A historical perspective might help inform the conversation we’re having on becoming a Second Amendment Sanctuary City. A Haines Chatters debate began last week in response to a link from The Brady Plan. The Brady Plan is an advocacy group aimed at reducing gun violence started by President Ronald Reagan’s former press secretary Jim Brady, who, during an assassination attempt against Reagan, was shot in the head and paralyzed.
Until the 1970s you couldn’t predict a person’s stance on gun safety legislation based on their party affiliation. Republicans were as likely as Democrats to support gun safety measures, as part of law-and-order campaigns. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, had supported gun safety measures.
When signing The Mulford Act in 1967, which repealed a law allowing the public carrying of loaded firearms, Reagan said he saw “No reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” This was, in part, a response to Black Panthers carrying loaded weapons while protesting at the state capitol.
Nixon’s law-and-order campaigns and his war on drugs involved support for gun regulation. In 1972 he urged congress to ban Saturday-night specials. “I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” he said.
Another interesting quote from the NRA’s executive vice president in 1963 during testimony before Congress supporting a ban on mail-order gun sales: “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”
The NRA also supported the 1968 Gun Control Act, which banned mail-order sales, restricted certain high-risk people from purchasing guns and prohibited the importation of military surplus firearms.
I cite these quotes not as an argument for or against specific gun safety laws, but to show how deeply partisan the issue has become. By the standards of today’s so-called discourse, the NRA at the time, Reagan and Nixon would be branded as radical socialists by the far-right media.
Like many things in this country, gun safety became a wedge issue, not based on the merits of the argument but as a way to drive voters to the polls based on fear and partisan combat. The so-called debate we’re now having is exactly what this issue is designed to do by cynical political strategists and interest groups who care more about power than the public good: anger and divide people who have more in common than not.
Assembly members surely didn’t introduce this resolution intending to divide. But they should be careful not to allow outside interests to bring messes like this to town. We don’t need it.
Assemblies have a poor track record gauging public sentiment. When it came to legal marijuana and the Stand for Salmon initiative, past assemblies voted on resolutions that went counter to what voters ultimately decided at the polls. Assembly people heard from their friends and assumed that was the majority. If the current assembly really wants to pursue such a divisive issue, they should put it on the full municipal ballot and let the public decide.