1994 Memo, From A Democrat, Discouraged More Gun Control

While browsing through my timeline on Twitter, I came across an item relevant to the gun control debate, which I believe raises a legitimate question about the motives of some who favor a greater degree of control over the private ownership of firearms.  The item was an image, but contained text referring to a story in The Washington Times, and provided its url.  So with some typing (but leaving off the final "?page=all"), I was able to look up the story, about a memo sent in 1994 by former White House Press Secretary Jody Powell, who had worked for President Carter, to George Stephanopoulos, who at the time worked for President Clinton.  Here are the first two paragraphs:

Former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos tried to spark a gun debate inside the White House in 1994 over a memo calling for Democrats to be more cognizant of the political consequences of anti-gun policies, according to documents from the Clinton Presidential Library.

The Jan. 1994 memo, by former President Carter's press secretary, was critical of gun control efforts, and Mr. Stephanopoulos tacitly embraced it, saying it "makes a lot of sense." But their entreaties were ignored. President Clinton would instead pursue the assault weapons ban that reignited the gun control debate, turning the issue politically toxic and damaging Democrats for years.

The advice from Mr. Powell essentially boiled down to this:  "It might be a good idea politically to back off on gun control."

Reading further down, we find the paragraph quoted in the above-linked picture.

"As much as I hate to say it, the NRA is effective primarily because it is largely right when it claims that most gun control laws inconvenience and threaten the law-abiding while having little or no impact on violent crime or criminals," wrote Jody Powell, the former Carter press aide.

This, of course, is what pretty much what we conservatives have been saying all along.  While President Clinton, as pointed out in the second quoted paragraph, "ignored" the "entreaties" from Mr. Powell and Mr. Stephanopoulos, he would at least have known what they were saying.  And if President Clinton learned that the NRA was "largely right" about gun control laws mainly affecting the law-abiding, then it is very likely that so did the person who now wishes to become the second President Clinton, who may well have passed on this information to her boss when she was Secretary of State.  This leads to the point raised in the above-linked picture.  If Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have known, in her case for over 20 years, that gun-control laws do not have any real effect on violent criminals but instead "inconvenience and threaten the law-abiding", why do they and other Democrats still want more of these laws?  What is their real motive?

So you don't have to type the entire url shown in the above-linked image, you can click here to read the full story.