Reload the Assault Gun Ban

Two months from today, the federal assault weapons ban dissolves like a wisp of gun smoke. Even though he proudly carried the National Rifle Assn.’s seal of approval in 2000, President Bush says he supports renewing the 10-year-old ban, but he has refused to push Congress in that direction. His word to congressional leaders would matter greatly now, just as his continued silence suggests that he values the NRA’s support over Americans’ safety.

The NRA’s strategy is to get its friends in Congress to run out the clock on the assault weapons ban. Toward that end, House leaders have blocked any vote on bills to extend the ban for another decade, and a Senate bill amended with renewal language died in March. Yet congressional leaders are pushing for votes on time-wasting wedge issues such as proposed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and flag desecration.

The 1994 ban bars the manufacture and importation of 19 specific semiautomatic gun models and others with similar features. These aren’t hunting weapons, unless you consider a classroom full of 7-year-olds or swing-shift workers at a factory to be prey.

The NRA loudly insists that the law is flawed because it bars some guns while allowing nearly identical weapons that have been cosmetically tweaked. That’s absolutely correct. But when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who sponsored the 1994 ban, proposed a more inclusive ban, like California’s, which defines assault guns by their generic characteristics, the NRA crushed it. It also killed her effort to close a loophole in the current law that allows importation of high-capacity bullet clips. If the federal law does expire, California’s assault gun ban would stay in effect. But there would be no bar against Californians buying these weapons of mass destruction in Nevada or elsewhere.

Bush justifies the war in Iraq by insisting that it has made this nation safer. But the president and his congressional allies risk making American cities and towns far more dangerous by their shameful failure to renew the assault gun ban. They have just 61 days left.

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To Take Action: Contact President Bush at (202) 456-1414 or president@whitehouse.gov; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, (202) 224-3344 or frist.senate.gov; House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, (202) 225-2976 or www.house .gov/hastert/.