By Tom Curry
National affairs writer
MSNBC

 

WASHINGTON - Gun regulation was a defining issue of politics in the 1990s, but the gun controversy has faded since then. The only major battle at the federal level in the past seven years was the passage of a bill in 2005 prohibiting suits against firearms manufacturers in cases where a gun was unlawfully used.

 

Why did the issue lose its potency? And will the slaying of 33 people at Virginia Tech Monday revive it as a defining difference between the two parties or between candidates for president?

 

It’s too soon to tell on the latter question. Members of Congress were unwilling Monday to do more than simply offer condolences to the victims of the shootings.

 

A veteran advocate of tighter regulation of guns, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D- Mass, took to the Senate floor late Monday afternoon to mourn the deaths of the Virginia Tech students.

 

“There’ll be time to debate the steps needed to avert such tragedies, but today our thoughts and prayers go to their families,” Kennedy said. “We’re seeing things like this happen every day, but it’s not part of the headlines. Clearly we need to do more to keep our people safe from gun violence.”

 

Reluctance to comment on politics
Senate Republican Policy Committee chairman, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz, cringed and looked irritated when a reporter asked whether Monday’s events will revive congressional efforts to further regulate gun buying or ownership.

 

“As long as there are still folks who are hurt, who are in the hospital, and families that are grieving right now, it is not the time to be injecting politics into the situation down at Virginia Tech,” Kyl said. “When the time is right, I’m sure there’ll be a big discussion about it.”

 

The record of the past several years shows that gun control as a motivating issue has lost some of the power it once had, both for proponents and opponents of gun regulation:

 

In Virginia’s 2005 gubernatorial election, Republican Jerry Kilgore touted his gun ownership; Republicans criticized the action that Democratic candidate Tim Kaine took as mayor of Richmond to rent busses to send activists to the Million Mom March, an event staged in Washington, D.C. in 2000 by gun control groups. But the issue didn’t seem to help Kilgore as he lost to Kaine by nearly six percentage points.
 
In last year’s confirmation battle over President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, Democratic senators Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California criticized Alito for dissenting from two of his appeals court colleagues in 1996 who had upheld a federal law banning possession of machine guns. But the issue did not loom large in the effort to defeat Alito; he won Senate confirmation with the support of four Democrats as well as all but one Republican.

 

Schumer spearheaded Democratic efforts to regulate guns when he served in the House in the 1990s. But last year as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee he made a point of supporting strong gun rights advocates as Senate candidates in GOP-dominated states.

 

‘Pro-gun’ Democratic candidates
Schumer’s pick in Montana, Jon Tester, told one sportsmen’s group during the campaign, according to the Associated Press, “I am pro-gun, I’ve got a lot of ‘em. And what I tell folks is because of the Patriot Act we damn well better keep ‘em.”

 

In Virginia, Democratic candidate Jim Webb was likewise a supporter of gun owners’ rights.

 

Webb had argued in his 2004 book “Born Fighting” that Al Gore’s “position on gun control cost him the election (in 2000), not in Florida but in the Scots-Irish redoubts of Tennessee and West Virginia, both of which through history and logic should have been slam-dunk electoral votes in his favor.”

 

In his second debate with Bush in 2000, Gore had boasted that he’d cast the tie-breaking Senate vote on a bill to curb sales at gun shows.

 

Webb on Monday called the Virginia Tech shootings “an incredible human tragedy,” but like other members of Congress, he did not address legislation or policy.

 

Last month Webb used the arrest of one his aides for unwittingly carrying a gun into a Senate office building to underscore his support for gun owners’ rights.

 

When asked if he thought the Washington, D.C., gun ban should be overturned, Webb stressed his support for the Second Amendment and added, “I believe the Virginia law (which allows law-abiding people to carry guns) is a fair law. I believe that wherever you see laws that allow people to carry (weapons), generally the violence goes down.”

 

Kerry’s hunting ‘photo ops’
In the 2004 and 2006 elections, Democrats seemed to want to signal that their support for some regulation of guns did not mean they were hostile to lawful gun owners.

 

In the 2004 campaign Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry made two highly publicized hunting excursions, one in Iowa in 2003 and the other in the swing state of Ohio only a few days before the election. Kerry’s Ohio goose hunting event was intended to give voters “a better sense of John Kerry, the guy,” Democratic strategist Mike McCurry told reporters.

 

Republican consultant Chris LaCivita said, “Since 2001 Democrats have increasingly downplayed gun control as an issue because it has not had the impact they wanted.”

 

And to large degree the issue as a motivator for ideologically committed voters has been eclipsed by other controversies: in last year’s election and in 2004, the hot-button ballot measures were same-sex marriage, curbing governments’ power to acquire private property using eminent domain, and the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

 

It’s a decided change from the politics of the 1990s when President Clinton fought with congressional Republicans over gun regulations. In the short run, Clinton won: Congress passed the Brady bill which required a waiting period and background checks on gun buyers. The following year it enacted a ban on certain “assault-style” semi-automatic weapons.

 

But those very victories played a role in the Democrats’ loss of the House in the 1994 elections.

 

During its consideration in 2004 of a gun manufacturers’ liability bill that did not ultimately pass, the Senate did vote, 52 to 47, to extend for ten years the 1994 ban on certain semi-automatic weapons.

 

Among those voting to extend the ban were current Democratic presidential hopefuls Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Joe Biden, and Sen. Chris Dodd.

 

Among those voting “no” were GOP presidential contenders Sen. John McCain and Sen. Sam Brownback, as well as six Democrats, including now Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, and Sen. Max Baucus, who’s up for re-election next year.