Nixon wanted ban on handguns
President Richard Nixon delivering his State of the Union Address to the Congress, Jan. 30, 1973. / AFP / Getty Images
WASHINGTON -- Few presidents in modern times have been as interested in gun control as Richard Nixon, of all people. He proposed ridding the market of Saturday night specials, contemplated banning handguns altogether and refused to pander to gun owners by feigning interest in their weapons.
Several previously unreported Oval Office recordings and White House memos from the Nixon years show a conservative president who at times appeared willing to take on the National Rifle Association, a powerful gun lobby then as now, even as his aides worried about the political ramifications.
"I don't know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house," Nixon said in a taped conversation with aides. "The kids usually kill themselves with it and so forth." He asked why "can't we go after handguns, period?"
Nixon went on: "I know the rifle association will be against it, the gun makers will be against it." But "people should not have handguns." He laced his comments with obscenities, as was typical.
Nixon made his remarks in the Oval Office on May 16, 1972, the day after a would-be assassin shot and paralyzed segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. As president, Nixon never publicly called for a ban on all handguns. Instead, he urged Congress to pass more modest legislation banning Saturday night specials, which were cheaply made, easily concealed and often used by criminals.
Not all of the president's men appeared to share his passion on the issue. The recordings and memos show that Nixon administration officials saw gun control as a political loser.
Nixon, a Republican, did say publicly that if Congress passed a ban on Saturday night specials, he would sign it. But in a sign of how potent the NRA was even 40 years ago, this narrow piece of legislation never made it to his desk, and there is no sign that he ever sent a draft bill to Capitol Hill.
Today, President Barack Obama faces similar hurdles in trying to ban assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines. Gun control advocates say no one needs such powerful weapons to kill an intruder or take down an animal. In Nixon's time, the argument of such advocates was that Saturday night specials were too poorly made to be relied on for self-defense or hunting.
"Let me ask you," Nixon said to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1971, "there is only one thing you are checking on, that's the manufacture of those $20 guns? We should probably stop that." Saturday night specials sold for $10 to $30 at the time. Mitchell responded that banning those guns would be "pretty difficult, actually," because of the gun lobby.
"No hunters are going to use $20 guns," Nixon countered.
"No, but the gun lobby's against any incursion into the elimination of firearms," said Mitchell.
The term Saturday night special originated in Detroit, where police observed the frequency with which the guns were used to commit weekend mayhem. Lynyrd Skynyrd memorialized the weapon in its 1975 song, "Saturday Night Special," in which the Southern rock band sang: "Ain't good for nothin'/But put a man six feet in a hole."
Nixon's private comments were not always supportive of gun control, particularly measures that would go beyond handguns. For example, in a taped conversation just a few days after saying that people shouldn't have handguns, the president asked rhetorically, "What do they want to do, just disarm the populace? Disarm the good folks and leave the arms in the hands of criminals?"
But most of his comments on the tapes, available at the websites of the National Archives and of the University of Virginia's Miller Center, were in favor of stronger gun control.
At a June 29, 1972, news conference, about six weeks after Wallace's shooting, Nixon said he'd sign legislation banning Saturday night specials. Later that year, the Senate did pass such a bill, but the House never acted on the legislation.
The bill's sponsor, Indiana Democrat Birch Bayh, said in a recent interview that the NRA helped prevent his bill from getting through Congress. The Nixon administration supported an unsuccessful Republican alternative Senate bill on Saturday night specials that had a definition the NRA preferred.
The shooting of another politician put gun control back on the radar the following year. On Jan. 30, 1973, two robbers shot Sen. John Stennis, D-Miss., and surgeons initially thought he would die. Stennis survived and lived until 1995.
The day of the shooting, Nixon told White House special counsel Charles Colson, "At least I hope that Saturday night special legislation, at least we're supporting that, you know. We're not for gun control generally, but we are for that. God damn it that ought to be passed. Or was it passed?"
When Colson told him it hadn't, Nixon instructed his counsel, "We better damn well be for it now, huh?"
At a news conference the next day, the president repeated his call to ban Saturday night specials. He also volunteered a comment that few national politicians would make today: "Let me say, personally, I have never hunted in my life. I have no interest in guns and so forth."
By March 1973, aide John Ehrlichman was telling Nixon that gun control was a "loser issue for us."
"You've got a highly mobilized lobby," he told the president. "I think what we have to do is carve out a little piece of it, and Saturday night specials, of course, has been our tactic."
Other White House officials also argued against doing much, including Tom C. Korologos, a White House deputy assistant for legislative affairs who later was an outside lobbyist for the NRA and ambassador to Belgium under President George W. Bush.
"The thing that worries me is that the president's hard-core support comes from the gun-folk and obviously we need support these days," Korologos wrote in an Aug. 31, 1973 memo, referring to the Watergate scandal that would undo Nixon's presidency.
"Lurking in the background is the president's personal statement: `I'm a liberal on gun control,'" Korologos said. Nixon might have made this statement privately; there is no record of him saying it publicly.
Korologos' conclusion: "I vote for a `talk' meeting and then `tough it out' by doing nothing and hope nobody gets shot in the next three years."
The effort to ban Saturday night specials receded in recent decades as the focus of gun control advocates shifted to rein in more powerful weapons.
Nixon's focus soon shifted, too.
In June 1972, a little over a month after his chat about banning handguns, Nixon had a recorded conversation that showed him trying to get the FBI to stop investigating the break-in at Democratic offices at the Watergate office building by burglars tied to his re-election committee.
Few remember the tapes about handguns. History forever remembers the tape that gave Nixon's Watergate pursuers their "smoking gun."
Popular in Politics
- Officials on Benghazi: "We made mistakes, but without malice" 292 Comments
- For GOP, scandals could be an electoral plus - or minus 75 Comments
- Where is the Benghazi cover-up Republicans promised? 378 Comments
- FBI seeks anonymous source behind Menendez allegations
- Ousted IRS chief: "I did not mislead" the American people 256 Comments
- Why Obama should worry that current scandals might impact 2016 224 Comments
- Obama: I didn't know about IRS report 613 Comments
- Immigration deal reached in House
The 1st in giving the States the right to a "well regulated Militia" (note: by definition, well regulated in the 1700's meant "well supplied") and the 2nd in giving the right to keep and bear arms to individuals (no qualifiers). The 3rd part, the last 4 words that say it all, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms, is as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." T Jefferson
That being said, there are many people today, who have a deep, (and a legitimate), distrust of the government.
They believe that it is in the nature of governments to accumulate and to concentrate more and more power over people's lives. More power leads to more control. It has always been so. As Lord Acton so famously stated, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Meaning that those who are given power over others will use that power.
Even if the government is not specifically intending to do so, it is the nature of large governments that this occurs.
Now the government may espouse their desire to help the citizenry, but when individuals disagree with what the government determines is in their best interest, then those in power use coersion. Sometimes subtle sometimes not so subtle.
This concentration of power and increasing coersion can be gradual (like slowly turning up the heat on a lobster in a pot), or sudden (like dropping him into boiling water).
One need only be a casual student of history to see the process at work again and again and again.
The Second Ammendment is *our* garuantee that this loss of individual freedom and increasing control of our lives cannot be done with impunity.
One need only look at what is occurring in Syria today or in Mexico, or any of a dozen other locations around the globe .to see examples of what happens when the government controls the people and when the people are defenseless to resist.
Now you may feel that this distrust is not warrented, or that it verges on paranoia. Many might agree with you. However many more, would not.
The Founding Fathers believed fervently that ordinary citizens needed to be protected from an oppressive government. If they had not, then there would not have been a Second Amendment in the first instance. They were very distrustful of the concentration of power into the hands of the few. They set up safeguards through the concepts of Separation of Powers and Federalism to prevent it from happening. They added further protections in the Bill of Rights.
The Founding Fathers, I am certain, would be aghast at the degree to which the government controls the lives of Americans today. Indeed, they went into rebellion over transgressions less onerous than what we today have allowed to be imposed upon us.
Read the Declaration of Independence. Look at the reasons that are ennumerated there. They speak of an oppressive government seeking to impose it's will, (unlawfully in their opinion), upon the citizenry.
The Second Ammendment was NEVER about what type of arms citizens might own or about what the technological developments of the future might bring. It was not about hunting. It was not about home defense. It was not about target shooting. It was about the ability of citizens to oppose and resist the oppression of a tyrannical government.
There are those Americans that honestly feel that this point of view is not applicable to the 21st century; that such concerns are the things of history. They label those like myself, as 'gun nuts' or as paranoid, even dangerous.
If you are one that believes that this distrust is stuff out of a dusty history book, and has no relevance in the 21st century, then I urge you again to to look around more carefully.
Those of us that support the Second Ammendment feel that it's relevence is as valid now as it was when it was first penned.
-----------------------------------------
yea ... guns are what sets you free!
---------------------------------------------------
here's the reason for single term limits.