Word: congressed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only two are on the federal books. One is the National Firearms Act of 1934, taxing interstate shipments of such gangster-style weapons as machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. The other is the pallid Federal Firearms Act of 1938, prohibiting interstate gun shipments to felons. In 30 years, Congress has failed to enact a single new gun bill, thus allowing, as the President declared, "the demented, the deranged, the hardened criminal and the convict, the addict and the alcoholic" to order weapons by mail with no questions asked...
Pollster George Gallup maintains that in his very first opinion sampling on gun control 34 years ago, 84% of the nation favored strong legislation. The figure has remained at or near that level ever since. Yet Congress has assiduously ignored such evidence of public opinion. John Kennedy's assassination did not goad Capitol Hill to act. There was a brief flurry, centering around Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd's bill to ban the mail-order sale of all guns, but as soon as the N.R.A. started moving, Congress stopped. Its paralysis persisted after last April's slaying of Martin Luther King...
...favor of strong legislation. Tydings drew twice as many letters on guns in a few days as he has on Viet Nam in the past three years. The 16-month-old National Council for a Responsible Firearms Policy launched a campaign to send 10 million pro-control letters to Congress, also got 400 pickets to march around the N.R.A.'s gleaming, $3,500,000 Washington headquarters, where an armed guard is posted at the door. Thousands of brown paper bags, lettered with the words "Ban all guns" were sent to Senators. They also bore the message: "Pop one of these...
Indications such as the Harris poll reinforced the prevailing feeling in Washington that the national mood is one of anger and frustration compounded by a sense of disorientation. Congress, which senses these things with the politician's instinct for self-preservation, sees divergent trends. It discerns a conservative swing in the country-a swing accentuated, paradoxically, by the murder of one of the nation's most articulate liberals. The rationale is that the majority of Americans, the white and the relatively affluent, now crave a return to a kind of ordered normality that may in fact never again...
...prospects for Velasco's fifth government, which takes office August 31, are not much brighter than those of his earlier ones. Though he himself won handily, the gaunt, white-haired septuagenarian wound up with only 35 seats for his supporters in Ecuador's 132-member Congress. But he can at least take comfort from the fact that the country's 20,000-man army appears for the time being to have lost its zeal for rule. Rather than subjecting Ecuador to another debilitating series of interim governments that lack both power and popular support, the army plans...