Republicans and the Gun Lobby

By The New York Times | Editorial

14 April 12

epublican politicians gathering at the National Rifle Association convention in St. Louis are eagerly pandering to a powerful political lobby that is intent on making the nation's gun laws weaker and more riddled with more dangerous loopholes. Rather than tackling public safety risks like the Stand Your Ground law implicated in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Mitt Romney and others offered nothing but exhortations to defend the Second Amendment's right to bear arms at all costs.

President Obama has regrettably been avoiding the gun control issue. Still, Mr. Romney attacked him at the convention on Friday, promising to stand with the N.R.A. "for the rights of hunters and sportsmen and those seeking to protect their homes and their families." This was a far cry from Mr. Romney's 1994 campaign for the United States Senate when he assured centrist Massachusetts voters: "I don't line up with the N.R.A." Yet there he was in St. Louis, lining up. Newt Gingrich, in his over-the-top manner, urged a United Nations campaign to proclaim the Second Amendment "a human right for every person on the planet."

The convention, in its "celebration of American values," has drawn tens of thousands of members to see genuflecting Republicans and to browse a seven-acre commercial mart of guns and shooting paraphernalia, much of it designed for the battlefields of war, not the home front.

Notably absent are top Democratic politicians, who seem to have concluded that, despite thousands of constituents shot or killed each year, it is best to go silent about gun control.

Polls show Republicans enjoy heavy support and donations from gun owners. In return, the gun lobby has had steady success in weakening gun laws — especially in the two dozen statehouses that followed Florida in enacting new self-defense laws to allow the instant use of deadly force in a confrontation rather than retreat from danger. These laws are fostered by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, with heavyweight business supporters like Walmart, a major gun retailer.

The families of the victims killed and wounded in the Virginia Tech massacre do not come close to having such clout. For the tragedy's fifth anniversary next week, they are having a hard time securing meetings with Washington politicians to fix the law that promised a more complete and up-to-date federal list of the mentally ill, who should be barred from buying guns. But two dozen states have submitted fewer than 100 mental health records each when tens of thousands should be entered, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national gun reform group. Financing to help state reporting efforts was supposed to be $1.1 billion over the last four years, yet Congress appropriated only $51 million. So goes the nation's utter failure to deal with the gun menace.