PRESIDENT NIXON WANTED BAN ON HANDGUNS

Associated Press
March 11, 2013

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.

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 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.

Few remember the tapes about handguns. History forever remembers the tape that gave Nixon's Watergate pursuers their "smoking gun."