Republican politicians weren’t always deep in the pockets of the NRA. Case in point: President Richard Nixon, who was so determined to combat gun violence he contemplated banning handguns altogether.
Nixon associated much of America’s problem with violence with easily-obtained, unregulated guns. When journalist William Safire, in a 1969 interview, asked Nixon what he thought about gun control, Nixon replied, "Guns are an abomination." If he didn’t have to answer to gun owners at the polls, Nixon said, he would make handguns illegal and require licenses for hunting rifles.
Now comes further evidence of Nixon’s desire to combat gun violence, in the form of recently released recordings of Oval Office conversations from 1972 and 1973.
“I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” Nixon says in one discussion with aides, “The kids usually kill themselves with it and so forth.”
“Can’t we go after handguns, period?” he asks. “I know the Rifle Association will be against it, the gun makers will be against it. People should not have handguns.”
Nixon’s remarks were made on May 16, 1972, the day after would-be assassin Arthur Bremer shot presidential candidate George Wallace at a campaign stop in Laurel, Maryland. As president, Nixon never did publicly call for a ban on all handguns, but he did urge Congress to pass more modest legislation banning the cheaply made handguns known as “Saturday night specials”.
The recordings show that, despite Nixon’s loathing for guns, his advisors and other administration officials saw gun control as a political loser, and, as always in Washington, practical politics won out.
“Let me ask you,” Nixon said to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1971, “there is only one thing you are checking on, that’s the manufacture of those $20 guns? We should probably stop that.” Mitchell responded that banning those guns would be “pretty difficult, actually,” because of the gun lobby.
“No hunters are going to use $20 guns,” Nixon countered.
“No, but the gun lobby’s against any incursion into the elimination of firearms,” said Mitchell.
At a June 29, 1972, news conference, about six weeks after Wallace’s shooting, Nixon said he’d sign legislation banning Saturday night specials. Later that year, the Senate did pass such a bill, but the House never acted on the legislation.
The shooting of another politician seven months later raised the issue of gun control again. On January 30, 1973, two robbers shot Senator John Stennis (D-Mississippi), who survived the shooting.
The day of the Stennis shooting, Nixon told White House special counsel Charles Colson, “At least I hope that Saturday night special legislation, at least we’re supporting that, you know. … God damn it, that ought to be passed. Or was it passed?”
When Colson told him it hadn’t, Nixon instructed his counsel: “We better damn well be for it now, huh?”
At a news conference the next day, the president repeated his call to ban Saturday night specials.
He also made a statement few national politicians would have the guts to make today. “Let me say, personally,” said Nixon, “I have never hunted in my life. I have no interest in guns and so forth.”
Nixon’s favored legislation never did pass, and the Watergate scandal soon consumed the remainder of Nixon’s tenure in the White House. The effort to ban Saturday night specials receded over the years as the focus of gun control advocates shifted to regulating more powerful weapons.
Nixon remained an advocate of stricter gun legislation throughout his lifetime. In his 1992 book, Seize the Moment, he wrote: “Unless we adopt and enforce strict gun control laws - ones much tougher than the Brady Bill - we will never succeed in stemming the violence spawned by the drug trade.”
Transcripts of Nixon’s White House recordings are available at the website of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.