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Delfay hopes Bush will push a national version of the law he signed in Texas that prohibits municipal handgun liability cases. An identical measure recently was signed into law by Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, a leading prospect for the GOP vice-presidential nomination.

Reality check No. 3: The National Rifle Association's PAC and lobbying operation have between them raised over $30 million for the coming year's elections and legislative battles. While to many Americans the NRA seems increasingly marginal and crazy -- remember when Charlton Heston declared that posting the Ten Commandments at Columbine High would have prevented the killings there? -- the group still commands 22 million members and a grass-roots lobbying operation that is the envy of issues activists everywhere, right or left.

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Sunday's march also comes at a strategically sensitive moment in the gun-control movement. Right now, gun-control advocates enjoy a strategic alliance with the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration. In fact, over the next few weeks, Democratic senators plan to link gun-control amendments to a Senate education bill.

But those amendments are largely symbolic. Democrats such as President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have spent the last 20 years courting rural, conservative male votes. They want quick, symbolic victories over the easy-to-demonize NRA, but they stop short of the kind of substantive measures needed to halt the flow of guns into America's cities, where most gun victimization still occurs.

Case in point: the agreement negotiated last month by the administration between Smith and Wesson and some of the 30 local governments suing gun makers for the health-and-safety damage caused by their products. On the surface a dramatic development, that settlement required little of Smith and Wesson beyond a handful of safety measures it already employs, and did nothing to force accountability for the distribution of guns into irresponsible channels.

Indeed, for all the discussion of locks, background checks and other hot-button safety issues, the real burden of gun violence -- and therefore the real challenge for a Million Mom gun-control movement -- comes from those distribution channels and the corporations that benefit from them. As a jury decided in Brooklyn last year, gun makers knowingly target the 35 states with the weakest firearms laws for a massive oversupply of weapons -- for gun sales far beyond what their local markets can absorb.

At the same time, nearly half of all federal firearms licenses are held by so-called kitchen-table dealers -- individuals who sell weapons out of the back of a truck or out of their homes. It is a system without the faintest hope of effective regulation. Until the industry is held financially accountable for weapons distribution, there will be little incentive to change -- which is why, in the short run, those 30 lawsuits remain key.

The Million Mom March was an event full of promise. But as Rep. McCarthy hinted, a march is not a movement, and a day's media event is not the same as political fisticuffs in the backrooms of legislatures. The gun control movement has always been hampered by the perception that it is too nice, and too moralistic -- sort of a politically correct version of the old temperance crusades.

But with the NRA trafficking in public fear and distortion, nice is definitely a problem. So is moralism if it allows gun control to be seen as an elitist attack on sport-gun consumers rather than a populist crusade against predatory corporations.

That hundreds of thousands of people felt motivated to march on Washington gives reason to hope for a turning point in the politics of guns, and by extension in the broader discussion of how to make America a safe society. But if the Million Mom March is to become a Million Mom Movement, it is time to put away the soccer gear and suit up for some hardball.
salon.com | May 16, 2000

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