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Many days it seems that in the struggle for gun rights we are slowly sliding downhill. Could we be losing the long-term campaign for our civil rights? My experience tells me that this is not the case.
A look back to 1994 shows that gun owners faced a far greater threat to their rights then than they do today. Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership was only a few months old. As its leader I was invited to testify at a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution regarding the Brady II Bill [NOTE: at that time DRGO was not affiliated with a non-profit corporation].
The gun prohibition movement in America was at its peak. Just the year before, Congress had passed the Brady Act, mandating a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases, a federal background check, and new classes of persons prohibited from owning firearms. Flush with this success the gun prohibition lobby, led by the Brady Campaign (then known as Handgun Control, Inc.), tried to get further controls enacted with the so-called Brady II Bill.
The Brady II Bill, authored by Ohio Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, would have added more categories of prohibited persons, banned small-caliber handguns, banned large-caliber handgun ammunition, banned semiautomatic rifles, banned magazines containing more than six rounds, levied a tax of 30% on handguns and a 50% tax on handgun ammunition, and enacted many more similarly draconian provisions. (h/t to Dave Kopel of The Volokh Conspiracy).
The witness panel was heavily stacked in favor of gun control advocates. It consisted of Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, D.C. gun control activist Marian Wright Edelman, a D.C. pediatrician representing the American Academy of Pediatrics, anti-gun advocacy researcher Arthur Kellermann, MD, and two other nationally prominent gun control activists. The pro-gun witnesses were two practicing California physicians, Edgar Suter, MD and I.
The bill failed, proving that the gun-grabbers had overreached. Here we include my written testimony to the Committee, as well as my answers to Sen. Metzenbaum’s follow-up questions. These documents show how hostile the gun control community was even then. But they also show how far we have come in the fight for the right of average Americans to own firearms.
—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.
All DRGO articles by Timothy Wheeler, MD.