Target Practice - Republicans' blatant failure in handling public response to media pressure for increased gun control legislation

A media gun show.

If the public is outraged about loose gun laws after the Littleton massacre, politicians outside Washington haven't heard the news. Sure, the California assembly restricted gun purchases to one a month within 48 hours of the killings (which were planned for at least a year and involved four guns, but never mind). And efforts to crack down on gun shows in Oregon have accelerated. But most of the action in the states has been pro-gun.

In the weeks since Littleton, Arizona, Arkansas, and Nevada have prohibited cities from suing gunmakers for the costs of gun-related crime. Legislatures in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas have sent similar bans to governors who will certainly sign them. Also since Littleton, the Michigan house, by a two-to-one margin, has passed legislation to let citizens carry concealed weapons; it stands a good chance to become law.

Are these state legislatures "out of touch with the tides of public concern," as the New York Times editorialized about pro-gun forces in the nation's capital? No. Polls suggest the public disapproves of the municipal lawsuits. But that fact is getting washed away by the tide of media coverage of the public's supposed "outcry" and "uproar" against guns.

Actually, it's not clear that Littleton has changed public attitudes toward gun control much. True, polls show that large majorities of men and overwhelming majorities of women back gun locks, waiting periods, and the like. But that's been the case ever since polls started to ask about these topics. Karlyn Bowman, the American Enterprise Institute's pollwatcher, says that the biggest long-term change in public attitudes has been a slow and steady erosion in support for a total ban on civilian handgun ownership: Gallup found 49-44 percent support for one in 1965 and 39-58 percent opposition post-Littleton.

Most people do not believe gun control will do much to reduce violent crime; they just consider the minor restrictions on offer unobjectionable, and possibly helpful. One sign of the shallowness of support for controls is that Democrats have a measly eight-point advantage in the ABC/Washington Post poll of which party the public trusts more to handle gun issues. The voters who actually cast their ballots on the issue, meanwhile, object to almost all controls. There's no evidence that has changed, either. As for the bogeyman of the NRA, in several polls more people view it favorably than view it unfavorably, even after Littleton.

In truth, the new "outcry" on which the press is reporting is its own. And even the public's longstanding support for some regulations is partly a result of abysmal reporting on basic facts about guns and federal law. When Elizabeth Dole came out against automatic weapons and assault weapons, nobody pointed out that automatic weapons have essentially been illegal since 1934 or that "assault weapons," a category invented by the gun-control lobby, are different only in appearance from other weapons.

The other change in the Beltway dynamics of gun control, besides self- fulfilling media spin, has been a shift in the strategy of gun-control groups. In the past, even when they pursued small-scale initiatives, their ultimate goal-a ban on civilian ownership of handguns-became clear. That's what happened during their push in 1993 and 1994 for waiting periods to buy guns (the Brady bill) and a ban on assault weapons. "They got cocky and pushed too hard on legislation and even more in rhetoric," says David Kopel, a law professor at New York University. "A lot of gun owners might not have minded the Brady bill within its four corners. But when they saw it was a deliberate strategy to change the culture, they said no." This provocation of gun owners was an important factor in the Democrats' loss of Congress in 1994, as even President Clinton has said.

The gun-control lobby no longer talks about banning handguns, only about keeping guns from criminals and children. The pro-gun coalition is left making the slippery-slope argument: Accept this tiny regulation, and eventually all guns will be outlawed. Now this is in fact what the gun-control lobby clearly hopes for, and some proposed regulations make sense only as way stations to a sweeping ban. But to most people, the slippery-slope argument sounds paranoid. So the anti- gun side achieves a strategic objective: making the NRA and its allies look first unreasonable and then disreputable. And the Democrats achieve their objective: getting suburbanites to associate the GOP with people for whom they feel no cultural affinity.

Republicans are playing right along with this strategy. The surest way to make an issue or an ally an embarrassment to oneself is to act embarrassed by it. This is what Georgia Republicans are doing by trying to rescind a speaking invitation to NRA official Wayne LaPierre. Since they are not converting to the gun-control side en masse, the main effect is to suggest that these Republicans have something to be embarrassed about. Still more harmful to the party is Mrs. Dole's insinuation that her rivals for the presidential nomination are bowing to "special interests," namely the NRA.