Gore changed position on Gun Control, or, “Why am I not surprised?”

March 1st, 2012

As Political Stage Changed, Gore Shifted
on Gun Control

By JAMES DAO

ASHINGTON, July 5 — During
his first campaign for the Senate,
Al Gore was asked by The Nashville
Banner in 1984 whether he could support
“stiff controls” on firearm sales and
ownership. His answer was a resolute “no.”

“I do not believe that such measures would
keep handguns out of the hands of
criminals,” said Mr. Gore, then a four-term
congressman from a rural Tennessee district
who earned an “A” rating from the National
Rifle Association that year.

But in 1987, when Mr. Gore was running
his first campaign for president, he gave a
very different answer to gun control
advocates seeking his support on Senate
legislation to ban plastic guns.

“He wanted to do whatever it took to
reduce gun violence,” said Sarah Brady, the president of Handgun
Control Inc. Ever since, Mrs. Brady has regarded Mr. Gore as one of
her movement’s staunchest supporters.

This year, Mr. Gore has placed gun control at the center of his campaign
for president. He has attacked his Republican rival, Gov. George W.
Bush, as a pawn of the N.R.A. and proposed an array of tough laws,
including licensing new handgun buyers, limiting gun purchases to one a
month and banning inexpensive and easily concealed handguns.

But in promoting his gun agenda, Mr. Gore’s campaign has largely
airbrushed away his early record in Congress of fighting gun control
legislation. To his critics, his stark evolution from N.R.A. ally to enemy
provides clear evidence that on contentious issues like gun control,
abortion and smoking, Mr. Gore has molded his views to fit political
needs.

“He was positioning himself for national office,” said Senator Larry Craig,
an Idaho Republican and N.R.A. board member. “I’ve watched him
make very calculated decisions on issues to build a national base. Gun
control was one.”

Mr. Gore and his supporters argue that his embrace of gun control was a
heartfelt response to a rising tide of gun violence in the late 1980′s. Mr.
Gore himself credits Mrs. Brady — whose husband, James, was partly
paralyzed in 1981 by a bullet meant for President Ronald Reagan — with
helping to change his views.

“The views of many people, not just elected officials, have evolved on
this issue as gun violence has become more prevalent,” said Mark
Fabiani, Mr. Gore’s deputy campaign manager for communications.

Mr. Bush has been more consistent on the issue than Mr. Gore, and for
years has been seen as a reliable N.R.A. ally. As Texas governor, he has
signed into law several bills the rifle association supported, including one
letting people with handgun licenses carry concealed weapons and
another prohibiting municipalities from suing gun makers.

N.R.A. officials said it was virtually certain the group would endorse Mr.
Bush this fall and throw millions of dollars behind his campaign.

In explaining his opposition to stringent gun control, Mr. Bush often
asserts that a well-armed populace is an effective deterrent to crime.

“I believe this legislation is helping make Texas a safer place to live,” he
wrote in a letter to a voter this year that defended letting more people
carry concealed firearms.

In contrast, a review of Mr. Gore’s record over 24 years suggests that
his journey through the gun control issue has been more complicated than
either his supporters or critics imagine.

Indeed, some people who knew him at the time suspect that Mr. Gore, a
one-time divinity school student, actually supported gun controls before
he entered office. But cautious and pragmatic to the bone, they suggest,
he behaved like most other Tennessee Democrats when he became a
politician, expressing opposition to gun laws.

In Mr. Gore’s first campaign for Congress in 1976, for instance, he
indicated to The Nashville Banner, the more conservative of the city’s
two daily newspapers, that he would not support new gun control laws.
When the paper endorsed him, Mr. Gore reprinted and distributed the
editorial, which included a glowing reference to his opposition to gun
restrictions.

Yet Mr. Gore also muddied his position with mixed messages. In an
interview that same year with the city’s more liberal newspaper, The
Tennessean, where Mr. Gore had earlier worked as a reporter and
editorial writer, he contended that The Banner had oversimplified his
positions. Instead of opposing gun control wholesale, he told the paper,
he was open to certain restrictions, including one he advocates today, a
ban on the cheap handguns known as Saturday night specials.

Friends and colleagues say they think Mr. Gore stifled or concealed
those pro-gun-control sentiments during the 1976 campaign, fearing that
he would anger voters in the Fourth Congressional District, a staunchly
Democratic but socially conservative swathe of hamlets, rolling forests
and tobacco farms in middle Tennessee.

“My thinking is that he wavered on gun control,” said Lloyd Armour, who
was Mr. Gore’s boss on The Tennessean’s editorial page. “But you had
to recall that he was from a very conservative, I mean very conservative,
district. He could not have survived if he had been as forthright as he is
now.”

If Mr. Gore was conflicted on the issue during the 1976 campaign, his
early voting record in Washington was not. During his first decade in
Congress, Mr. Gore steadfastly opposed gun restrictions, winning “A” or
“A-” ratings from the N.R.A. in three of his first five campaigns. And
though it appears that he did not receive campaign contributions from the
rifle association, the group says it mailed literature praising his record to
its members in his district.

“I don’t think he was a stand-up, rah-rah, pro-gun congressman or
senator,” said James Jay Baker, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist. “But he was
a solid vote for us, which those grades indicate.”

Mr. Gore supported efforts in the late 1970′s to stop the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from creating a system of serial numbers
to be used to trace weapons. The N.R.A. argued that the system was a
first step toward national gun registration. Mr. Gore agreed, and voted to
cut the bureau’s budget by $4.2 million, killing the plan.

After winning election to the Senate in 1984, Mr. Gore continued to be a
reliable vote for the rifle association. In his first year, he supported the
gun lobby’s most prized goal of the decade: a sweeping repeal of federal
gun laws that had been enacted after the murders of Senator Robert F.
Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. Mr. Gore’s
father, Albert, had voted for those restrictions in the Senate.

The repeal called for ending federal limits on the interstate sale and
transport of guns, restricting the government’s ability to seize weapons
and significantly reducing its ability to inspect firearms dealers.

With Mr. Gore and most other Southern Democrats voting for it, the
Firearm Owners Protection Act, as it was known, sailed through the
Senate by a 79-to-15 vote. To this day, Mr. Gore contends the act
contained provisions that made it worth supporting, including tougher
penalties for crimes committed with guns.

But gun control advocates view the law as one of their worst setbacks in
decades, though some of its most far-reaching provisions were removed
during negotiations with the House.

After enactment of the repeal measure, Mr. Gore continued to express
skepticism about gun control, telling the magazine Washington Monthly in
1986 that “gun laws haven’t been an effective solution to the underlying
problem of violent crime.”

But by 1987, as crack fueled a surge in gun violence, public sentiment
began to shift in favor of stricter gun laws. Congress began to feel the
pressure, and police organizations joined the ranks of gun control
advocates, giving lawmakers political cover to oppose the N.R.A.

When Mrs. Brady called Mr. Gore that year to solicit his support for the
ban on plastic guns, he readily agreed. He was absent for the vote when
the measure failed, but co-sponsored a similar bill the next year.

Republican opponents and other critics say Mr. Gore had an added
motivation for switching sides just then: in the spring of 1987, he had
jumped into the presidential campaign.

Two leading Democratic candidates, Michael S. Dukakis and Jesse
Jackson, were strong proponents of gun control, and, his critics assert,
Mr. Gore was trolling for votes in New York and New England, places
where regulating guns was popular. Mr. Gore denies that.

Though his presidential campaign collapsed in early 1988, Mr. Gore’s
advocacy for gun control grew stronger. In 1990, he helped negotiate a
bill banning certain semi-automatic weapons, and urged his fellow
Tennessee Democrat, Senator Jim Sasser, to support it.

His critics say Mr. Gore tried to have it both ways on the assault
weapons ban, voting against an amendment to extend the ban to more
weapons, then voting for the final bill. But gun control advocates call the
amendment a “poison pill” that could have killed the overall bill.

In 1991, Mr. Gore co-sponsored a bill named after James Brady
requiring a five-day waiting period for handgun buyers. Six years earlier,
Mr. Gore had voted against similar legislation. This time, he rose to give
one of his few floor speeches about gun control in 16 years in Congress.

“Violence in this country and violence with guns is a problem that must be
addressed not next month, not next year, but now,” Mr. Gore said, in a
losing cause.

But even as Mr. Gore was working for passage of the Brady bill in
Washington, his staff was telling reporters in Tennessee that Mr. Gore
was undecided about the measure, according to news accounts in
Nashville papers.

Both the assault weapons ban and the Brady bill were defeated in
Congress those years. But in the Clinton administration, Congress passed
both bills and they were signed into law. And last year, Mr. Gore cast the
tie-breaking vote in the Senate on legislation to require background
checks for gun buyers at gun shows. That bill is now stalled in
negotiations between the House and Senate.

Republicans say Mr. Gore’s shifting views on gun control raise questions
about his candidness and credibility. But gun control advocates say what
matters most is that Mr. Gore is staunchly in their camp today.

“His constituents may have influenced his early votes,” Mrs. Brady said.
“But once he gave it some thought, he supported gun control, for the right
reasons.”