The Barr amendment lies in the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime like road kill on a sunny day. Maybe someone should do something about it. On the other hand, maybe it will just go away if it stays there long enough.
Rep. Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga.), author of this malodorous legislation, wants to repair the damage from last year's Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban, which prohibits anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from purchasing or owning a gun.
In September, someone in the dark of night managed to strengthen the ban by excising the historic exemption for police and other law officers. In other words, cops with a distant history of child or spouse abuse can also lose their guns.
Today Barr, a big law-and-order guy and former prosecutor, wants to put the exemption back in by amending the ban to exempt everyone, including cops, convicted of abuse prior to Sept. 30, 1996, the date the ban became law.
Given his views, Barr's move appears to make sense, except domestic violence activists, police and the Democrats who wrote the bill insist it was Barr himself who first proposed eliminating the exemption.
"I wasn't instrumental in anything," Barr said, but acknowledged that he had "no problem taking the exemption out." Law officers should be subject to the laws they enforce, he said, so the fix is an exemption for all. Otherwise the ban would be applied retroactively, which is unconstitutional, he added.
Barr tried but failed in May to hook his amendment to another piece of legislation, so he has taken it back to the subcommittee on crime in hopes of bringing it to the floor on its own.
Good luck. Potential co-sponsors will wonder how arguments about "constitutionality" will compete with a banner on the Capitol steps reading: "Congress wants to put guns back in the hands of wife-beaters and child-abusers!"
Anyway, it turns out that no one knows -- or at least will admit knowing -- how the gun ban affair actually transpired. The only thing they agree on is that it included the "official use exemption," when it went to conferees writing the gigantic Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act at the end of September last year.
"I wanted to attach it to anything that would bring it through," said the ban's author, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.). So he pinned it to the Appropriations Act, the must-pass bill to fund the government for fiscal 1997.
Virtually all lawmakers practice this tactic, known as "the Christmas Tree." Every big bill conceals little gifts, so who's going to shut down the federal government just to stop Lautenberg?
No one. But enemies of the ban -- lawmakers who oppose any curbs on guns -- offered many "proposals for change." One of these, Lautenberg and Barr agreed, was to get rid of the law enforcement exemption -- an automatic feature of every gun law passed in the last 30 years.
"It was mischievous as all get-out," Lautenberg said. His theory is that Barr, one of the ban's leading opponents, eliminated the exemption as a "poison pill" that would make the ban so unpalatable that he could kill it altogether.
Not so, said Barr. "A number of members had come to me and said, This thing is being rammed through. Isn't there anything we can do to make it more reasonable?' Getting rid of the exemption was one idea."
Barr wasn't in the conference, an enormous, exhausting affair that ran through Friday night and into Saturday morning Sept. 28. Lautenberg was. He sat up late fending off attacks on the ban, then left.
"It happened during sleep time," said Lautenberg, who awakened to discover he had a far stronger law. Not surprisingly, he has decided to embrace it and hold the line against Barr's latest attacks.
When domestic violence activists awakened, they were pleasantly amazed: "We had supported the basic legislation," said Donna Edwards, executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. "We didn't know the change was going to happen, but we certainly noticed when it did."
Some police groups, however, felt betrayed. Robert Scully, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said many in the ranks thought Barr was socking it to them as "payback" for their support of Clinton administration gun control measures. "We were ambushed," he said.
Barr is confident that the subcommittee on crime will pass his amendment and send it to the House floor. Lautenberg thinks not: "He tried to kill the whole bill," Lautenberg said. "Instead it came around to kick him in the pants."