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Carloads of pro-control mail have cascaded into Washington. Senators whose mail had run 100-to-1 against gun laws now found the ratio reversed. New Jersey's Republican Senator Clifford Case alone has received 11,000 letters since Senator Kennedy's death, 400-to-1 in favor of strong legislation. Tydings drew twice as many letters on guns in a few days as he has on Viet Nam in the past three years. The 16-month-old National Council for a Responsible Firearms Policy launched a campaign to send 10 million pro-control letters to Congress, also got 400 pickets to march around the N.R.A.'s gleaming, $3,500,000 Washington headquarters, where an armed guard is posted at the door. Thousands of brown paper bags, lettered with the words "Ban all guns" were sent to Senators. They also bore the message: "Pop one of these in the Senate. The surprise might get to the Senators."
In a rebuke to violence, 1,000 New York schoolchildren turned a mound of toy guns and comics—including Superman and Combat—over to trash collectors. Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward stopped mail-order gun sales after King's assassination; Macy's, Alexander's and Abraham & Straus in New York had quit selling guns even before that. Last week Ohio's J-Mart discount stores gave their entire $20,000 inventory of guns to the Columbus police.
Three leading gunmakers—Remington, Savage and Winchester—urged an end to mail-order sales of rifles and shotguns, proposed a permit system for gun owners and announced sponsorship of a long-range study of behavioral patterns in relation to the use of firearms. In San Francisco, 300 citizens voluntarily turned in weapons after an appeal from Mayor Joseph Alioto, who said that the city might "have them melted down and made into a sculpture honoring Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King." In Chicago, gun owners voluntarily delivered 100 weapons to police stations.
Everett-on-the-Spot. Most significant was the soul-searching among Senators, many of them Western liberals who have long bowed to N.R.A.-generated pressure and opposed effective controls. Washington Democrat Warren Magnuson, who as chairman of the Commerce Committee helped bottle up the Dodd bill after J.F.K.'s assassination, said he would now vote for a ban on the mail-order sale of all guns because of "the violence and terror surging through the streets of every county and every state." Democrats William Proxmire and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, Edmund Muskie of Maine, Mike Monroney of Oklahoma and Republican Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania said that they, too, were preparing to switch.
The Republican congressional leadership indicated that it might abandon its longstanding opposition and accept an Administration bill banning mailorder sales of all guns or even a stronger version by Tydings requiring gun owners to obtain licenses and register their weapons. "Let the testimony show the need," declared Senate G.O.P. Leader Everett M. Dirksen, "and I'll be Johnny-on-the-spot in supporting it."