Agenda courtesy of the Fourth Estate

Josey1

Agenda courtesy of the Fourth Estate Back when the Brady Crime Victim Disarmament Law was being debated, rape enabling legislators such as Charles Schumer and Ted Kennedy rolled their eyes and ridiculed as hopeless paranoids anyone who dared suggest that the goal was to set up some kind of national registry of gun-buyers. You know, the kind of pre-existing registry that proved useful when it came time for earlier governments to round up and confiscate the civilian weapons of the Armenian Turks in 1915, the Ukrainian Kulaks in the 1930s, and Hitler's untermenschen a few years later -- not to mention those of the hapless citizens of Mao's Red China and Pol Pot's Cambodia and most recently of England and Australia just in the past decade. How absurd! Anyone could see the law specifically barred the gathering of any such registry -- in addition to calling for the destruction of the records of gun-buyers who submit to "instant background checks" immediately after they're "cleared." So perhaps those naive enough to have once again trusted the gun-grabbers can be excused for scratching their heads and wondering if they'd entered some alternative universe when the headlines of The Washington Post on Dec. 7 read "Ashcroft Blocks FBI Access to Gun Records; Critics Call Attorney General's Decision Contradictory in Light of Terror Probe Tactics." Gun records? What gun records? Are the good senators talking about using the records police maintain after running those "instant background checks" -- which they're not allowed to keep and which only we "paranoid gun nuts" ever suggested they would keep anyway, in defiance of the law? Or are they talking about sending FBI agents into every gun store in the nation to rifle through the file drawers of the Brady Law "yellow sheets" -- which we've been promised would always be stored at the individual gun dealer's premises precisely so they could never be assembled into a searchable, computerized national "gun registry"? Meantime, how on earth do you suppose this issue ever arose at all, when everyone knows no firearms were used in the Sept. 11 terror attacks? The answer is that it was almost certainly no coincidence that Fox Butterfield's story, headlined "Justice Dept. Bars Use of Gun Checks in Terror Inquiry," played on the front page of The New York Times, Pravda to America's collectivist elite, on Dec. 6 -- the very day Mr. Ashcroft was scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The story thus provided the good senators with a handy briefing paper for their inquisition. "The (Justice) department made the decision in October after the FBI asked to examine the records it maintains of background checks to see if any detainees had purchased guns in the United States," the story noted. Read it again. He couldn't have said, "The records it (the Justice Department) maintains ..." could he? By Dec. 7, Butterfield's fellow Timesman, Neil A. Lewis, was quoting Sen. Kennedy, D-Chappaquiddick, in full bray, asking Mr. Ashcroft, "Why is the department handcuffing the FBI in its efforts to investigate gun purchases by suspected terrorists?" Sen. Schumer fumed, "When it comes to the area of even illegal immigrants getting guns and finding out if they did, this administration becomes as weak as a wet noodle." The Washington Post picks up the account: "Some critics charged that Ashcroft's strong opposition to gun control is interfering with his role as the government's top cop." (I've always loved the "some critics" construction, generally useful to read as "me and the people I watch `Ally McBeal' with.") Bush administration officials correctly told the Post that information collected by gun stores for use in background checks is by law unavailable for other police purposes -- White House spokesman Ari Fleischer going so far as to point out the current administration is only following a regulation signed a year ago by Attorney General Janet Reno, who ruled that records can be used only to audit the background-check system. But the Post was not to be so easily dissuaded from the assigned story angle. "Such regulations are easily changed, countered Clinton administration officials and other critics." (There they are again.) "They pointed out that Ashcroft has issued an order permitting federal investigators to listen to attorney-client conversations and sought to lengthen the time illegal immigrants can be held before being charged. At his request, Congress has granted many other powers in recent months." Do I have this right? The senators are arguing that since Mr. Ashcroft has been busily violating the law and the Constitution in other areas, he should not be such a stickler about obeying the law and what remains of the Constitution here? Did either leftist daily offer us a single, accurate headline on the order of "Senators Urge Ashcroft to Break Another Law"; "Senators Want Ashcroft to Help Them Break Their Own Brady Database Pledge," or "Silly Dems Forget: No Guns Used on Sept. 11"? Of course not -- though the obvious question any cub reporter might have asked the good senators was: "If your Brady Bill is working the way you said it would, doesn't that mean we can all rest assured that NO bad guys of ANY nationality are acquiring weapons in this country?" Or, on the other hand, "Do you mean to say you think your Brady Law isn't working? If that does turn out to be the case -- if it is allowing illegal aliens to buy guns from licensed dealers -- would the new Schumer-Kennedy solution be to say, `Oh well, that didn't work, so there's no sense hassling law-abiding Americans any more; let's just repeal the whole thing'?" They could have asked that question. But that might have generated something well beyond, "All the News that Fits Our Agenda." Vin Suprynowicz, the Review-Journal's assistant editorial page editor, is author of "Send in the Waco Killers." His column appears Sunday. http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2002/Jan-13-Sun-2002/opinion/17851502.html