By NR’s Editors

This editorial can be found in the April 3, 2000 issue of National Review.

Gun Rites
The ritual has become familiar: another horrific shooting, another round of calls for gun control. But this time, the calls sounded tinnier than usual. The perp, though a six-year-old boy, already had a history of violence. He lived, effectively parentless, in a crack house; he got the gun from there. President Clinton responded to the boy?s shooting of a classmate by renewing his call for legislation that would . . . regulate gun shows and require trigger locks. This was too much even for Greta van Susteren, as friendly an interviewer for Clinton as can be imagined. She suggested that a trigger lock would not stay on a gun in such an environment. Responded Clinton, lamely, ?I?m not at all sure that even a callous, irresponsible drug dealer with a six-year-old kid in the house wouldn?t leave a child trigger lock on a gun.?
All passion has left the gun-control debate in Washington; it is now solely a matter of political calculation. Dick Gephardt and other leading House Democrats demand that the House vote on ?gun safety? measures at least as strong as those already passed by the Senate. But the House itself has already voted against those provisions, and by large margins. So Gephardt is effectively insisting that the House reconsider a bill that cannot pass. The purpose is to scare suburban women by painting the Republicans as trigger-happy.

A few nervous Republicans want to counter this campaign by passing a bill that deals only with trigger locks. That, they think, would ?take the issue off the table.? It wouldn?t; Clinton would just make a new demand at the signing ceremony. Besides, there is reason to think that Gephardt has miscalculated. So far, the agitation for gun control has served mainly to swell the coffers of the National Rifle Association. Its officials expect to have 3.5 million members by Election Day.

Republicans, meanwhile, have found a winning message on guns: that we need to enforce existing laws, not write new ones. Juveniles with legal guns, according to the Justice Department, commit fewer crimes than juveniles without guns ? and, of course, far fewer crimes than juveniles with illegal guns. Yet prosecutions for weapons violations have fallen under Clinton. A recent Zogby poll found that 68.3 percent of Americans would prefer a candidate promising tougher enforcement to one promising tighter controls; only 29 percent expressed the opposite preference. There is no need to wobble.