Clinton, NRA in War of Words

By Calvin Woodward
Associated Press Writer
Monday, March 13, 2000; 2:23 p.m. EST

WASHINGTON ?? Escalating a bitter feud with the National Rifle Association, the White House today angrily accused the NRA of making “outrageous and disgusting” charges about President Clinton and called on the NRA’s political supporters to repudiate the statements.

The White House response was triggered by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre’s assertion that Clinton exploits gun deaths for political purposes.

“I’ve come to believe that he needs a certain level of violence in this country,” LaPierre said Sunday. “He’s willing to accept a certain level of killing to further his political agenda and his vice president, too.”

Clinton read the remark verbatim today at the close of a Democratic fund-raising speech in Cleveland to make the point, he said, “that there really is a difference between the two parties” on gun control issues.

“Maybe he really believes this,” Clinton said. “And if he does, we’ve got even more trouble than if it’s a horrible political thing.”

Vice President Al Gore also lashed back today from the presidential campaign trail, demanding an apology from LaPierre.

“Anyone who has spent time as I have ? many times ? with the families of the victims of gun violence and felt the heartache, seen the way gun violence tears families apart, couldn’t possibly make such a comment,” Gore said in Miami. “And I believe Mr. LaPierre’s comments reveals a kind of sickness at the very heart of the NRA.”

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said LaPierre’s charges were “a sick attack on the president.”

“I haven’t seen anything this low in a long time in Washington,” Lockhart said, “and if there are right-thinking people in the NRA and the leadership of political parties who support the NRA, they ought to stand up and repudiate it.”

Asked if his remarks were aimed at Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the apparent Republican presidential nominee, Lockhart said, “I think if it was in his heart that this was a repugnant statement, he should say it.”

At issue was a new advertising campaign in which NRA President Charlton Heston all but accuses Clinton of lying in his characterizations of the group as an impediment to sensible laws and public safety.

Several of the 13 ads that have started to run on network affiliates and cable TV networks end with Heston saying, as if speaking directly to Clinton: “When what you say is wrong, that’s a mistake. When you know it’s wrong, that’s a lie.”

More broadly, the sparring was over Clinton’s two-track effort to use his final year to win some of the gun controls that have eluded him so far and inject the subject into the presidential campaign pitting Vice President Al Gore against Bush.

Clinton, interviewed Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” said people can’t take seriously the “wounded rhetoric” of the NRA, “given how ruthlessly brutal they were” to members of Congress who helped pass the Brady waiting-period bill and the ban on assault-type weapons.

“These crocodile tears, I don’t think it will wash with the voters, even with Moses reading the script,” he said.

Heston, an actor, played Moses in the movie “The Ten Commandments.”

LaPierre, also on “This Week,” attributed Clinton’s renewed focus on guns to his interest in getting Gore elected. “The pollsters and consultants are telling them, scare suburban women,” he said.

Among other steps, the president wants people who make purchases at gun shows to be subject to background checks that could take as long as 72 hours. Many congressional Republicans and the NRA want any such checks to be instant, or at least no longer than 24 hours.

“I just think that the knee-jerk reaction to any gun safety measure is wrong,” Clinton said of the NRA. “If you do one little thing that requires any accommodation … they think it’s the end of the world.”

“You know, they basically win through intimidation,” Clinton said. “People are scared of them.” But while the organization may have over 3 million members, “there’s more people than that in America,” he said.

Following Clinton, who taped the ABC interview Friday, LaPierre wasted no time going after the “level of dishonesty this man is capable of.”

He contended that the administration has been singularly lax in enforcing gun laws already on the books. “You can’t care about stopping crimes with guns and give the country a complete lack of enforcement,” the NRA official said.

Congress would have given Clinton most of what he wants last year ? including gun show checks and mandatory child-safety locks on guns ? but the president “killed it all” by insisting on a 72-hour wait at the shows, LaPierre said.

In one ad, Heston quotes Clinton as saying other countries have lower rates of gun deaths because they don’t have an NRA. “You want a country with no NRA, a country with no Second Amendment,” says a transcript of the ad.

Another ad said the statement that 13 children die every day from gun accidents is a Clinton lie. Heston put the number of such accidental deaths at 130 a year.

But Clinton’s statement ? which he has since revised to 12 children ? concerns the average number of young deaths overall from guns, not just accidents.

He bases it on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which says 4,223 juveniles were killed by guns in 1997 ? an average of 11.6 per day.