Turning Gun Control Into Ammunition

There are political pundits who say a Washington politician would have to run stark naked down Pennsylvania Avenue to get any attention from Los Angeles’ celebrity-crazy media market.

Small wonder, then, that the staff of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer was fairly dancing in the streets one recent day when the California Democrat managed to pull off what’s known in the business as “a roadblock”--air time on three big local stations on the same night.

What brought the media mountain to Muhammad was Boxer’s appearance at a local trauma center to survey the carnage from junk guns--the so-called Saturday night specials that Southern California gun makers churn out at considerable profit, and the weapons most often used by criminals. It is the same kind of gun, we have recently been reminded, that killed Bobby Kennedy in the kitchen of our own Ambassador Hotel back in 1968.

It seems that Boxer had struck a chord that lifted her profile, however briefly, in a city generally bored by national politics. Recent polls suggest that many Californians are largely unaware of Boxer’s record after five years in the Senate. Pretty grim statistics with the 1998 election just a year away.

Even smaller wonder, then, that we found California’s junior senator in a Capitol Hill office building last week, standing over a cloth-draped table with two shiny revolvers, two Saturday night specials and a child safety lock so flimsy she opened it with a paper clip.

“We are not trying to take people’s guns away. We are trying to make sure . . . these guns will not turn on them and kill them or maim them,” Boxer declared. Then she picked up a silver revolver and fastened a solid lock with a loud snap. “We don’t need junk locks on junk guns.”

And so began Campaign 1998, the year when Boxer--at the top of the GOP’s national Senate hit list--will either remain one of California’s most powerful politicians or go home to Marin County, a victim of her liberal ideology.

“This is 100% reelection campaigning,” Tony Quinn, a Republican analyst in Sacramento, said of Boxer’s gun display. “But this will give Boxer an entry into the suburbs that she doesn’t have in other elements of her record.”

Gun control is not a new cause for the first-term senator. For years she has tenaciously pressed legislation to require that trigger locks be sold with handguns and that domestically manufactured Saturday night specials--which seem to have a habit of blowing up in their owners’ faces--be subjected to the same safety standards as imports. She has told story after story of children killed by handguns, of respectable citizens wounded by their own unpredictable firearms.

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But this could be the issue that enables her to stay true to her liberal ideals and still win over mainstream suburbanites she badly needs if she is to keep her job.

“It is difficult to win a Republican nomination if a candidate is supportive of any kind of gun control,” said Washington political analyst Charlie Cook. “At the same time, most swing voters in the suburbs are for some sort of moderate restriction on guns. This is probably a good move for Boxer. And it doesn’t cost her any Democratic votes.”

It worked for California’s other Democratic U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein, whose continued attack on assault weapons yielded an against-all-odds national ban on some rifles and helped make her the most popular politician in the state.

Although Times polls this month showed that Boxer has failed to muster more than 50% support against any candidate except one virtual unknown, Feinstein’s public approval has soared. She has rebounded from a brutal 1994 reelection fight and leads the pack in the governor’s race she is now considering.

Experts believe that gun control is partly why--an issue that makes the suburbs, where the No. 1 fear is crime, sit up and pay attention.

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that guns are a suburban issue,” Quinn said. “I think this is Boxer’s attempt to take a page out of Feinstein’s book and put the Democrats on the side of the law-and-order issue.”

It is an issue that has served Republicans well for 30 years and one that many now find themselves on the wrong side of. Wasn’t that the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police applauding Boxer at her gun display?

And wasn’t that Republican Gov. Pete Wilson vetoing state legislation that would have applied safety standards to domestic handguns--a bill virtually identical to Boxer’s national counterpart?

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Wilson may have done the embattled senator a big favor. With political moderation breaking out in Washington like a bad rash, partisans are trying hard to find anything to distinguish themselves from the enemy this election year.

“You don’t get many opportunities these days to show the other side is acting extreme,” Cook said. “When you get a chance, you take it and run like a thief.”

In 1992, Feinstein embraced a lagging Boxer and together they sailed to Washington as the first pair of women senators elected by any state. It came to be known as the Year of the Woman.

With Boxer firmly on the gun control bandwagon, and Feinstein holding the reins, maybe they’ll do it again.

Could be a bad year for guns.