The Armed Bear

You know the old pun on the Second Amendment - the right to arm bears?  After surviving a bullet to his brain on the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, White House press secretary James Brady - nicknamed "the Bear" - went against the National Rifle Association with his wife Sarah armed with only the truth - and won an important victory for American gun control activists, a group not accustomed to victories.  Brady, who died yesterday at 73,  advocated for legislation that would require background checks on anyone who attempted to purchase handguns like the one John Hinckley used to shoot Reagan, Brady, and two others.  

Many gun control bills have failed in Congress - thanks largely to a hostile minority of zealots with a strict-constructionist view of the Second Amendment's latter clause ("the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed") and lack of acknowledgement of its former clause ("a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state") - and even one success, a 1994 assault weapons ban, expired after ten years never to be renewed.  But the "Brady bill" - now a law - continues to be in effect, and though I could cite statistics and studies on the issue, there's no real way to quantify how many would-be killers the law has stopped from committing acts of gun violence in a country with far too many of them.  

Brady shared the optimism his old boss Ronald Reagan had about the future, and he never let the disability caused by his wound nor the frustration of passing badly need gun control laws stop him.  His attitude was that, when you're defeated, you give up and keep up the fight.  That's a message gun control activists should remember going forward.  RIP.