The Arizona senator’s questionable commitment to Second Amendment rights.

By Dave Kopel, author of The Truth About Gun Shows

ohn McCain has apparently discovered that soft money has its merits,
now that a California billionaire is funding his appearance in gun control
commercials in Colorado and Oregon.

This might be considered a signal that McCain does not intend to seek the
presidency in 2004. Ever since the NRA created its Institute for
Legislative Action in 1976, it has been impossible for a candidate (other
than an incumbent president) who supports gun control to win the
Republican nomination (as Elizabeth Dole, Richard Lugar, and others have
discovered). The difficulty is exacerbated by the great influence that Gun
Owners of New Hampshire holds over the first-in-the-nation primary.

Indeed, it’s difficult for a candidate with a good but imperfect pro-Second
Amendment voting record to win a U.S. Senate race in Arizona ? which
may be one reason that Dennis DeConcini retired rather than face the
Arizona electorate after he became a leading proponent of banning
so-called “assault weapons.”

Through 1998, McCain had a strong pro-gun voting record in Congress. In
May 1999, McCain voted in favor of an NRA-supported provision that
encouraged, but did not force, small-scale gun collectors who sell firearms
occasionally at gun shows to run background checks on customers.

The next day, however, McCain led several Republican senators into
Trent Lott’s office and demanded that the vote be reversed. McCain
thereby set in motion a process which turned Sen. Orrin Hatch’s (R-UT)
juvenile crime bill into a Second Amendment nightmare ? including in it
provisions that would have given the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms unlimited taxing and regulatory power over gun shows, and the
de facto power to destroy gun shows. (Handgun Control, Inc., has
successfully lobbied several local governments in California to ban gun
shows entirely ? even though all California gun transactions must follow
background check laws written by HCI.)

Hatch’s bill was already a civil-liberties disaster, even without the gun
control. The House of Representatives, acting as the more temperate
body, reformed the worst of the gun amendments. The gun provisions
were split off from the rest of the bill, and House anti-gun Democrats, in
conjunction with constitutionalist Republicans, defeated the softened gun
bill, while the non-gun bill passed easily.

Fortunately, the intransigence of the White House and the Democratic
leadership prevented a conference committee from coming to any
agreement, and federalization of juvenile justice is not going to pass the
current Congress in any form. No thanks to Senator McCain.

Once the 2000 presidential race narrowed to Bush versus McCain,
Second Amendment activists overwhelmingly preferred Bush, agreeing
with the Arizona State Rifle & Pistol Association’s grading of Bush as a
“B” and McCain as a “C-” (and Gore as an “F”).

The press tended to agree; as Steve Brill pointed out, part of the media
enthusiasm about McCain reflected a press consensus that McCain’s
pro-gun and anti-abortion statements on the campaign trail were
“pandering” that did not reflect his true beliefs.

Nevertheless, the press is acting as if McCain’s television commercials for
gun control are as surprising as Charlton Heston demanding gun
registration.

McCain, for his part, still claims to support Second Amendment rights; on
national television appearances following his commercial blitz, he did
oppose the Gore national handgun licensing proposal, and he endorsed the
allowing of licensed, trained citizens to carry firearms for protection.
(Currently allowed in 31 states, including Arizona).

So if McCain remains sincerely committed to Second Amendment rights,
then he should have read the fine print on the Colorado and Oregon “gun
show” initiatives that he is backing. For in truth, both of these initiatives are
classic “bait and switch” tricks of the gun prohibition movement, and
contain controls far more onerous than background checks at gun shows.

For example, the Colorado initiative says that a “gun show” includes any
gun transaction where three or more people are present, or where 25 or
more firearms are displayed. Thus, parents who give their 17-year-old
daughter a BB gun for Christmas are running a “gun show” around the
Christmas tree. (The Colorado proposal defines “firearm” to include BB
guns, model rockets, and many other things that are not real firearms.)

Likewise, the Oregon initiative includes five-year record retention on
buyers and sellers (a.k.a. gun-owner registration), eliminates the privacy
of buyers’ medical records, and does nothing to prevent or punish the
abuse of personal records.

According to the Oregon Republican party, which unanimously voted to
oppose Oregon’s Measure 5, McCain’s chief of staff Mark Salter called
the party to ask about the issue ? after McCain already made the
commercial. Asked if McCain had read the Oregon initiative before taping
the commercial, Salter said that McCain had not.

The Oregon Republican party issued a press release blasting McCain’s
“hypocrisy.” The press release noted that “When Mark Salter was asked
that if the ORP can document to Senator McCain there are major flaws in
Measure 5, would the Senator reconsider his support for Measure 5 or
consider pulling his TV spot. The answer was NO.”

In the commercial, McCain claims that a legal loophole allows felons to
buy and sell thousands of guns at gun shows. “Many were later used in
crimes,” McCain says. “That’s wrong.” Of course there’s no data to
support this assertion. In truth, two separate studies by the U.S. National
Institute of Justice, other research, and even a study of Handgun Control’s
“educational” arm, reveals that gun shows barely even register statistically
as a source of crime guns.

During the presidential primaries, McCain did well with independents, but
was rejected by a large margin of Republican voters. Now, apparently, he
is returning the favor. One effect of McCain’s commercial may be to
stimulate the turnout of anti-gun voters, most of whom are not likely to
vote Republican. The Presidential election is so tight that it is possible that
a narrow Gore win in Oregon could give us President Gore. Colorado is
more solidly in the Bush camp, but Democrats believe that they have a
real chance to take the state Senate by a one-vote margin, giving
Democrats a major role in congressional redistricting.