6.09.00
Republican Gun Folly

6.08.00
Off Target

6.07.00
Smart Growth

6.06.00
Payday Mayday

6.05.00
The Next Pro-Life Fight

6.02.00
Missile Opportunity

6.01.00
Elián and the Embargo

5.31.00
A Successful Launch

5.30.00
Testing Time

5.26.00
How Safe Are You?

5.25.00
Separated at Birth

5.24.00
Mergerphobia

6/09/00 6:00 p.m.
More Gun Folly
Sometimes the GOP gets off message through easily avoided errors.

By NR's Ramesh Ponnuru & John J. Miller

o be unable to have a unified message is the chronic complaint of a congressional party. The problem is especially acute if the media is hostile to its positions. It well may be in the interest of the Republican party as a whole to end the week on a high note, having passed a repeal of the unpopular estate tax with a veto-proof majority. But individual Republicans have an incentive to get favorable coverage by muddling the message. And so you have a picture of John McCain pushing campaign-finance reform on the front page of the New York Times; and, on the jump page, a picture of Republican congressman Greg Ganske standing by Ted Kennedy in support of a patient's bill of rights.

Sometimes, though, the party gets off message through easily avoided errors. One such error would be taking the advice Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, recently gave at a meeting of House and Senate Republican leaders. Nickles said Republicans could take the gun issue off the table if the House would pass some cobbled-together package including mandatory trigger locks. Senate Democrats, who don't want to pass anything so as to preserve what they think is a winning issue, would filibuster any such package. But Nickles thinks this is good: Republicans would be able to point out their hypocrisy. Representative J. C. Watts, also a Republican from Oklahoma, agreed with the idea-but backed off when Tom DeLay, the House majority whip, pointed out that the votes weren't there to pass such a bill.

DeLay knows that even if Denny Hastert, Dick Armey, and John Dingell (the leading pro-gun Democrat) were to sign off on a gun-control bill, more than 130 congressmen would vote against it as a violation of Second Amendment rights. Another 100, mostly Democrats, would vote against it as insufficient. So the upshot would be several days of debate during which Democrats would have ample opportunities to drive a wedge between Republicans and soccer moms-although not as many as if Nickles got his wish of a protracted Senate debate, too. As a bonus, Republicans would also appear unable to run the House.

And let's not forget the fact that pro-gun voters would be upset with the Republican leaders. Some Republicans on the Hill say that there would be no problem, since the National Rifle Association "signed off" on mandatory trigger locks last year. But the NRA was willing to swallow that only as part of a larger deal that included elements they favor (e.g., a restoration of the right to self-defense in D.C.). They don't support a stand-alone bill on trigger locks-and more important, neither do their members.

Nickles and Watts aren't the only ones promoting this bad idea; Henry Hyde, chairman of the House judiciary committee, has long been nervous about gun issues. But the nervousness is unwarranted. Take a look at the state of public opinion in the aftermath of the Million Mom March and the first anniversary of Columbine. In today's USA Today poll, 30 percent of adults were worried that gun violence would increase under a President Bush-and 54 percent were worried that there would be too many restrictive gun laws under a President Gore.

Going Postol
Pentagon officials "are systematically lying about the performance of a weapon system that is supposed to defend the people of the United States from nuclear attack," said MIT physicist Ted Postol in an interview with the New York Times published today. The crux of his charge is that recent, successful missile-defense tests have been so laughably simple that an enemy could easily outwit a fully deployed system through the use of decoys and other countermeasures.

Senator Thad Cochran, Republican from Mississipi and a leader on missile defense, vigorously disputed Postol in a floor speech. Cochran pointed out that a rogue state like North Korea is a long way from developing the sophisticated countermeasures that first-generation national missile-defense systems — built specifically to rebuff small launches from desperate countries — may find confounding. "For every idea that is transformed into hardware and subjected to the real world's trials, many others, thought up by smart people with Ph.D.s from the best universities, are discarded as impractical. Countermeasures are no less subject to this reality than are the weapon systems they are intended to frustrate. Imagining is one thing; designing, building, and testing is quite another."

The New York Times story remains troubling; it quotes sources in and out of government criticizing missile defense's testing regimen. Many questions must be answered before deployment can begin, and that means testing, testing, and more testing — something liberals have never supported. When they're fighting against testing, they say missile defense can't ever be made to work because the technology is too far out of reach or effective countermeasures are too cheap. But when the tests show positive results, they say the tests aren't rigorous enough. The reasoning is circular, and the answer is to ignore their loopy logic and move straight ahead.

Columns / Current Issue / Goldberg File / Nota Bene
Washington Bulletin / Subscribe / Ad Info / Home