Senate OKs Crime Bill; Gun Curbs Come After New Shooting

Responding to the recent spate of school shootings, the Senate on Thursday passed a bill that would impose new gun control measures for the first time in five years, try to curb depictions of violence in the entertainment industry and take other steps to crack down on youth violence.

The bill was approved, 73 to 25, after the Senate dealt a blow to the gun lobby and agreed to an amendment that imposed strict new background check requirements on all firearm transactions at gun shows and pawnshops, with Vice President Al Gore casting a tie-breaking vote.

The gun show amendment, opposed by most Republicans, supplanted a GOP-backed measure passed last week that President Clinton and other Democratic critics charged was riddled with loopholes.

“This is a turning point for the country,” said Gore, whose pivotal vote on the gun show checks likely will become a key issue in his presidential campaign. “Finally a majority of the United States Senate . . . is turning the corner and helping to protect the children.”

The cliffhanging vote was the emotional climax of a week of steady gains in the Senate for gun control advocates, who hailed the results as a sign of the waning power of the National Rifle Assn., long considered one of the Capitol’s most formidable lobbies.

“What you just saw is the NRA losing its grip on the United States Senate,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

The gun control debate, which already had been dominated by the blood-soaked images of last month’s massacre at a Colorado high school, took on a fresh sense of urgency Thursday with another shooting at a school in Conyers, Ga. That helped persuade Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.) to change his position on the gun show amendment and cast a crucial vote for it.

“What really clinched it for me was when I heard about the shootings literally in my own backyard,” Cleland said.

The surprising vote on the amendment was another signal that powerful political cross-currents are forcing the GOP to reposition itself on the volatile gun control issue, which polls show is particularly important to suburban women, who are often crucial swing voters.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), a strong opponent of gun control in the past, earlier this week endorsed new gun show regulations and a higher minimum age, from 18 to 21, for gun purchases. Two GOP presidential hopefuls--Elizabeth Hanford Dole and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)--have kept their distance from the party’s traditional hard-line opposition to gun control. Even an aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), one of the party’s staunchest conservatives, conceded that the House likely will join the Senate in passing some sort of gun control measures this year.

The issue will begin moving in the House as early as next week, with a planned House Judiciary Committee hearing on gun law. Full House debate on legislation to combat youth violence may come as early as mid-June. Hastert and Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) have been discussing ways to produce bipartisan legislation on the subject.

The Senate’s juvenile crime bill had long been in the works and would give states and prosecutors new tools to crack down on youth crime. But starting last week, the measure spawned an emotional, protracted debate on how the government should respond to the Colorado massacre.

Availability of Guns Is the Focus

Dominating these discussions were arguments by Democrats that the best way to combat youth violence is to limit the availability of guns. Before adoption of the tough gun show amendment, the Senate over the last week--often by surprisingly large margins--approved proposals to:

* Require all handguns be sold with safety devices.

* Ban juvenile possession of certain assault weapons.

* Prohibit the import of high-capacity ammunition clips.

While significant, these provisions were relatively modest compared to more far-reaching measures, such as a one-gun-a-month purchase limit, that Democrats decided not to offer for fear of jeopardizing the entire bill.

With many lawmakers casting part of the blame for school shootings on an entertainment industry that they castigated as violence-obsessed, the Senate also approved several amendments designed to pressure Hollywood into changing its ways.

The bill would:

* Launch a federal investigation into whether the entertainment industry targets young people in marketing violent images, as well as a study of the effect of media violence on children.

* Grant an antitrust exemption to allow entertainment companies to develop a “code of conduct” to keep violence in their products to a minimum.

* Discourage the use of public lands for filming movies that promote “wanton or gratuitous violence.”

But the Senate’s appetite for bashing Hollywood appeared to wane Thursday as it voted, 56 to 41, to reject an amendment to establish a 12-member independent commission to recommend ways to hold the film industry accountable for children’s access to violent material. The remedies could have included legal action against producers or government regulation of movie content.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) led the charge against the amendment, complaining that it would have called for a third entertainment-related study in the bill and that the government had no business regulating the content of movies.

“We have investigation mania going on here,” Boxer said. “This one is frightening to me to think that the federal government would now begin to regulate the content of the movies.”

The razor-thin vote on regulating gun show purchases was the final twist in what became a meandering, often-confusing controversy over that specific issue. The battle began last week when Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) first proposed the background check requirement on all gun show purchases. It was designed to close a loophole in current law that requires such checks only on sales by licensed firearm dealers, not by the many unlicensed sellers who attend gun shows.

With most Republicans voting against the proposal, it was defeated, 51 to 47. But two days later, faced with vehement criticism that the party was beholden to the gun lobby, Republicans reversed themselves and offered their own proposal to require gun show background checks. This version won narrow approval, but Democrats, including President Clinton, heaped scorn on it. They charged that it would create a new, special class of purchasers who would escape background checks and said that it would allow people to recover their guns from a pawnshop without such checks.

Led by Lautenberg, the Democrats forced the Senate to revisit the issue Thursday by offering a revised version of his initial amendment. He said it would close the GOP loopholes by unambiguously requiring background checks on all those who buy firearms at gun shows or recover their guns from pawnshops. It would permit up to three days for the gun show background check and allow fees to be charged for running the check.

Most Republicans continued to oppose the proposal, saying that the fees would amount to a tax on gun owners and that the three-day waiting period was too long. GOP senators contended that, if Lautenberg’s amendment becomes law, many gun buyers and sellers would shun gun shows and turn to the black market.

The six Republicans who had backed Lautenberg’s initial amendment last week stuck with him Thursday. The revised version picked up two more votes from Democrats who had been absent last week and a crucial new vote from Cleland.

That created a 50-50 split. Knowing that the vote could be close, Gore was in the chamber prepared to exercise his right as vice president to preside over the Senate and cast a tie-breaking vote. It was only the fourth time in his more than six years as vice president that he has done so.

Thursday’s vote gave Gore a welcome opportunity to bask in the political limelight on a popular issue at a time when many Democrats have been concerned that his presidential campaign has gotten off to a slow start.

As the vote was announced, Democratic gun control advocates, including Boxer and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), crowded into the well of the Senate chamber for gleeful congratulations.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart pronounced the president “very pleased that the Senate adopted the common-sense approach in the Lautenberg amendment.” Lockhart issued his statement aboard Air Force One, which was flying Clinton to Littleton, Colo., for meetings with families of the victims of the April 20 shootings at Columbine High School.

The NRA lambasted the vote on the gun show amendment, saying that it would be more productive for the administration to step up enforcement of current gun laws than to pass new ones.

“It’s more made-for-television lawmaking,” the group said in a statement. “Everyone knows this won’t stop the crisis in our schools.”

Wellstone, Feingold Break Party Ranks

On passage of the overall bill, 42 Democrats voted for it, two against it. The two no votes were cast by Sens. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, one of the chamber’s most liberal members, and Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, who frequently charts his own course.

The vote among Republicans reflected the party’s deep division on gun control issues: 31 supported the bill and 23 were against it, almost all from the GOP’s conservative wing.

The last time a gun control measure cleared Congress and became law was in 1994, when Democrats were the majority party in the House and Senate. But the Democratic support for increased firearm regulation was widely seen as a key reason Republicans won control of Congress in that year’s fall election. And until this year, GOP congressional leaders had easily sidetracked various gun control proposals.

The basic elements of the juvenile crime bill were overshadowed by the gun control furor. A key provision would allow U.S. prosecutors to try as adults defendants as young as 14 who are charged with violent federal offenses. Under current law, the decision about whether to try a juvenile as an adult is made by federal judges, not prosecutors.

The bill would authorize $1 billion a year over five years for grants to states for juvenile crime prevention and enforcement. And it would eliminate a current requirement that states identify whether they have a disproportionate number of minority youth in jail and, if so, to take steps to address that.

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The Turnaround

Last week, the Senate defeated a proposal to require mandatory background checks all transactions at gun shows. A similar proposal, an amendment to the juvenile crime bill, passed Thursday.

1: Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), right, switched his vote from nay to yea.

2: Sens. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), left, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who were absent for last week’s vote, voted yea on Thursday. Vice President Al Gore broke the tie.

The Bill Would. . .

Make it easier to charge juveniles as young as 14 with violent federal crimes.

Require background checks on all firearm transactions at gun shows and pawnshops.

Revoke the right of gun ownership for anyone convicted of a gun crime as a juvenile.

Require gun safety devices to be sold with all handguns.

Limit the liability of gun owners who use the gun lock when the firearm is stolen and used to commit a crime.