Hindsight from The New Gun Week November 1, 1999
Gun Debate Spreading to Program Youth
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
The gun control debate appears to have gone into hyperspace. It's everywhere. Bill Clinton and other leading proponents of civilian disarmament are pulling out all the stops.Yes, he'd like to get Congress to pass restrictive new gun laws before they adjourn for the year, but he's in it for the long haul, too. What he wants from Congress this year is only a small part of his agenda. He'd like to come back for another bite out of the Second Amendment next year, and hopes that his successor will keep on chewing away at the Constitution.
That's one reason why he is exploiting every public relations tool at his disposal to keep the gun issue in the forefront of public attention. Since most of the media agrees with his civilian disarmament philosophy, he also doesn't have much trouble getting them to play along with his script writing and stage management.
Another reason Clinton's so keen to play the gun control card is that he believes it will be one of the trump cards of his party in the presidential and congressional races next year.
Finally, he sees what he is doing now to demonize guns as laying the groundwork for future generations who will be as completely anti-gun as he can make them.
StudentsThat's why he exploits school settings and students to further his agenda.
On Oct. 19, Clinton told high school students in Washington that they can be the key to lessening violence in their schools and in society at large, and asked for their help in passing new civil rights protections for homosexuals. According to Associated Press, he told the students that violence, fear and alienation lead to schoolhouse killings, and also represent age-old fears arising from ethnic and religious differences.
"If you can deal with that, you're going to have the brightest future of any generation of Americans," Clinton told a group of more than 350 young people on Capitol Hill who were attending a conference on violence that was spurred by school killings and stalled gun control legislation.
Clinton said expanding federal hate crimes legislation to cover crimes motivated by sexual orientation is very, very important, and complained that congressional Republicans are trying to block it.
One hundred-thirty members of Congress, overwhelmingly Democrats, selected up to five student delegates from their districts to attend the two-day event that began Oct. 19.
Republican Reps. Jennifer Dunn of Washington, Sue Kelly of New York and Connie Morella of Maryland were the only GOP lawmakers who chose to participate, according to Laura Nichols, spokeswoman for House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt (D-MO).
Asked why few Republicans were participating in the youth violence conference, John Feehery, spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, said it was a Democratic-sponsored event and "we didn't get invited."
The conference opened with a greeting from Clinton and Gephardt and a showing of "Fight for Your Rights: Through My Eyes," a new MTV documentary. A series of workshops on existing programs to address youth violence followed, including interactive demonstrations of violence prevention methods.
On the second day, the participants formed small groups to identify the top five primary causes of and solutions to youth violence, so they can present their findings to House and Senate leaders on the Capitol steps.
The conference ended with an Internet broadcast, moderated by Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, of a town hall-style discussion with kids in Washington and participating schools around the country.
School ShootingsClinton cited the Education Department's annual report on school safety and said that while homicides remain rare, the number of multiple victim homicide events at schools has increased.
"The bad news is, we've had Columbine, Jonesboro, Springfield, Pearl...places where there have been these horrible examples of school violence," he told the students.
Clinton urged the Republican-led Congress to pass hate crimes legislation and the anti-gun Lautenberg-scripted version of the Juvenile Justice bill that passed the Senate last May.
Gephardt, who represented the House Democratic Caucus, said the teen-ager summit was part of a larger effort to "come up with better answers" and revive the youth crimes bill stalled in Congress.
But Clinton isn't alone in his effort to program the minds of young people in the gun control debate. The New York Daily News on Oct. 19 happily reported that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and friends had their own program scheduled to debut on Oct. 21.
The Daily News claimed that Harry Ahearn, a retired New York Police Department homicide detective who now works as a guidance counselor at Intermediate School 278, was the organizer of the school's fourth annual Day of National Concern About Young People and Gun Violence.
The keynote speaker was to be hero cop Steven McDonald, who took a bullet in the spine, "educating us from his wheelchair about the madness of guns in the wrong hands," the newspaper reported.
Ahearn said, "Every Oct. 21, the kids are asked to take a national anti-gun pledge, promising never to bring a gun to school, resolve a conflict with a gun, and to influence others to do the same. But this year the counseling staff thought it would be a good idea to make a whole day out of it, instead of just a pledge.
Official SanctionSchool counselors contacted the NYPD and the Brooklyn district attorney's office, and each of them decided to send speakers. The DA's office sent an assistant DA to talk about the legal ramifications of guns, and a staff nurse, who is an expert on gunshot wounds, was to tell students just what a bullet does to the human body.
Chief James Lawrence of the NYPD will then ask the kids to make the anti-gun pledge, Ahearn reported. Because the 500-seat auditorium is too small to fit all 1,500 11- to 13-year-olds, there will also be seminars in the cafeteria on GREAT and DARE programs, which emphasize gang and drug prevention.
Alll of which raises the question of when taxpayers' money is used to promote general education and when it is being used to promote a political agenda. A retired NYPD officer told me that he believes the presence of the chief is a violation of city laws, if not state and federal, on the use of public employees for political purposes.
The Daily News apparently isn't much concerned, because it closed the story by saying: "This day at PS 278 should be a model for every intermediate school in the city."
Meanwhile, Associated Press gave further evidence of how heated the current gun control debate is by focusing on the increased lobbying activities on both sides of the issue.
HCI Spending Up 500%"Supporters of gun control saw a rare opportunity after the Columbine shooting incident to win more restrictive laws, AP reported, and have poured five times as much money into lobbying as usual.
The leading gun-control group, Handgun Control Inc., spent $340,000 from January through June of this year, up from $60,000 during the same period in 1998, AP claimed.
Still, Handgun Control's spending was less than half that of the NRA, they said. Using both its own staff and the help of outside lobbying firms, the NRA put $850,000 into its effort during the first six months of the year, compared with $750,000 during the same period a year earlier.
But even when the NRA spends money to convey its ideas to the general public, there are those who will put their own spin on the messenger even if they can't argue with the message.
In the same week the other stories I've cited were breaking, the wire service also reported that a new TV commercial by the NRA had angered some minority lawmakers because of its portrayal of blacks and Hispanics in a series of mugshot photos.
The commercial, which asks Congress not to create new federal gun laws until current ones are enforced more aggressively, started airing Oct. 11. It shows dozens of mug shots of criminals prosecuted in Ohio. While there are many whites in the mug shots, a large percentage are minorities.
Chief NRA lobbyist Jim Baker said critics are "grasping at straws trying to avoid the real message here-that prosecution on federal gun laws have dropped."
Baker said that he believes that these critics are simply trying to avoid that issue.
"It is more of a diversion than an honest criticism," said Baker.
The message from the media and anti-gun politicians, minority or otherwise, seems to be "don't interfere with our agenda."
The New Gun Week is published three times a month by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on the 1st, 10th, and 20th. Hindsight is a commentary written by SAF President and Gun Week Executive Editor Joseph P. Tartaro. This commentary may be reprinted so long as credit is given to the author and the publication. For more information or to subscribe, write Gun Week, PO Box 488, Buffalo, NY 14209, or call 716-885-6408 Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, or inquire on Compuserve to John Krull, Production manager-JohnSAF@Compuserve.com or gunweeksaf@broadviewnet.netAlso, check out the New Gun Week at http://www.GunWeek.com