Al Salvi’s recent, politically expedient flip-flop on gun control once again brings to light the former U.S. Senate candidate’s inability to deal with a difficult issue.
A recent Supreme Court decision said that gun-control laws that force local law-enforcement agencies to divert manpower and resources to track otherwise law-abiding citizens exceed federal authority. The issue of one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington is a very salient one, even when the larger issue is crime control.
Salvi defends his flip-flop on guns by posturing himself as the humble public servant who has asked for forgiveness from voters who he believes were lost in the last election because of his stance on the issue. Salvi has chosen to abandon an issue he once described as a fundamental constitutional right. But Salvi’s defeat in 1996 is attributable to his poor handling of a major issue, not to the issue itself.
In October, U.S. Rep. Dick Durbin’s U.S. Senate campaign began running ads that featured former Reagan administration press secretary Jim Brady–wheelchair-bound casualty of the assassination attempt on the president–criticizing Salvi’s position on gun control and primarily the Brady Bill. The Salvi campaign chose to ignore this issue entirely until it was too late. In an act of clear desperation, Salvi attacked the man in the wheelchair by leveling a totally unsubstantiated charge that Brady himself had been a purveyor of machine guns.
The fact is that the Brady Bill does not apply to Illinois because the Illinois “instant-check” law is far better. The Brady Bill is scheduled to fade out and become like the Illinois law in two years. Also, the Brady Bill would not have picked up the attacker who shot Brady because it does not require reporting of psychotics treated at private facilities. The Illinois law does and would not have allowed Brady’s attacker to purchase a handgun.
So was Durbin callously exploiting Jim Brady’s tragic circumstance by using him to misrepresent the gun-control bill? This was all fully explained to Salvi at the time, but he failed to act. Salvi missed a golden opportunity to embarrass Durbin on the crime issue.
Another important political issue lost in the great gun debate of 1996 was the fact that Durbin had endorsed state Rep. Jay Hoffman to succeed him in the 20th Congressional District while Hoffman was racking up the same voting record on guns–and the other volatile issue of abortion–as then state-Rep. Al Salvi.
In the same hair-trigger fashion that Salvi shot himself in the foot in the 1996 election, he now has plugged the other foot. His about-face leaves most of us with a bitter taste in our mouths. Even those who do not share our views on gun rights are alarmed at the ease with which Salvi has discarded a principled stand with an expedient act. For those of us who sacrificed mightily in 1996 for Al Salvi, this is a bitter pill to swallow.
