Word: guns
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...interview last weekend, the Vice President said his early views of the issue reflected the perspective of a Congressman from a rural part of the South where "guns did not really present a threat to public safety but rather were predominantly a source of recreation." As a young representative of a conservative Tennessee district, Gore opposed putting serial numbers on guns so they could be traced, and voted to cut the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms budget by $4.2 million so that it could not carry out regulations that had unleashed a torrent of 300,000 letters from gun...
What is likely to be more troublesome now are the votes he took in 1985 when the Senate--taking its first major stand on gun control in almost two decades--significantly weakened the gun law it had put into place after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. By then elected statewide, Gore was representing Memphis and Nashville and other urban areas where, he acknowledges, "gun violence was even at that time beginning to increase." But he voted against a 14-day waiting period for handgun purchases and for allowing their sale across state lines...
...fairness, Gore had plenty of company, even among Democrats, in backing the gun lobby during the 1980s. "Back in those days everybody did," says Sarah Brady, wife of Ronald Reagan's wounded press secretary, who became outraged enough by the 1985 bill to join the cause of gun control. But there were a few exceptions. "In 18 years in the Senate, Bill Bradley never cast a single vote in support of gun owners," notes NRA spokesman Bill Powers...
...then Gore had switched sides on the issue. He credits Sarah Brady for "helping a lot of us" see how gun control and overbearing government were not the same. And the admiration is mutual. "He's been one of our biggest proponents," she says of Gore...
Both of this year's Democratic presidential candidates have advanced ambitious gun proposals: Gore would require that purchasers of weapons obtain photo licenses; Bradley would go even further, registering the guns themselves. While Gore says he has an "open mind" on gun registration, he insists that the more radical step has "zero chance of being enacted...