell Holmes said you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. Well, America is a crowded theater,” Feinstein said, insisting that free speech is not absolute. “Many people feel the envelope has been so pushed over some of these rights that it really is time to test them again.”