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Yet there is little reason to believe that the new push for gun control will get very far. Standing in the way, as always, are two mighty forces: the stubborn belief of many Americans that they have a moral and constitutional right to own guns, and the efforts of the 3 million-member National Rifle Association to fan that belief. The N.R.A. has lost none of its ability to flood the offices of Congressmen and state legislators with angry mail against the mildest gun-control initiatives. True, it lost a highly publicized referendum last fall on a Maryland law that will in effect ban cheap handguns, but that defeat was offset by a little-noticed victory in Nebraska: voters changed the state constitution to make it more difficult for Nebraska towns and counties to enact strict gun legislation. On the federal level, N.R.A. lobbying helped kill a rather weak plan that would have imposed a seven-day waiting period on buyers of handguns.
Gun-control advocates can expect no help from the Bush Administration. Quite the contrary: the new President, a life member of the N.R.A., has sweepingly asserted that "free men and women have the right to own a gun to protect their home." His views echo those of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who reiterated his opposition to gun control even after he was wounded by John W. Hinckley. Hinckley used a pistol he had acquired from a Dallas pawnshop only four days after his arrest in Nashville for attempting to board an airliner while concealing three handguns in a carry-on bag.
So the prospect is that the arms race in the streets and suburbs will continue to escalate, trapping growing numbers of innocent people in the cross fire. There were examples just last week of people endangered merely by being in the wrong place:
-- In Watsonville, Calif., Ignacio Vasquez Segura on Tuesday walked into a packing shed on a mushroom farm where a former girlfriend worked. She was not there, so he asked for one of her friends, Raquel Guiterrez, 24, shot her dead and blasted away with a semiautomatic rifle, wounding two co-workers. Segura fled in a sports car and shot himself in the head as police were closing in.
-- In Bridgeport, Conn., the Rev. DeLen McCrae, his wife Imogene and her son Scott Bish were sleeping shortly after midnight Wednesday when a fusillade of gunfire tore through their house. They huddled on the floor in Bish's room until the firing stopped; no one was hurt, but several bullets ripped through a living-room couch on which McCrae's daughter would have slept that night had she not called off a visit. Next day an anonymous phone caller told Mrs. McCrae it had all been a mistake; the barrage was intended for a next-door neighbor.