Clift: Democrats and the Politics of Guns

Rahm Emanuel was once a fierce gun-control advocate. As a top aide to Bill Clinton, he helped push the president's assault-weapons ban. At the time, Emanuel argued there was little reason for anyone to have a military-style weapon designed to kill as many people as possible in the shortest time.

Restricting guns is the last thing Emanuel wants to talk about now. An Illinois congressman, he helped Democrats take back the Capitol last year in part by recruiting pro-gun candidates. The effort was part of a larger push to reach out to gun owners who'd shunned the party.

That may help explain the noticeable hush from Democrats in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings. Some Democrats have begun to sound a lot like Republicans on the issue. Emanuel, asked about the party's position on gun violence, borrows a line from the National Rifle Association. "There are successful laws on the books," he says. "They have to be enforced."

Emanuel hasn't gone soft on guns (he earned an F on the NRA's report card). But in a country where a third to a half of homes have at least one firearm, Democrats could no longer afford to let the GOP own the issue. Emanuel says Washington should tackle the problem of gun crime by reaching back to another effort from his White House days—Clinton's program to put more cops on the streets, which President George W. Bush axed.

But hiring more cops wouldn't have stopped Cho Seung-Hui from purchasing the weapons he used in his shooting rampage—an uncomfortable fact that few people on Capitol Hill have rushed to point out. Democrats have been reluctant even to scold the president for allowing the assault ban to lapse, which enabled Cho to buy large-capacity clips that were illegal under the previous law.

One Democrat who is talking: New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed by a gunman in a 1993 shooting spree. For years, she has pushed a bill that would give states incentives to report information about criminals and the mentally ill to the National Instant Criminal Background Check database. As it is now, some states don't supply records, and others only do so sporadically. That kind of information could have stopped guns from getting into the hands of Cho, who was ruled an "imminent danger" by a judge in 2005.

McCarthy's bill passed the House in 2003, but the Senate never took it up. It will get more attention now. McCarthy's ally, Democratic Rep. John Dingell, long a gun-rights advocate, has been quietly talking with the group in hopes that the NRA will back a version of McCarthy's bill, according to The Washington Post. "We have no problem with mental-health records being part of the [database]," a source close to the gun lobby, who asked not to be named talking about internal matters, tells NEWSWEEK. The White House is also looking at the idea. After the shootings, Bush ordered his cabinet to find a way through the bureaucratic tangles that let warnings about disturbed gun buyers like Cho go unreported. Pro-gun or anti-, it's hard to argue for staying quiet about that.