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From Houston Chronicle, March 26, 2008:
Democrats Obama, Clinton tred softly on gun control
Silence on the issue has become the party's pattern
By DAVID LIGHTMAN
Mcclatchy-tribune
Democrats have been skittish about gun control since 1994. Their support for a strong anti-crime bill that summer, which included a ban on 19 types of assault weapons, was later seen by many party strategists as one reason that the party that year lost control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.
Six years later, after Vice President Al Gore lost states with large numbers of gun-rights advocates, many Democrats again saw gun control as a key reason he lost the presidential election.
But they won't find anything from Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York or Barack Obama of Illinois. They didn't sign the rival brief from other members of Congress who back the tough handgun restrictions.
The Democratic presidential candidates' silence is part of a pattern. For years, the national party has downplayed its historic sympathy for gun control for fear that emphasizing it would be politically costly.
Democratic politicians are "nervous about the gun issue, so they stay away from it," said Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Gun-rights advocates described the Democrats' dilemma in starker terms.
"The fact is that politicians have discovered there are 80 million law-abiding gun owners, and they're mad as all get out at politicians who want to take their guns away," said John Snyder, a spokesman for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
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