Guns -- the dead issue

EARLIER THIS MONTH, a conference was held on school safety in the wake of the murders of five Amish schoolgirls in Nickel Mines, Pa., and a series of other violent incidents.

President Bush was there, along with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. There was a survivor of the Columbine shootings, a collection of school superintendents and security officials and representatives of the PTA. Discussion of how to prevent school violence touched on everything from the use of metal detectors to video games to anger management. But according to the Washington Post, one prominent element in the school shooting sprees was not even mentioned: guns.

Now, a conference on school violence that evades discussion of the role of guns is like a seminar on “Hamlet” that focuses on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but makes no mention of the prince of Denmark.

Stemming the flow of firearms into irresponsible hands is the political issue that dare not speak its name. There was a time that high-profile killings such as the 1968 assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. brought passionate cries for limitations on handguns. A bipartisan omerta now smothers the issue. Republicans who have long fattened on the contributions of the National Rifle Assn., and Democrats who are tired of being dismissed as people who wield nothing more lethal than a Cuisinart, agree that lock-and-load is here to stay.

So quiescent is the issue of gun control that there is little current public opinion polling on the subject. But when the issue has been put to citizens, majorities have favored stricter firearms laws and restrictions on the ownership of handguns. A CNN exit poll taken during the 2000 election indicated that 60% of voters favor stronger gun laws.

Democrats used to point to such data to support their periodic efforts to rein in firearms, but always in a way so as not to alienate the nation’s many gun owners. After years of posing lamely with weapons of mass and middling destruction in attempts to reassure voters of their broad-shouldered manliness (recall Michael Dukakis’ ill-fated cruise in a tank at a Michigan factory in 1988, and John Kerry’s borrowed shotgun and barn coat in 2004), Democrats have run up the white flag. They have evidently concluded that curtailing the right of gun ownership is a nonstarter, especially if they intend to pursue victory in 50 states.

That’s the goal of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean. His vision of breaking the GOP lock on states such as Wyoming, Montana and Colorado has caused the Democrats to holster their olive branch, snatch the Winchester from the cold, dead hands of Charlton Heston and ride off under the leadership of Montana’s pro-gun Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer to confront the Mountain West Republican Party. We should not be surprised if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton shows up at the 2008 Democratic Convention togged out like Annie Oakley, shooting cigars out of the mouth of her husband, the former president.

The NRA, for its part, has decided to meet the Democrats halfway, scurrying to put some of its $20-million campaign war chest in the pockets of 60 gun-friendly congressional Democrats across the country, according to the Wall Street Journal. The NRA ran the table in the 108th and 109th congresses, which allowed the assault rifle ban to expire, curtailed municipal lawsuits against gun makers and mandated the quick destruction by the FBI of gun registration data. The NRA has evidently concluded that it needs to hedge its bets in the event that the Democrats capture one or both houses of Congress on Nov. 7.

But in truth, some of the efforts by Democrats to rein in firearms during the Republican-led congresses have been more symbolic than real. The assault-rifle ban was, in essence, an aesthetic campaign against ugly and menacing-looking rifles that operated no differently from ordinary hunting rifles. State and municipal gun laws, which Democrats typically back, are no match for vigorous interstate commerce in top-shelf Glock and Sig Sauer handguns and cheap knockoffs, which Democrats are helpless to curb.

There is much that the new, gun-friendly Democrats can learn from experience as the abortion-friendly party. They can, for example, modify that catchy pro-choice slogan and proclaim the hope that firearms “should be legal and rare.” Or how about a bumper sticker adapting the pro-choice battle cry: “If you are against guns, don’t own one”?