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Broken PromisesThe Failure of the Trigger Lock "Deal" Between the Gun Industry and the White HouseThe Aftermath: Legislation StymiedWhen the White House agreement was announced, momentum was increasing on Capitol Hill behind pending legislative proposals to mandate that all new handguns be sold with safety devices. Not surprisingly, the firearms industry was anxious to avoid any such federal requirements. Firearm manufacturers are virtually the last unregulated manufacturer of a consumer product in America, a status the industry is eager to preserve.The industry's hope that the voluntary agreement would forestall federal legislation seemed to be confirmed by then-White House spokesman Mike McCurry at his press briefing the day the agreement was announced. In response to a reporter's question about the outlook for legislation mandating safety locks, McCurry responded:
[W]hen industries step forward and voluntarily do these things, the ease of implementation is greater, the likelihood of litigation over rulemaking or regulation is less, and you get the job done. I think we had a decision by the private sector to step forward today and say they're going to get the job done.... When commenting publicly, industry spokespersons insisted that the companies were acting purely out of a desire to be good corporate citizens. On the day the agreement was announced, Feldman of the ASSC told The New York Times, "We very much want to be the responsible industry, and perceived that way by the public." Without White House action, Feldman told the Times, the industry would eventually have offered the locks anyway, "but not as quickly." Yet in the more private setting of gun industry publications, participants in the voluntary agreement openly acknowledged that the deal's greatest benefit was that it effectively killed any federal legislation mandating that safety devices be sold with weapons. The December 1997 issue of Shooting Industry noted:
The agreement reached between Clinton and the firearms industry means that the White House will not push for mandatory legislation on trigger locks, and anti-gunners have admitted those proposals are basically dead in the water....No one was more enthusiastic about the results of the Rose Garden ceremony than those industry executives who actually attended. Glock's Paul Jannuzzo, displaying the antipathy and fear with which the firearms industry views even the slightest hint of regulation, went further:
I'm not at all comfortable with someone like [Representative] Charlie Schumer (anti-gun Congressman) telling us how to lock up a pistol or revolver or shotgun or anything else. Lord knows that if he or someone like him�whether it be [Senators] Feinstein, Boxer or Kennedy�wrote legislation like that, there would be some firearm that it would be impossible to fit. And that would probably outlaw the firearm. I'd much rather have something on a voluntary basis where we can make the decision as to what fits mechanically our own products as opposed to somebody whose real goal is to outlaw firearms deciding how they should be locked up. Or, as Feldman summed up the gun industry's motivations:
`Unprecedented' is an overused word, but this really was unprecedented. I hope when we look back on the event we won't talk about that we were there, but that it was a turning point in the way we handle firearm issues in this country. If we don't start playing smart politics, we're going to lose.
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