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The lobby's alarmist attitude sometimes leads it to trample on the truth by distorting an opponent's positions. Says Republican Congressman Robert McClory of Illinois, who supports handgun controls: "They misrepresent my stand completely. They invariably charge that I'm trying to take their guns away, and I'm not." Kennedy—the target of an N.R.A.-backed $205,000 campaign last year opposing his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination—spent much of his time trying to explain that the N.R.A. was wrong in charging that he favored the confiscation of hunting weapons. Says Kennedy: "There is no question that they tried to distort my views."
Understandably, there are not all that many politicians with the courage to buck the gun lobby. Gerald Ford originally favored a ban on cheap handguns but backed down in the 1976 presidential election. Former Democratic Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana was a chief sponsor of gun-control legislation in the mid-'70s; like McGovern, he ended up supporting an N.R.A.-backed bill to loosen controls when his 1980 campaign drew near—and, like McGovern, he was defeated.
Some examples of the gun lobby's tenacious success:
> In 1975, Congressman Marty Russo of Illinois, who has somehow survived gun-lobby attacks, sponsored a bill to ban concealable weapons. After the House Judiciary Committee, on a close vote, approved the bill one Thursday, a high-caliber barrage of telegrams was unleashed over the weekend. Result: on Monday the bill was reconsidered in committee and defeated.
> As part of a legislative package to fight terrorism, Congress considered requiring manufacturers of explosives to put tiny color-coded chips into their products to help in tracing the source of terrorist bombs. Partly out of fear that any kind of controls could be a first step to restricting the use of gunpowders, the lobby fought the proposal on the ostensible ground that it would make the explosives dangerous for use in old-fashioned muskets. The bill was narrowly defeated in committee last June.
> In 1978, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) proposed a series of regulations to make fit easier to trace guns used in crimes. Within two months, the gun lobby marshaled 350,000 letters to ATF, many claiming that the bureau was planning to confiscate all firearms. The author of the regulations, Richard Davis, was called a "liar and perjurer" in an N.R.A. magazine and received harassing phone calls. Says he: "They make life so hard that you just don't want to mess with them any more." Congress forced ATF to drop the proposal.