ABSTRACT
The interest-group pressures discussed in chapter 4 converge primarily on Congress. As the sparring from 1934 between Representative McCormack and General Reckord suggests, the political texture of gun issues in Congress has maintained an astonishing degree of similarity in the past eight decades. The NRA was actually far more amenable to gun regulations in the 1930s,
however, than since the 1980s; for example, it helped draft a handgun waitingperiod law for the District of Columbia in the 1930s, as well as DC’s very strict handgun law written in the 1970s-which the Supreme Court struck down in 2008. Yet the policy line since that time reflects, one might argue, a regression (either desirable or undesirable, depending on one’s point of view). In the 1930s national gun registration was openly advanced as an achievable national policy.1 In the 1990s gun control supporters hailed as a great, even landmark, victory the passage of a modest, even marginal, policy change-enactment of a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases.
