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March of the racketeers
The Democrats are suing Tom DeLay for normal political practices and calling it "racketeering." But the real racketeers in Congress are Democrats and their family name is Kennedy.
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[05/12/00]

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And the good mothers turned out in droves. According to march organizers, 750,000 people attended the Mother's Day rally, although official estimates put the number at a vaguer "tens" or "hundreds" of thousands. The crowd was predominantly white and female, strollers were ubiquitous and pink was the favorite hue of the day. Marchers hailed from everywhere from Sacramento, Calif., to Ithaca, N.Y., and were affiliated with groups ranging from Jewish Women International to the National Education Association.

Funny lady Rosie O'Donnell emceed the rally, but the comedic mien she radiates on her television talk show was not on display Sunday. O'Donnell was all business and outrage as she described the obstacles attendees would have to overcome to see their anti-gun-violence agenda passed into law.

"The NRA [National Rifle Association] is buying votes with blood money," O'Donnell lectured sternly. But, she added, the organization had "better get used to us. We will not go away."

O'Donnell made gun violence a personal cause after the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo., last year, when she asked female viewers to take guns from their husbands and make their homes gun-free. In doing so, she became a de facto leader of the gun control movement, a potent antidote to National Rifle Association helmsman Charlton Heston. And in Washington on Sunday, she found a receptive audience.

The march was the brainchild of Donna Dees-Thomases, a part-time public relations consultant at CBS and mother of two who was spurred to action after hearing about the nursery school shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, Calif., last year.

Dees-Thomases and the other rally coordinators say they do not advocate an outright ban on handguns. Instead, the often-repeated line of the day was "licensing and registration" -- in other words, forcing gun owners to comply with the same requirements drivers do, an analogy that was evoked in many speeches. Specifically, licensing would force gun purchasers to complete a safety course and undergo a background check to ensure they didn't have a criminal record and were of legal age. The registration restrictions would also require a gun seller to check the purchaser's license and register the gun's serial number.

O'Donnell and other speakers pointed to recent examples of other activists who have successfully taken on entrenched interests. Mothers Against Drunk Driving led efforts to tighten drunken-driving laws across the country, and a series of state lawsuits extracted concessions of negligence and massive settlements from the tobacco industry. "People said tobacco was undefeatable," said O'Donnell. "They were wrong."

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