"All nations should know," President George W. Bush told his fellow Americans during the Jan. 29 State of the Union message, "America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security." That apparently does not include doing anything that would offend the National Rifle Association. Staring down suicide bombers is one thing. Standing up to the NRA? Now that would take real courage.

The Bush administration has buckled already.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft confirmed for Congress in December that he blocked the FBI from accessing records of background checks conducted on prospective gun buyers. FBI agents wanted to peruse the computer files to see if any of the 1,200 foreign nationals detained in America after Sept. 11 had tried to or did purchase a gun.

Ashcroft didn't want to violate the privacy of gun buyers. His concern for privacy does not extend to the detainees, whose ordinarily privileged communications with legal counsel are monitored by Ashcroft's Justice Department.

Gun-violence prevention activists are running into the same mindset in Tallahassee.

Arthur C. Hayhoe, executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said state legislators have not heard a single gun-control bill in more than five years. That won't change in 2002, Hayhoe predicted, despite the Sept. 11 attacks and evidence that terrorist networks have taken advantage of liberal Florida gun laws. State Rep. Nan H. Rich, D-Weston, has introduced one of the bills going nowhere. HB 303 would close a loophole in current law that relieves private, unlicensed sellers from having to run criminal-history checks on customers at gun shows. Florida is one of 32 states that haven't closed the loophole since the 1994 passage of the federal Brady Law. Hayhoe said 10 of Florida's 67 counties have closed the gun-show loophole within their borders, including Hillsborough, Pinellas and Sarasota counties. The state legislative leadership, including key committee chairmen from the Bay area such as Sen. Victor D. Crist, R-Tampa, and Rep. Gus M. Bilirakis, R-Palm Harbor, are indifferent, at best, to shutting the loophole across the Sunshine State.

"They have no intention of hearing this bill," said Rich. "It's very simple. The NRA doesn't want it heard. So they're not going to hear any gun bills."

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms has estimated that unlicensed dealers man one out of every five tables at the average gun show. "That doesn't account for the guy walking down the aisle with an assault rifle over the shoulder and a sign with a price on it," said Hayhoe. "It's difficult to understand why this has been allowed to go on for so many years."

Even with the NRA pressure, Rich cannot understand the legislative cowardice surrounding the gun-show loophole. "This should be an easy gun bill," she said. "We're not taking away anybody's guns. We're not registering anybody's guns. You walk into a store and you have to have a background check. You walk into a gun show and buy from a private seller, you don't. That's what we want changed."

Hayhoe, whose group is based in Wesley Chapel, said he has visited 10 Florida gun shows in four loophole counties since Sept. 11. "I can only tell you what I found was frightening," he said. "I could have bought assault rifles and handguns at any particular show. At the 10 shows together, I could have bought an arsenal, no questions asked, no background check."

That's what Conor Claxton did in South Florida. The Irish Republican Army officer and three comrades spent $18,000 on handguns, rifles and high-powered ammunition that he was convicted in 2000 of shipping to Belfast for use against British troops. "We don't have gun shows in Ireland," Claxton was quoted as observing. "You see things here like you never imagined."

Rich said she was disturbed by another gunrunning case in Detroit. Last Sept. 10, Ali Boumelhem was convicted of picking up shotguns, assault weapon parts and flash suppressers at Michigan gun shows and conspiring to ship them to Hezbollah guerrillas, who have fought the Israeli army in Lebanon. Boumelhem was a convicted felon at the time of his buying spree for Hezbollah, which is blamed for the 1983 bombing of a U.S. marine barracks in Beirut.

Hezbollah operatives have trained with members of the al-Qaeda network, according to testimony at the trial of suspects in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa.

"I find it really amazing," said Rich. "We talk this great game about homeland security and fighting terrorism. Are we serious?"

When Rich filed her gun-show loophole bill in October, she said she asked legislative leaders if they would take it up during last fall's special session on terrorism. "People thought I was crazy," Rich said.

The political game of appeasing the NRA has continued into the 2002 legislative session. Yet dismissing reasonable gun-control proposals out of hand is not a game to some activists.

"We are victims and survivors of gun violence," Tom Burke, a St. Petersburg member of the Million Mom March, told Weekly Planet. "Those who oppose us, those who will write, those who will call the paper, those who will send letters to the editor in the Planet, they probably never had a loved one shot in the back by a gun criminal. They've probably never called the funeral parlor to arrange for a funeral for a spouse or child that was killed by a gun from a gun criminal.

"Let me get very blunt. We're sick and tired of burying our loved ones. We're sick and tired of going to funerals for our loved ones because of a gun criminal. And we're sick and tired of not getting the help that we need from the Legislature."

Burke said certain lawmakers are determined to put up roadblocks. One of them is Sen. Ginny Brown-Waite.

"Ginny Brown-Waite is our biggest problem," Hayhoe said of the Brooksville Republican, who hopes her colleagues can draw up a nice, safe congressional district in which she can run this fall.

In private meetings and public statements, Brown-Waite has accused the gun-violence prevention lobby of grandstanding to achieve their ultimate goal — banning handguns.

Burke said he has warned Brown-Waite that those lines fed to her by the NRA are inaccurate. "Members of the Million Mom March, some of us own firearms in the family," he said. "We're not looking to ban firearms. So when Sen. Brown-Waite says that, I've got to cut her off and say that's not our policy. Those who promote those words are not telling the truth."

A Brown-Waite aide told the Planet that the Million Mom March shouldn't have a beef with her boss. The Senate version of the gun-show bill was referred to Crist's Criminal Justice Committee, where it is expected to die without even a reading. What the aide neglected to mention was that Brown-Waite chaired the Senate's Select Committee on Public Security and Crisis Management last fall and, according to gun-violence prevention activists, refused to hear a gun-show bill as part of an anti-terrorism legislative package. Crist, who is also vice-chairman of the select committee, told the Planet through an aide that it would not make sense for his crime panel to hear the gun-show bill since the House is sitting on the legislation, too. Bilirakis said his Crime Prevention, Corrections and Safety Committee won't meet again before the scheduled end of the legislative session in March.

If Bilirakis set a gun-bill hearing, "Tom Feeney would cut his head off," said Hayhoe, referring to the House speaker.

Burke recalled a 2001 meeting with Feeney aide Paul M. Hawkes. Quickly opining that gun control doesn't work, Hawkes directed Burke's attention to Washington, D.C., where strict gun laws haven't reduced violent crime.

That's because the District of Columbia is among the places paying, in blood and corpses, for Florida's lax gun laws. "Florida is leading the country as the supplier of guns recovered in crimes," said Burke. In a recent year, ATF tied 1,635 Florida-bought guns to homicides, assaults with firearms and armed robberies across the nation. Of those guns, Burke said he told Hawkes, 174 were recovered in D.C. police probes.

Gov. Jeb Bush has yet to fully succumb to the political expediency practiced by his brother's administration, according to Burke.

Bush criminal justice adviser Bradford L. Thomas has met with Million Mom March and police representatives, who urged the governor to rescind a Florida Department of Law Enforcement policy that deletes gun sales from a statewide database of pawnshop transactions within 48 hours.

About 150 mostly police detectives, whose bosses are not as susceptible to NRA pressure as elected county sheriffs, wrote Bush in favor of retaining pawned-gun records, which are invaluable for tracing firearms used in violent crimes.

FDLE Commissioner James T. Moore, siding with the NRA, determined the pawned-gun records to be a form of firearms registration, which the Legislature has outlawed. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth disagrees with Moore's interpretation.

Burke said the Million Mom March is hopeful that Bush will weigh in on the dispute. Then again, the governor might just string along the group until after the November election.

Anti-gun violence activists aren't sitting around waiting for a miracle. "Since the Legislature is such a dead end," said Hayhoe, "we're looking at ballot initiatives and electioneering."

Contact Staff Writer Francis X. Gilpin

at 813-248-8888, ext. 130, or frangilpin@weeklyplanet.com.

This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 5, 2002.