Gun Lobby

When I was in the fourth grade, I was playing at a friend's house when he took his sister's shotgun out of a closet, put it up against my head and pulled the trigger.To my relief (and to the inestimable good fortune of you, my readers) the shotgun simply made a loud clicking noise.Why do 10-year-olds do such dumb things? Because they're 10-year-olds.My friend was not a particularly violent kid. In fact, he was a pretty nice guy. And he told me his sister always kept the gun unloaded.Not all kids, however, are as lucky as I was.On April 8, 1991, a 10-year-old girl from Severna Park was shot and critically injured by her 11-year-old playmate who had found a handgun on a basement shelf.

Commentator Peter Morici says it is impossible to prevent further gun atrocities through laws limiting firearms ("The false security of gun control measures," April 16). But I suspect he is hiding his real agenda. Mr. Morici is a conservative eager to defeat gun control laws that, he fears, might reduce their availability. That's proof in itself that laws banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and those requiring universal background checks will have exactly the effect intended: They will make it harder for people to obtain such weapons in order to wreak havoc on society.

I attended night courses back in the '70s with a very pretty young woman -- tall, blond and well-dressed. She wore designer clothes to her executive job.But in her designer pocket book she carried a small designer pistol -- a pearl-handled gun.And she had designed a gun-carrying rationale.She was a single mother who lived in a high-crime neighborhood. One day when the family was gone, they were robbed of most of her jewelry, antiques and appliances. Since then she had always carried a gun and what jewelry she had left in her purse.

Gun-rights advocates unveiled Tuesday a 225-page report paid for by the National Rifle Association that lays out a vision for arming teachers to prevent the kind of mass shootings that claimed 27 lives at a Connecticut elementary school last year. Drafted in response to the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary, the report calls for the creation of a 40- to 60-hour weapons training course that would prepare teachers or administrators to carry guns and confront possible shooters — ideas that drew a mixed response from Maryland officials.

WHEN MOTHERS speak, wise men and women listen. Today, Mother's Day, hundreds of thousands of mothers -- across lines of race, religion and region -- will join the Million Mom March for sensible gun control. Their message, like the wisdom mothers have dispensed for generations, is plain and powerful: guns are killing too many in this country. The time for excuses, delay, or inaction is over. We need to take steps now to get guns off the streets and out of the hands of people who should not have them.

WASHINGTON -- Only hours after the latest schoolhouse massacre in Colorado, President Clinton, the man in search of a legacy to lift his scandal-scarred presidency, went on television to let the American people see him feel their pain.Haltingly, about the best he had to offer by way of addressing the tragedy was to say Americans have to reach out and tell their children "to express their anger with words and not actions."He declined to say much more then because, he said in the somber tones he always emits on such occasions, he did not want to intrude on the grief of the victimized families.

WASHINGTON -- The National Rifle Association endorsed Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett's Democratic opponent last year. Since then, the conservative freshman Republican from Western Maryland has been working hard to make sure that doesn't happen again.He took the latest step yesterday, staging a news conference outside a House committee room to complain that he had been denied permission to testify against gun control legislation at a hearing about to take place inside the room.Mr. Bartlett has introduced two pieces of legislation which he says are designed to protect the constitutional rights of gun owners.

A national gun control group began airing an advertisement on two Washington radio stations yesterday criticizing Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. for his record on handguns. The ad -- scheduled to run eight times between yesterday and Tuesday -- is the first on radio or television in Maryland's 2002 gubernatorial campaign. The congressman from Baltimore County is the leading Republican candidate for governor. "We targeted Ehrlich first because we have concerns about his record," said Amy Stilwell, a spokeswoman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

WASHINGTON - In a sign of the changing political calculus of gun control, the Senate appears poised to pass a top priority of the National Rifle Association this week, legislation that would shield the gun industry from lawsuits arising from the misuse of their weapons. Gun manufacturers have pressed for years for such a law, arguing that it is needed to protect them from lawsuits filed by municipalities or individuals that the industry says could bankrupt it. Dozens of such lawsuits are pending.

The gun lobby suffered a well-deserved defeat yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to recognize a constitutional right to own machine guns. The justices let stand without comment a lower court ruling that said Congress had prohibited individuals from possessing or transferring such weapons in 1986.The high court's action was the only reasonable response. The gun lobby has persistently claimed an absolute constitutional right to possess firearms. Yet in 200 years, the court has never interpreted the Second Amendment to mean that individuals have an unlimited right to "keep and bear arms."

Jonylah Watkins died on a Tuesday. She was with her father, who was sitting in a minivan in Chicago on the night of March 11 when someone opened fire. Doctors worked 17 hours trying to repair what a bullet had done to her body, but to no avail. She died the next morning. Her funeral was about two weeks ago. She was 6 months old. Antonio Santiago was 7 months older when his mother put him in a stroller and took him for a walk in their Brunswick, Ga., neighborhood. Sherry West says they were accosted by two teenagers demanding money.

Watch out, ladies and gentlemen, the Maryland Senate - where Democrats outnumber Republicans 35 to 12 - could be going weenie on gun control. Already, they're caving to the "gun enthusiasts" on the proposal to require a license to buy a handgun in a state where, according to a Washington Post poll, more than 85 percent of us support it - 73 percent strongly so. By Wednesday, our mighty senators had cut the cost of the license from $100 to...

It is time to move beyond the archaic interpretation of the Second Amendment offered by the gun lobby ("What will get the NRA's attention?" Jan. 7). We do not believe in the legality of independent militias today, nor do we subscribe to the overthrow of the government by militias. To require a license and background check before someone can purchase a gun may be interpreted by some as an infringement of individual rights, but such laws are in place across the country. Enforcement of gun laws is costly, as is the cost of gun violence, and I believe it is absolutely necessary that gun owners bear the brunt of those costs.

In response to the editorial on guns in The Sun ("The missing issue: guns," Nov. 5) and a recent show on gun control on WYPR with Dan Rodricks interviewing Johns Hopkins professor Daniel Webster about a report by the Center for Gun Policy and research at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University: Kudos to The Sun, Mr. Rodricks, WYPR and Mr. Webster for bringing forth this discussion, one that is rarely heard in...

It is not too much of a stretch to say the National Rifle Association profits from mass killings like the slaughter at the theater in Aurora, Colo., and the killings at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. The NRA is, after all, a fundraising machine that runs on fear and a sense of crisis, even when the fear is false and the crisis manufactured. A former Republican lawmaker has made public a four-page fundraising letter from the NRA's executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, that was sent out to gun enthusiasts just three days after a young man styling himself as the Joker turned a showing of the new Batman movie into a bloody massacre.

We've said it before and we'll say it again: Firearms and domestic violence don't mix. So why is the Maryland Senate trying to wreck a bill intended to protect victims of abuse by tacking on an amendment that would keep guns on the table in domestic violence cases? This is cynical politics at its worst. The bill, sponsored by Gov. Martin O'Malley, would require judges to confiscate firearms from partners who are under final restraining orders as a result of domestic violence. The rationale is obvious: Given the explosive nature of abusive relationships, the presence of any firearm can quickly turn deadly.

The police in Killeen, Texas, profess mystification over what led George J. Hennard to burst into a restaurant and kill 22 people who were having lunch. But regardless of what dark motives may have lurked within Hennard, there is on one thing virtually every reasonable person can agree upon: He was insane. If he was not, then we need to redefine insanity.But what of other people who came forward after this dreadful event took place? The victims' bodies were not even cold before a spokesman for the gun lobby said the massacre only proved that people needed guns to protect themselves.

ATLANTA -- Kids love superheroes because they're invincible, brave, all-powerful. Children can suspend disbelief to look up in the sky for Superman or around the corner for Wonder Woman. Teenagers are enamored of a TV series called Heroes, which revolves around young people with - you guessed it - superpowers. But it's more than a little disconcerting to hear that so many adults also believe in superheroes. They must. Why else would they insist that the best way to prevent carnage of the sort that occurred last week at Virginia Tech is to put guns into every available hand?

ATLANTA -- Last Tuesday, a man followed a woman into a downtown Atlanta hotel - in the same complex as CNN's headquarters - and shot her in the face and upper body, leaving her fatally wounded. He, in turn, was shot by a security guard and remained hospitalized late last week. The victim, Clara Riddles, worked at the hotel, but the rage that radiated from her assailant, Arthur Mann, was apparently personal. Family members say the two had been dating, but Ms. Riddles had recently broken it off. What propelled the shooting into national headlines was that it happened in the same building occupied by hundreds of CNN staffers, and it was also near a major sports venue where college basketball's Final Four tournament had ended the night before.