Right Attacks Software, Left Trumps With Hardware

The gun-control proposals strangled in the House of Representatives a week ago are already being resurrected as powerful issues in the incipient national elections. This will be to the detriment of Republicans, whose pro-gun tactics have left even sympathizers wondering about their electoral acumen.

Not only is the old Nixon- and Reagan-era law-and-order coalition just a memory, but GOP Capitol Hill leaders, especially unofficial House boss Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), seem to think the average American voter lives in rural Oklahoma instead of in the huge, gun-skeptical belt of suburbs that stretches from Long Island to Long Beach. Nothing else could explain their legislative tactics.

In the long run, the GOP can look forward to some Democratic problems. The Clinton administration’s gains in the crime arena owe as much to demographics as public-policy success. The huge postwar U.S. baby boom sent crime rates soaring in the 1960s, ‘70s and early ‘80s, but as the boom ebbed in the last decade, so did murder, assault and other violent crime. Now, as the new baby boom of the 1980s verges on adulthood, youth violence is likely to begin rising, though probably not in time for the 2000 election.

The GOP is also taking too much comfort from an obvious duality: Republicans and conservatives are permissive toward the hardware of violence--guns and weaponry--while Democrats and liberals are weak on its software--the images that fill television, video games, movies and the Internet.

Both party leaderships all too often support only partial remedies, based on attacking the other’s weaknesses, campaign donors and constitutional exaggerations, while continuing to cherish their own. The GOP is focusing its attacks on the software, while protecting its pivotal constituency, the well-heeled gun lobby. Its Second Amendment sloganizing exaggerates the right to keep and bear arms--as if the founders intended to protect AK-47s!

The Democratic constituency, in turn, is the heavyweight entertainment industry, which inflates First Amendment free-speech rights--as if the founders sought to protect the rights of entertainers to yell “fire” in a crowded theater full of impressionable teenagers.

Although the general public agrees with both criticisms, guns are far more in the news today. Thus, the GOP fumbling is front and center. Not only do DeLay and company fail to understand that the aftermath of the Littleton, Colo., shooting is not a good time to be carrying cartridge belts for the National Rifle Assn., they seem unable to grasp the reversal in public perceptions that has occurred over the last three decades.

Back in 1969, Republicans and conservatives pretty much owned the law-and-order issue, but since the late 1980s, the balance has been shifting to the Democrats. The rise in violence that made law-and-order politics so salient in the ‘60s was associated with liberal constituencies and causes: inner-city riots, antiwar demonstrations and even the occasional bombing by leftist radicals. Liberal sociology, an easy political target, was broadly permissive--society, some argued, was as much to blame for crime as the perpetrators. The GOP made hay accordingly.

The 1990s, however, yield a different paradigm. The shift in the birthrate has been paralleled by a second major shift in political sociology. In the last 10 years, the group violence reported in the press has increasingly come from those associated with the right: minor-league neo-Nazis, religious cults, abortion-clinic bombers, skinheads, rural militia and posses and high-school dissidents. Littleton and Oklahoma City are cases in point.

These days, moreover, it is conservatives who often seem to be justifying the violence. Abortion, some insist, is a bigger crime than violent efforts to stop it. The Interior Department, others contend, has driven Western ranchers to the wall. There is the argument that law-abiding people need guns to deal with criminals. Where many liberals once sought to expand the constitutional protection enjoyed by criminal defendants, many conservative thinkers now favor an expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear firearms.

Ironically, there is also a repetition in the counterpoint. Even when conservatives owned the law-and-order issue in the 1970s, the Nixon administration lost credibility over the dubious legality of its Southeast Asia involvement, its scandals and its corrupt campaign finance. This can now be said of the Clinton administration.

It is tempting to suggest that DeLay is no student of history. For even if the Democrats have their own weaknesses, the truth today is that the law-and-order issue has crumbled for the GOP--like so many other appeals of their landslides in the Nixon and Reagan eras. To misread this risks repeating the grave mistakes of Barry M. Goldwater in 1964. He assembled a losing coalition of Southern, Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states--a rough correlation with gun owners rather than suburbanites.

The foolishness in the House was underscored by its insistence that student violence could be curbed by posting the Ten Commandments in schools. Considering how much of a joke it would be to post them in congressional cloakrooms, why should they be any more effective in high-school lunchrooms? The Democrats may be vulnerable over the violence seeded by the entertainment industry, but not while GOP tactics remain at kindergarten levels.

In practical terms, the recent defeat of tougher gun laws by the GOP-dominated House--with the help of a rural minority of Democrats--could doom such legislation for the remainder of this Congress. “Soft” encouragements to violence are even less likely to be regulated, reflecting the clout of the communications industry. Violence in its dual aspect may be no more open to serious congressional reform than other areas of bipartisan corruption, such as campaign finance, the lobbying laws or secretive mechanics for handling international trade agreements.

In addition, as we approach the 2000 presidential race, the schedule of the caucuses and primaries plays into the hands of both wings of the violence industry. On the GOP side, the big states with suburban voters who favor a crackdown on guns don’t vote until March. Meanwhile, the gun lobby might profit because the states with large ratios of conservatives, gun owners and hunters dominate early primaries and caucuses: Iowa, Arizona, South Dakota and New Hampshire.

For the Democrats, the probability that California could be decisive in the race for the presidential nomination between Vice President Al Gore and former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley should influence the contenders to be tough on the hardware of violence but muted with respect to the software. Too many important Democratic contributions come from Hollywood, even though many of the movie stars with the highest on-screen body counts--Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Clint Eastwood--have supported the GOP.

Could a third-party candidate emerge and capitalize on the freedom to attack both parties’ violence lobbies? In theory, perhaps, but there’s no one on the horizon. In a two-party situation, the recent GOP stumbles have increased the extent to which the issue favors the national Democrats. Even Gov. George W. Bush of Texas will have his hands full convincing the proverbial soccer moms.

Over the long haul, if the Democrats keep the White House in 2000, they may find both demographic trends and interest-group politics eroding their antiviolence image. But, in the meantime, DeLay, the former pest exterminator from Houston, is on his way to being as good a whipping post for the left as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.