It’s a cliché that the Second Amendment is the favorite amendment of the Republicans. It certainly seems to be the one they are most likely to invoke, and it is also the one that they are most likely to protect.
Not all Republicans have the knee-jerk urge hostility to gun control, though. At least two Republican Presidents favored it.
President George H.W. Bush had been a Life Member of the NRA for years. He angrily resigned his membership in May, 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing that resulted in over 160 fatalities. One of the victims had been Al Whicher, a member of the Secret Service.
During the month before the attack, the executive vice president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, sent a fundraising letter in which he claimed that President Clinton’s ban on assault weapons “gives jackbooted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure and kill us.”
It was the “jackbooted thugs” line that angered and offended the President. He stated, “I was outraged when, even in the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy, Mr. Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of N.R.A., defended his attack on federal agents as “jack-booted thugs.” To attack Secret Service agents or A.T.F. people or any government law enforcement people as “wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” wanting to “attack law abiding citizens” is a vicious slander on good people.”
The President went on to characterize the slain Al Whicher as a “kind man, a loving parent, a man dedicated to serving his country.” He added that he had attended the wake for Steven Willis, an ATF agent slain during the confrontation with the Branch Dravidian cult. Bush called him “an honorable man” and said he was “no Nazi.”
President Ronald Reagan is a hero to many contemporary Republicans – and he had long supported gun control. That stance should not surprise anybody given the assassination attempt by John Hinckley, Jr. On March 30, 1981, Hinckley shot the President, Press Secretary James Brady, and two other people. Everybody survived, but Brady was left with permanent brain damage.
Reagan had supported gun control, however, even before the assassination attempt. In 1967, while Governor of California, Reagan signed the Mulford Act, which prohibited carrying firearms in public, regardless of whether they were on one’s person or in a vehicle. Reagan also passed a law that required a 15-day waiting period for firearm purchases. At the time, he was quoted as saying, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
In 1986, President Reagan signed the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which prohibited people from owning fully automatic rifles. There was a grandfather clause to protect people who had bought and registered such weapons before the law’s passage, but later purchases were forbidden. Three years later, Reagan commented, “I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.”
Reagan also supported the Brady Bill that mandated a week-long waiting period and background checks for people wanting to buy firearms. In a 1991 editorial in the “New York Times,” Reagan noted that if the bill had been law back in 1981, neither he nor Brady would have been shot. In his editorial, he also wrote, “Since many handguns are acquired in the heat of passion (to settle a quarrel, for example) or at times of depression brought on by potential suicide, the Brady bill would provide a cooling-off period that would certainly have the effect of reducing the number of handgun deaths.”