Senate kills bill giving lawsuit immunity to gun makers, dealers
By HELEN DEWAR
Washington Post
3/3/2004 
 
 WASHINGTON - In a major reversal, Senate sponsors of legislation to shield the firearms industry from lawsuits Tuesday abruptly killed their own bill after it was amended to renew an expiring ban on assault weapons and to require background checks for gun show purchases.

The legislation had been regarded as a virtual certainty for passage only hours before. But it was defeated, 90-8, after Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, chief sponsor of the lawsuit measure, took the Senate floor to say the bill had been "so dramatically wounded it should not pass."

Earlier, the National Rifle Association, which had made the legislation its top legislative priority for the year, began sending messages to senators urging its defeat because of the gun-control provisions that had been added earlier in the day. Craig is a member of the NRA board of directors and rarely disagrees with the organization.

Although both sides vowed to continue pushing for their respective proposals, collapse of the Senate bill makes it unlikely that Congress will enact gun legislation this year, according to senators on both sides of the issue. Without congressional action to extend it, the ban on assault weapons will expire in September, allowing renewal of traffic in the semiautomatic, military-style weapons.

Craig was joined in killing the bill by many Democrats and moderate Republicans who had supported the amendments on assault weapons and gun shows, but had misgivings about giving gun manufacturers and dealers broad immunity from lawsuits arising out of gun crimes.

To a large extent, the bill - and its fate - reflected the Senate's ambivalence on gun control: It is a difficult and divisive issue, especially in an election year. Although a majority wanted to stop what they regarded as unwarranted lawsuits against legitimate gun makers and dealers, majorities also wanted to keep the ban on assault weapons and crack down on shady deals at gun shows.

For purists on both sides, it appeared that no bill was preferable to one that contained provisions that they deeply opposed.

Moreover, despite their glee over passage of the gun-control provisions, Democrats knew the provisions would probably be stripped out in negotiations with the House, whose GOP leaders strongly opposed them. Republicans feared Democrats, angry over their exclusion from House-Senate negotiations last year, would refuse to send the bill to conference and insist that the House agree to the gun-control provisions as the price for industry immunity protections.

"Everyone's between a rock and a hard place" on the issue, said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., who had fought for the gun-control provisions but regarded the lawsuit immunity proposal as "a terrible bill." In all, "we end up the day a lot better than we started off. . . . The NRA and its allies are in retreat," Schumer added.

In a measure of the proposals' political as well as legislative significance, Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina returned to the Senate for the first time this year to vote for the two gun-control proposals, although their votes turned out not to be critical.

"The right to bear arms is a right that should be protected for law-abiding Americans," Kerry told the Senate. "There is no right, however, to place military-style assault weapons into the hands of terrorists and/or criminals who wish to cause American families harm." Edwards did not speak before the votes.