Gore, Bradley Use House Gun Vote as Campaign Fodder

Temporarily united by a common target, the competing Democratic candidates for president lashed out Friday at congressional Republicans who blocked efforts to restrict sales at gun shows, effectively blaming them for future carnage on America’s streets and in its schools.

“What is the Congress doing?” a heated Vice President Al Gore rhetorically demanded, speaking in Los Angeles before several hundred Fairfax High School students and supporters in a midday rally in the school’s gymnasium. “Why don’t they wake up and respond to what the American people want?”

Arriving in Los Angeles on the third day of his presidential announcement tour, Gore used a town hall meeting to characterize congressional Republicans--and by extension any GOP presidential candidate--as handmaidens to the National Rifle Assn.

“Let me just tell it like it is,” Gore declared. “There is only one reason the Republican leadership in Congress fought against closing that gun show loophole. It’s because of the National Rifle Assn. and their gun lobby.”

Speaking separately at a Friday morning meeting with Los Angeles Times reporters and editors, Gore’s Democratic challenger, Bill Bradley, presaged Gore’s remarks with a similar denunciation of the House vote.

“The House vote, I think, was an embarrassment,” said Bradley, who is in the closing days of a nine-day campaign swing through California. “It’s an insult to the American people.”

Both Democrats were reacting to the GOP-controlled Congress’ move early Friday to weaken proposed new restrictions on sales at gun shows. The measure had passed the Senate earlier after Gore broke a tie in the upper house. Later Friday, the congressional gun measure was scuttled.

In focusing on guns, Bradley and Gore were seizing an issue that is particularly potent in California, one of the nation’s biggest supporters of restricting weapons. In a Los Angeles Times Poll this week, Californians overwhelmingly favored tighter gun controls. Almost nine of 10 voters supported the stricter Senate version of the gun show bill.

As he did Wednesday when he formally announced his presidential aspirations in Tennessee, Gore on Friday tried to draw the Republican presidential front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, into the gun control debate. He criticized Bush--without naming him--for signing a measure that bars cities from suing gun manufacturers to recoup the costs of gun violence.

“While some want to pass new protections for gun manufacturers . . . I will fight for new protections for families to get guns off the streets, out of the schools and away from the hands of criminals,” Gore said.

In Texas, Bush spokeswoman Mindy Tucker responded to Gore’s criticism.

“Gov. Bush does not believe the manufacturers of legal products should be held responsible for the criminal misuse of those products,” she said. “Vice President Gore must be suffering from a case of misplaced responsibility.”

Gore’s Los Angeles appearance was partly a repeat of his announcement address and partly an effort to personalize himself after months of criticism, even from Democrats, about his wooden presentations.

But Friday, in the kind of forum favored by empathizer-in-chief Bill Clinton--and the type in which Gore has often seemed stilted--the vice president did an Oprah Winfrey turn.

Taupe suit coat cast aside, he ticked off his proposals for improving education and ridding schools of violence, then asked for questions, some of which were arranged.

One young woman he called on by name, Jessie Funes, a Fairfax High senior, spoke movingly of being pushed nearly to suicide by “horrific” treatment from peers who objected to her lesbianism. Then she broke down in tears.

Gore loped from his lectern to where she stood in the middle of the gymnasium and embraced her. The crowd applauded. When he returned to the lectern, he endorsed California legislation, advocated by Funes, that would have banned discrimination against gay students in public schools. The measure, by Democrat Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, was defeated this month by one vote.

“Jessie, thank you for your courage,” added Gore’s wife, Tipper.

Bradley spoke at The Times event, appeared at a Glendale breast cancer clinic and then flew to San Francisco, where he was scheduled to speak late Friday at a dinner attended by lawyers who have joined together to halt gun violence.

Painting a haunting portrait of an America where “the roar of the Columbine tragedy still echoes across the land,” Bradley, in prepared remarks, said that guns had robbed the nation of its liberty.

Breaking from his plan to avoid specifics during this campaign tour, Bradley ticked off his gun control plan: eliminating so-called Saturday night specials, or cheaper handguns; limiting the purchase of handguns to one per person per month; requiring gun show background checks and mandatory trigger locks; and barring firearms dealers from residential areas. He would also make it illegal for those convicted of domestic violence to possess a handgun.

Many of the proposals were made unsuccessfully during Bradley’s three terms as a U.S. senator from New Jersey. The one-a-month idea was also proposed by President Clinton this year but was not included in the administration’s gun control pitch because it was perceived as doomed.

Gore’s own gun control proposals, reiterated Friday, were also specific but not as far-reaching as Bradley’s. He favored raising the age for purchasing handguns from 18 to 21, limiting sales to one per person per month, outlawing sales of assault weapons and large capacity magazines to juveniles, and restricting sales at gun shows.