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Politics : The 2nd Amendment-- The Facts........ -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Schumer's Worst Nightmare who wrote (601)	6/18/1999 10:56:00 AM
From: JeffA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10167

Woo hoo! Lets hear it for the House! I guess if they had to pass something a milder version is better. Check this out, Comrade Klinton is mad at the "dead of night" vote. Turnabout is fair play. This is exactly how he got Brady passed. What a jerk. Clinton outraged at "dead of night" gun vote (Adds comments from Podesta, Reno in grafs 5-9) By Steve Holland COLOGNE, Germany, June 18 (Reuters) - U.S. President Bill Clinton on Friday condemned the House of Representatives' passage of watered-down gun control legislation as a ''great victory'' for the National Rifle Association lobby and a defeat for the American people. The Republican-controlled House voted 218-211 early on Friday in Washington for a plan to require only 24 hours for background checks of buyers at gun shows. Forty-five Democrats and 47 Republicans crossed party lines in their votes. Clinton had backed a plan to require three days for background checks, which the Senate had approved 51-50 in May with Vice President Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote. ''I think when the American people figure out what they did in the dead of night, they will be bitterly disappointed,'' Clinton told reporters. ''They'll be shaking their head and they'll wonder what in the world is going on in Washington.'' Administration officials said they would continue to press for passage of the Senate's version of the legislation as the gun control debate continues. The two chambers of Congress must eventually seek to reconcile differences in their measures. ''We're going to work very hard to reverse it and to see if we can get a good bill out of this,'' White House Chief of Staff John Podesta said on NBC's ''Today'' program. Attorney General Janet Reno said she would recommend that the president veto the legislation if the version passed by the House on Friday reaches his desk. ''But again I want to say it is so important for us to work through it now and, as we proceed this morning with Congress further considering the legislation, to look at what has been done and take steps to correct it now,'' she said on ABC's ''Good Morning America'' program. Reno said that with the House-passed version's 24-hour period for background checks, 17,000 people with criminal records, including a murderer in Texas, who were denied permission to buy guns in the past six months, would have slipped through the system. Clinton, in Cologne for the annual economic summit of major industrial democracies, had portrayed tighter gun control as essential to stem the kind of violence that struck Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20 in which two teenagers killed 12 fellow students and a teacher and then themselves. ''It was a great victory for the NRA, but it was a great defeat for the safety of our children,'' Clinton said. Clinton, who has battled against the powerful NRA throughout his presidency, did not threaten a veto of the legislation since the final version would have to be worked out in a conference between Senate and House representatives. Currently Americans can make immediate purchases of weapons at gun shows without background checks, although such checks are required at regular gun stores. The FBI has reported that many criminals purchase weapons through the unregulated gun shows. Clinton said the message from Congress was that ''if you go to a gun show and you'd rather not have your background checked, just walk outside and swap guns and money and everything is fine.'' He even blamed the NRA for the late-night vote, accusing it of engineering that ''in the hope that no one would find out that they are still running the Congress, this Congress, for their own convenience, instead of for the interest of the people.'' Clinton has blamed an NRA campaign as partly responsible for the ousting of Democrats from control of the House in 1994, saying the lobby targeted members who voted for the Brady handgun control law and a ban on assault weapons. He said the NRA ''can always produce several hundred telephone calls for every one an ordinary citizen can make.'' ''The people who feel strongly about this are not organized, they don't have a lot of money and they don't normally threaten people in public life the way the NRA threatens them,'' he said. On Thursday, Clinton had made an impassioned last-ditch appeal to Congress to pass stronger gun control measures, and telephoned several lawmakers from Paris to urge them to vote for tougher laws.