Attorney General John Ashcroft wants information that would keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons, fugitives and illegal aliens purged after a day.

Attorney General John Ashcroft's views are so extreme on gun control laws that he finds himself in the position of shielding gun-toting felons and illegal aliens. One would think such a stand would embarrass Ashcroft, who is supposedly in the midst of fighting terrorism inside our borders. Yet Ashcroft's zeal never wavers as he protects his favorite special interest, the gun lobby.

His latest outrageous behavior comes in the debate over the National Instant Criminal Background Check system, called NICS. It works this way: When someone buys a gun, the FBI or state law enforcement officials do a background check to keep firearms out of the hands of convicted felons, fugitives and illegal aliens. The law allows those records to be retained for 90 days, after which they must be destroyed. Ashcroft wants the records purged after a single day.

Those 90 days are important to law enforcement officials, who often discover after the fact that a gun was illegally purchased. They can then use NICS records to find the buyer and retrieve the gun. In fact, of the 235 illegal gun sales in a recent six-month period, all but 7 took longer than a day to be noticed, according to a new study by the General Accounting Office.

Ashcroft says using the records for criminal investigations is illegal, claiming it is an invasion of gun owners' privacy. This isn't the only time the attorney general has given the law his own interpretation to advance the gun industry's agenda.

When the FBI began rounding up foreign residents after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the agency wanted to use NICS records to determine if those suspects had purchased guns, possibly illegally. Ashcroft said no and in December testified to U.S. Senate that "Congress specifically outlaws and bans . . . the use of approved purchase records for weapons checks on possible terrorists or anyone else."

Not exactly. Recently, a Justice Department memo dated two months prior to his testimony surfaced. "We see nothing in the NICS regulations that prohibits the FBI from deriving additional benefits from checking audit log records" as part of their terrorism investigation, the memo stated.

Ashcroft has been only too willing to trample on the rights of many Americans to achieve his often narrow agenda. The exception has been gun manufacturers, dealers and owners. For them, he has created new constitutional protections.

In arguing a gun case in May before the U.S. Supreme Court, Ashcroft's Justice Department revealed that it would change decades of federal policy and reinterpret the Second Amendment to give individuals the constitutional right to own firearms. Until then, the Justice Department had contended that the Second Amendment confers the right to bear arms only on the "well regulated militia" that is its subject.

No wonder Ashcroft is the poster boy, literally, of the National Rifle Association, which put him on the cover of its magazine. Meanwhile, 30,000 Americans a year are killed by guns, and attorneys for John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, have latched onto Ashcroft's pronouncements to defend their client's actions.

It is becoming increasingly clear that John Ashcroft is far outside the American mainstream when it comes to reasonable gun control.

Back to Opinion

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

From the Times
Opinion page