Opinion * Commentary trol activists, believing that the Littleton, Colo., school shooting tragedy might at last arouse Congress to toughen gun laws, have been knocked back on their heels in the wake of the Senate's vote to reject tightened procedures for sales at gun shows.
The 51-47 vote against the Democratic proposal, and the subsequent passage by 53-45 of a Republican version making background checks on buyers from unlicensed gun dealers merely voluntary, jolted the anti-gun lobby at a time its leaders hoped the clout of the National Rifle Association and its allies might at last be slipping on Capitol Hill.
Robert Walker, president of Handgun Control Inc., a leading anti-gun group, called the vote "extraordinarily disappointing" and accused the NRA of hypocrisy in light of its position expressed earlier in the week that it might support such checks provided no records were retained by any federal agency.
The GOP version, an amendment to a pending juvenile crime bill, was sponsored by Sen. Larry E. Craig of Idaho, who is a member of the NRA board. He argued successfully that nearly all dealers at gun shows are licensed and hence already obliged by federal law to make background checks to prevent sales to convicted felons. Sales by unlicensed dealers, he said, were "private" transactions and should not be subject to federal regulation.
But Mr. Walker said that under a provision of the Craig amendment, "kitchen table dealers" -- unlicensed sellers who customarily don't own gun stores but simply operate out of their homes -- will be able to go into any state and sell at gun shows, "enormously compromising" the ability of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to prevent sales to criminals.
Another provision, Mr. Walker said, would open what he called "the pawn shop loophole," which would enable criminals who have pawned a gun to reclaim it later without a background check, as now required under federal law.
erate control proposals, has called on the Senate to reconsider. He said he can't understand "why they passed up this chance to save lives" and that there was "simply no excuse for letting criminals get arms at gun shows they can't get at gun stores." Once again the NRA has demonstrated its powerful influence on Congress.
The Senate vote dashes cold water on recent speculation that serious breaches were undermining the gun lobby, after some gun manufacturers and sport-shooting groups attended a White House conference on youth violence and indicated they might support some new gun restrictions. The NRA itself was not invited and vowed to hold the line against further gun regulation.
trol proposals being pushed in the wake of the Colorado shootings, including mandating child safety locks on guns, enforcing parental responsibility for keeping guns from children and raising the age for buying a handgun from 18 to 21, still face uphill fights against the NRA's determined opposition.
The tremendous publicity focused on the Colorado tragedy led to widespread editorial and public demands around the country for an answer to the nation's gun madness. The Senate's first answer was a dismissive shrug.
ton Bureau.
ville, Va. Thanks to a distant cousin, Lucian K. Truscott IV, a best-selling author and an association member, my family was formally invited by the association -- for the first time -- to attend the annual reunion of descendants of the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson. As guests, not as members.
scendant of Jefferson, a fact I have known since I was 12 years old.
The clarity and certainty with which I know my progenitor is easy to understand. My relatives have kept copious records for years, including Bibles dating back a century, daguerreotypes of grandparents and detailed genealogical charts.
ond" family. That is, from his 38-year relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife, Martha.
Second, oral history is not considered "legitimate" by historians. But the documentation required by today's historians was illegal in 1790, when Thomas Woodson, my great, great, great, great grandfather, was born. He was Hemings' first child fathered by Jefferson.
My journey to the reunion is in part an attempt to achieve my father's dying wish to be buried at Monticello.
My father, Robert Cooley III, a judge and decorated Vietnam veteran, died suddenly last July at age 58, two weeks after asserting on network television that he wanted to be laid to rest there alongside his ancestors. I contacted the Monticello Association and requested that his wish be honored, particularly given the almost decade-long commitment and national attention he brought to Heming's relationship with Jefferson.
The request was denied in part because association officials said they did not have DNA evidence linking Hemings' descendants to Jefferson.
ic evidence has been required prior to admitting members. At least one member has been admitted without a birth certificate. Some members, I have been told, have been admitted based on oral history.
Further, there has been no required vote of the entire association membership to admit new members. With these precedents, humously) will be granted membership.
It is temporally and emotionally draining to repeatedly assert our link to Jefferson when we frequently encounter overwhelming resistance. This resistance would not exist if we were products of Jefferson's "first" family.
Jefferson's son
Some 200 years ago, it was literally dangerous to be the "slave son" of Jefferson. Woodson was born in Shadwell, Va., (Jefferson's birthplace) and lived at Monticello until he was 12.
In 1802, a Richmond, Va., newspaper stated that Woodson had "features bearing a striking though sable resemblance to the president himself." That placed him in danger. Men tried to kidnap him and use him to disparage the president and his political party. Woodson was sent away from Monticello for his own protection; he changed his name and distanced himself from Jefferson.
cello Association will meet Sunday in private. It is then that association members will have an opportunity to rectify history. They can provide us, the "second" family, our birthright: Equity in rights and privileges accorded other Jefferson descendants.
If we are not admitted to the association this year, then we will persevere next year. Or the next.
Meanwhile, it is incumbent on all Americans to insist on a true account of our history, which would assist the members of the Monticello Association in recognizing that it is right and just to admit members of Jefferson's "second" family into their association.
Byline: By Robert Reno
--- 0.5-pt. rule --- IF IT were made a serious crime for former U.S. Supreme Court clerks to write books about the court's private deliberations, I suppose the justices themselves would have to strike down such a law as an offense to the First Amendment.
Edward Lazarus, former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun, hasn't been arrested for writing a book about his time with the court. But he has been administered a spanking he'll remember and has been attacked by the fraternity of former clerks. And Anthony Kronman, dean of Yale Law School, apologized to the court for publicly endorsing the book as "well-researched and wonderfully written."
Dean Kronman didn't go so far as to say he'd decided, on learned reflection, it was wretchedly researched and atrociously written.
The elite of the legal fraternity, acting with animal-house coarseness, has treated this book as a lapse of manners. But the message of the rebuke is clear: Clerks must forever keep their mouths shut. Justices alone must decide what becomes history.
This is an astonishing position for a bunch of lawyers to take in defense of unwritten regal prerogatives that Louis XIV would have envied. Will Chief Justice Rehnquist now add ermine to his gold stripes?
Carried to logical and absurd conclusion, a gag on clerks turns a great institution into a gang recret rituals. I guess the danger is if more clerks blab, the court might be revealed as more of a Moose lodge than a temple of justice.
Indeed, what more protection do these people need? They have competent bodyguards. They are appointed for life. Senility does not disqualify them. They are unanswerable for their opinions to any body on earth. If, occasionally, some future clerk reveals they played Parcheesi while deciding cases, wore red socks or arrived tipsy, would it subtract from their dignities any more than this wretched attempt to shut people up?
umnist. trils, it's like a haunting melody that never completely goes away. During this time of year, it powerfully reasserts itself, bringing back to me memories of different times and half-forgotten places.
Many Baltimoreans of a certain age, who grew up before horses were reduced to fleeting images in betting parlors or pawns in the sordid struggle to expand legalized gambling, surely know what I mean. Whether we rode our own, cheered home a pick in the Preakness or drank in the panorama of greening countryside and white fences at the Maryland Hunt Cup, we understood that horses are three-dimensional creatures with strong personalities and a seductive appeal to all the senses.
I got my first addictive whiff at age 5, the summer before World War II began, when my parents sent me to a farm near Cockeysville to study the rudiments of horsemanship.
ly required students to demonstrate ladylike deportment while perched on a frisky bay. A rebellious sort, she declined to participate in what she thought was a laughable irrelevancy and was not welcomed back her senior year.
tentious, backward or, even worse, politically unaware.
But they understood the value of gentility and apparently thought their eldest child deserved a crack at it. And what is riding if not genteel? Horses, some say, have a civilizing influence. And many horse owners seem to have taste, manners and, yes, manors.
For my part, I dreamed that horses might lead me to Elizabeth Taylor, who made all our hearts beat faster in "National Velvet."
Whatever the motivation, I spent a summer learning to slide the bit between my pony's teeth and tighten the girth under his plump belly so the saddle wouldn't slip. And I was taught the painful necessity of climbing right back in the saddle after a fall. Otherwise, I was assured, I might lose my nerve. I even won ribbons in local horse shows. (Of course, all I had to do in the lead-rein class was sit up straight and look fetching.)
After the war, my riding education resumed under the direction of Louise Carey, the guiding spirit of the Baltimore County Humane Society, then on Park Heights Avenue. Mrs. Carey was the kind of sion, almost to the point of saintliness, for the children and animals in her classes.
Alas, she had standards, too. I was a gawky adolescent with no sense of rhythm. I couldn't get the hang of posting, the up-and-down motion that takes the hard bumps out of trotting. When the horse broke into a canter, she counseled me to "grip with your knees," but all I could do was hang on for dear life.
I did not advance into the horsey set. Even so, I longed for opportunities to ride. Mrs. Carey's son Tony, now a prominent Baltimore lawyer, was all too eager to provide them once the Humane Society moved to spacious quarters on Nicodemus Road near Reisterstown.
There I learned another of life's hard lessons. While some horses bring grace and gentility into our lives, others bring trouble. Mrs. Carey welcomed many of the latter, unloved and unwanted, to her lush pastures.
Over the years, she assembled a quirky cast of equine eccentrics, retirees and misfits, including old police horses, burned-out thoroughbreds and some too cranky to accept the strictures of human society.
For example, Ruth, a superannuated race horse, loved to run so much she refused to stop until she reached, say, Westminster.
A particularly nasty horse, often offered as a mount to Tony's unknowing first-time visitors, would be nicknamed Slobo today. He enjoyed lurching beneath low-hanging limbs. Then there was the mare with the water fetish. She had an uncontrollable urge to roll over in creek beds, even with a rider aboard.
Horses, sad to say, aren't a regular part of my life today. Yet, occasionally, when a horseback rider goes down our road, I catch the scent on a May breeze and reflect on the horses -- noble, exasperating, kooky -- who enlivened my youth.
Whatever the rewards of our association, however, gentility, martial grandeur and Miss Taylor continue to elude me. an Central Committee on April 29 officially postponed a declaration of statehood until June at the earliest.
There is no doubt that any agreement that ends a half-century of ethnic struggle will be accompanied by pain. But the peace necause the public yearns for peace.
Japan and other members of the international community can help foster an environment conducive to peace by extending financial assistance to the Palestinians. In the end, however, peace will depend on decisions made by the Israelis and the Palestinians.
There are some who believe that ethnic conflicts can only be resolved with military power. Witness the North Atlantic Treaty Oress could become a model for solving ethnic conflicts through dialogue.
The Palestinians kept the peace process alive by foregoing a declaration of statehood. No matter who becomes the next prime minister of Israel, the time has come for the Israeli people to respond in kind by clearly voicing their support for peace.
Pub Date: 5/14/99