"More Good Than Bad"

Rarely had so many politicians altered their positions so radically and so swiftly. As mail cascaded into their Capitol Hill offices, Senators and Representatives who had long opposed even the mildest gun-control legislation nimbly switched sides. "Times change," said Nebraska's Republican Senator Roman Hruska, once Capitol Hill's strongest opponent of controls, "and sometimes they change rapidly."

Capitalizing on Congress' receptive mood, Connecticut Democrat Thomas Dodd's Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee voted unanimously to send the President's bill banning mail-order sales of rifles and shotguns to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will tackle the issue this week. The House Judiciary Committee, which deadlocked 16 to 16 on the Johnson bill only two weeks ago, passed it by a 29-to-6 vote.

In the wake of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, public revulsion gave Congress its cue. Maryland's Democratic Senator Joseph Tydings, the sponsor of a tough bill that would require licenses for the purchase and possession of firearms and ammunition, and registration of the weapons, was deluged with 10,000 letters supporting his stand. San Francisco as well as neighboring Marin County passed a registration ordinance. In Chicago, a voluntary turn-in campaign has prompted the surrender of 75 guns a day. Florida's Jordan Marsh and Burdine's chains quit selling toy guns, while Sears, Roebuck, the world's largest retailer, stopped advertising weapons as well as children's "toys of violence." A surprising exception to the mood of reevaluation; Presidential Candidate Eugene McCarthy, who insists that controls are a state rather than a federal matter because of widely varying conditions, and who warned against legislating "under panic conditions."

Grinding Out Letters. To be sure, there was a degree of haste. Partly, it was prompted by news that the National Rifle Association had begun grinding out letters to its nearly 1,000,000 members, telling them to write Congressmen and Senators immediately but not to use "abusive or threatening" language.

For his part, the President would like to see a provision tacked onto his bill calling for registration and licensing of guns. But he fears it would result in time-killing hearings or a lengthy debate in Congress. Without question, he considers the gun-control provision in the omnibus crime bill to be hopelessly weak. He is not at all happy about the rest of the bill, either, though he reluctantly signed it into law last week. Johnson had considered vetoing the bill, but was assured by eleven governmental departments whose advice he had requested that most sections would hold up under constitutional law. Only four hours and 46 minutes before midnight, when the bill would have become law automatically, he finally signed the 110-page document with the resigned comment: "This measure contains more good than bad."

Johnson was particularly upset by the bill's Title III, authorizing local and state police wiretapping and electronic surveillance under a court order. Calling on Congress to "immediately reconsider" the provision, he warned that it could lead to "a nation of snoopers bending through the keyholes of the homes and offices of America, spying on our neighbors. No conversation in the sanctity of the bedroom would be free from eavesdropping."

The President also took note of objections to the fact that Title II seeks to overturn several Supreme Court decisions on the legal rights of people accused of federal offenses. While the court held in the Miranda case that a defendant must be warned of his rights before evidence is admissible, the Crime Act says that such warnings are unnecessary as long as any confession made by a suspect is deemed voluntary. The bill also permits police to hold a suspect up to six hours--and longer in some cases--without an arraignment. Noting that these provisions apply only to federal cases, Johnson snowed his displeasure by telling the Attorney General and J. Edgar Hoover that federal suspects should still be given "full and fair warning" of their constitutional rights.

Other provisions of the bill were closer to what the President requested in 1967, when he called on Congress to strike a blow against crime in America. Among these: $400 million for assistance to state and local police in the next two fiscal years--almost 10% of the total amount now spent on all aspects of law enforcement in the U.S.

By authorizing funds to improve state and city agencies, said Johnson, the bill "responds to one of the most urgent problems in America today--the problem of fighting crime in the local neighborhood and on the city street."

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