Larry Craig

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, the Senate is not in order. The Senator from New York deserves to be heard on this issue, as will I.

Mr. CRAIG. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. CRAIG. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. CRAIG. Very briefly, as a cosponsor of the bill, half a minute?

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, Senators who just voted for the immediate past amendment have voted to clarify and limit advertising on the Internet, both for guns and explosive materials. Remember, the Internet is an advertising medium. Guns do not materialize through the screen of the computer if you order them. In fact, if you order a gun on the Internet, here is what American Guns says: Please note, a buyer must first call the seller of the gun, confirm the price available, arrange for a Federal-firearms- licensed dealer in your State to receive shipment. Your FFL dealer must send a copy of their license to the seller. The Senator from New York mentioned the 17-year-old Alabama boy. If that happened--and I am not saying it did not happen; he has the news story--three laws were broken. Three laws were broken. The teenager attempting to buy the gun broke a law. The person who trafficked the gun, transported it, broke a law--you cannot transport a gun through the mail service, through a common carrier. There has to be contact in these relationships or laws are broken. I must also tell you, although I am not a constitutional attorney, he walks all over commercial speech. This is advertising. We have corrected those kinds of things in our bill to make sure we keep the Internet clean, but we went one step further, we went after the explosive materials and the kinds of devices that were used in Littleton. I think all of us want that corrected. That is what you voted for. Let's not trample on the marketing that goes on, advertising on the Internet. Let's keep this bill and the Internet clean and protect those kinds of rights. I yield my time.

Mr. CRAIG. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 350

Mr. CRAIG. Of course.

Mr. CRAIG. The Senator from New York has pointed out consistently through the bill where there might be corrections or where in some instances there were deletions that were not intended. Last night he expressed there was a loophole. I pointed out in the law that we had placed this new category directly into the law to comply with all of the law which included background checks. They were apprehensive. We went back and reviewed it and confirmed with many attorneys exactly what we believe to be true. But this morning, in good faith, we have offered this. You can accept it or reject it at your will. But it is very clear what we intend. I think the chairman of the Judiciary Committee has made that intention clear: Temporary licensees, for the purpose of convenience and also security at gun shows, will do background checks. Thank you.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. I am happy to yield to my colleague from New York.

Mr. CRAIG. I will not yield for a moment. Let me correct another area the Senator from New York and I had a disagreement on, but that is a gentlemanly disagreement. We still disagree. That deals with pawnshops. In the Brady environment--that was the period of time in which we were building the national background check--a 3-day period was instituted, not to keep the gun from a person, but to check a person's background for the purpose of finding out whether it was legal for that person to own a firearm, whether the person was a felon or not. If, during that period of time, you pawned your gun at a pawnshop and then you went back to retrieve it, the pawnshop owner gave it back to you, no questions asked. It was your gun, your name was on it, you had the pawnshop ticket; as long as you could show ID, you got your gun back. ATF and this administration are now interpreting this differently through instant check. They are saying you have to go through a background check again, and there are lawsuits out there in the marketplace today because of that. It is very important for the Record to show what happens. If I am the person who takes a gun to a pawnshop and I pawn my gun, if I have my pawn ticket, within 24 hours the pawnshop owner must not only report the pawning of that gun to the local law enforcement authority with the serial numbers of the gun and my name--that is what goes on today in the law. So there is a background check, per se, because if my name happens to come up the name of a felon, I will never get that gun back; the law enforcement can go and collect it. But what is happening now is that I go in 3 months later to get my gun. I have my money and my ticket and my record is clear. The ATF, and this administration, are saying: Foul. You have to go through a background check. We are saying that is wrong. We are reinstating the Brady environment during the period of the 3-day waiting period.

Mr. CRAIG. I will be happy to yield for a brief explanation by the Senator from New York.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, the Hatch-Craig amendment package is a very broad-based package bringing greater enforcement, aggressive prosecution that this administration has been very reluctant in pursuing. It enhances penalties across a broad cross section of illegal activities to assure that the criminal simply is not going to fall through the cracks. As my colleagues from Arizona and Oregon indicated, once we were able to defeat the Lautenberg amendment and establish some very clear parameters for creating the permanency of the national instant check system and the funding of that check system and assuring that we were not creating extraordinary liability for private citizens who wish to involve themselves in sales, then I thought it was right and appropriate that we begin to move to clarify and define gun shows and how guns are sold at those gun shows. That is exactly what we have done this afternoon. I think it is a major step on an issue that has brought a great expression of concern across our country. What is important to understand is that there is no placebo. Many would rush to the floor hoping we can pass a myriad of laws. As I said with the Senator from California a few moments ago, the world would become instantly and dramatically safer. We hope what we do today will change the thinking in America. Law-abiding citizens have and will always have constitutional rights to own and bear arms for a variety of reasons. What we don't want to do is create a huge Federal bureaucracy that has so many tentacles in its webs that private law-abiding citizens get caught up in them. That is what would have happened in the Lautenberg amendment. Along with that was the fear that a promoter could be almost anyone who said they were in support of a gun show. They would have to become a licensed Federal firearms dealer. That is not the case nor should it be the case. Like many people know, when you go to the local drug store today and you want to charge it, you bring out your Visa card, they pass it through the machine and tell you nearly instantly if your credit is good, if you can charge against the card. What we want to be able to do to free up law-abiding citizens and to catch the criminal in the web, is to make sure that this instant background check is embodied in the law, and that the Justice Department and the politics of any Justice Department--be it Janet Reno or someone else, cannot manipulate the law. That is to assure an instant computerized check system which assures that felons are on it and adjudicated others are on it, those who find themselves defined by the law as being not sufficiently responsible for the ownership of guns. That is what it is all about. That is what we are about here today--in the area of gun shows, that this be done. Somehow, gun shows have been cast as some bazaar in which illegal criminal activity goes on. That is not true and everybody but a few politicians knows it is not true. Less than 2 percent of the guns sold through gun shows find themselves in criminal activity. We would argue that is too much. We are now asking law-abiding citizens to become involved with us in making sure that guns at gun shows, now that law- abiding citizen is protected, will not be sold to a criminal or to a juvenile. So we do that and I think we strengthen the provisions by doing so. We also deal with another area my colleague from New York will be dealing with, potentially, later, and that is Internet sales. We are suggesting Internet transactions that are known to be legal activities or that could be legal activities are against the law. What we are not saying is you cannot advertise on the Internet. That is a first amendment right and I do not think the Senator from New York would want to infringe on the right of commerce, to speak out. Let me correct for the Record a dialog that the Senator from New York, who is now on the floor, and I had yesterday. He felt, reading my amendment that was agreed to yesterday, there was a problem. That problem dealt with the potential of interstate transactions, that are now prohibited, being opened up. In all fairness--I said he was wrong. As he read my bill, he was reasonably accurate, because the bill had been mishandled in its typing. What we were trying to define was the temporary situation of a gun show, because when we do tracking and when we do background checks and records, we are dealing with addresses, permanent locations--permanent locations of a business, a dealer of guns. A gun show is not permanent, it is temporary. It is at the convention hall or the fairgrounds. In doing the typing, legislative counsel misqueued the wrong paragraph. I must say, in all fairness, the Senator from New York was right. He found it. I agreed with him. We corrected it. We are now clearly back to Federal law being absolutely as it is. Interstate sales of guns are banned. Only under certain conditions of the Federal law can that happen. So we have corrected that also in this omnibus amendment, the Hatch-Craig amendment, that we think is right and responsible to do.

Mr. CRAIG. I will only comment this much further and then I am through for the evening. I have been sitting here adding up the laws that your description broke. The seller has broken the law tonight by your definition.

Mr. CRAIG. I will be very brief. I do stand in opposition. Last year, we had the same vote on the floor, and it was to overturn the 1994 law that creates some exceptions. It is the exception that the Senator disagrees with now as it relates to the importation of a form of automatic loading device, better known as a clip. The vote last year was 54 to 44 in opposition to that amendment on a tabling motion. I hope we can continue to maintain that position. I think it is consistent with the law that we passed in 1994. I yield the floor.

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I yield back the remainder of my time. Amendment No. 344 (Purpose: To make an amendment with respect to effective gun law enforcement, enhanced penalties, and facilitation of background checks at gun shows)

Mr. CRAIG. I thank my colleague from New York.

Mr. CRAIG. In the original amendment, the Senator bans a class of firearm that is used in schools and colleges for professional target shooting and target practice. Has she taken that particular provision out?

Mr. CRAIG. All right.

Mr. CRAIG. Here is what we are saying. We are saying in this law that the people who abide by the law have done nothing wrong. If they go through the background check and do all the legal things, they have done nothing wrong; they are within the law. If the gun happens to fall into the hands of a criminal and is used in a crime and somebody wants to trace it back to them and make them liable, we are saying, no, no; you were a law-abiding citizen. You cannot say that they were wrong because their gun at sometime in the future fell into the hands of a criminal and was used. The Senator knows today those kinds of lawsuits are going on out there.

Mr. CRAIG. I counted that breaking the law. The juvenile is breaking the law.

Mr. CRAIG. Let me talk about the Internet for a moment. Somehow in the last day and a half we have heard this marvelous new word ``loophole.'' Everything has a loophole in it. Somehow through a loophole we are cramming everything today. It is a great mantra. I think Bill Clinton coined it in one of his phrases lately--handgun control loophole. Tonight we have a loophole in the Internet. It is called ``beam me up a gun, Scotty,'' except the Senator from New York, being the remarkable fellow he is, has not pioneered Star Trek technology to deal with guns. The Internet is an advertising medium. It is not a medium of exchange. You advertise on the Internet. Now, I am not a very good Internet surfer, but I know I can't push a button and see a gun come out from the screen. The Senator from New York knows it, too. In fact, he refers to Guns America Web Site. We pulled it up while he was talking. This is what it said: Please note, as a buyer you must first call the seller of the gun, confirm price and availability, and arrange for an FFL dealer in your State to receive shipment. Your FFL dealer must send a copy of their license to the seller. My point is quite simple: If you buy a gun on the Internet, it somehow has to make contact with you. He referenced a young fellow who acquired a gun on the Internet and his mother intercepted it because a common carrier had brought it to their home. The common carrier violated the law. It is against the law in America today to send a gun through the U.S. mail or to allow one to be transferred by common carrier to be delivered to a recipient. I guess that is my point. He may not like the style of advertising or the rhetoric around the advertising, but there has to be a point of contact. How do you make the contact? How does the gun move from the seller to the buyer? Therein lies the issue here. If I believed what is being said were true, I would be alarmed. I don't think any of us want a gun show in our kiddie's bedrooms. It is great rhetoric tonight. The gun show isn't in the kiddie's bedroom. There is advertising on the Internet. The child can access the Internet. The child can't touch the gun. He cannot receive the gun. And the example that he applied was a violation of the Federal law. Again, one of those laws that we stacked on the books and somehow somebody slipped through it. That is what happens with laws some of the time unless we have this huge web of law enforcement. My guess is the common carrier is libel in this instance. I don't know the total story, but I do know the gun got delivered to the home and it had to come through some form of common carrier. We believe that to be a violation of the law. The impact of this amendment is to simply restrict gun sellers to 19th century advertising technology. That is, newspapers and fliers. On a more serious note, the amendment would be an extraordinary and unprecedented restriction on commercial speech. That is called a violation of the first amendment. I am not a constitutional lawyer and I am not going to debate that this is a constitutional violation. But my guess, if it were to become law, it would rapidly get tested in the courts because I believe it could be that. Our laws have never required an advertising medium to become part of the business that it advertises. For example, we don't require a newspaper to get a State liquor license before carrying alcohol ads. But in any event, that would be well beyond anything this Congress ever contemplated. In fact, Federal law confirms exactly the opposite: The Firearms Owners Protection Act, which became law in 1986, specifically confirms the right of individuals to make occasional sales, exchanges, and/or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection, for a hobby, or to sell all or part of a personal collection of firearms within their State or their residence. I do not quite understand what the Senator from New York is talking about tonight about expanding beyond the boundary of a State. Yes, the Internet is national; it is international. But for a gun owner in New York to buy a gun out of California would be interstate activity, and that would be against the current law. I think the Senator from New York knows that. What we are suggesting in our amendment, because we do address the issue of Internet activities, this Congress would not want anything illegal going on in the Internet. If you use the Internet to offer a firearm to a felon, and you know it, you broke the law. That is what we are saying. If your intent is to sell to anybody on the Internet and not require the checking, you are breaking the law. That is what we would say. The Hatch-Craig amendment makes it a crime to knowingly solicit--that is what you are doing on the Internet, you are soliciting. You are not transporting guns, you are not putting them in the hands of kids, you are soliciting--to knowingly solicit an illegal firearm transaction through the Internet. That is what we do. We go a step forward and talk about explosive materials. There is a very real concern on the Internet today about bombs--not material, because you can't transport it, again, but the diagrams to build a bomb. I am opposed to that, too. But at least you have to go out and acquire the material to build one because the Internet doesn't ``beam it through to your home, Scotty,'' nor does it beam the gun. That is the reality. Our amendment is simple. We think it addresses the issue. I hope our colleagues tomorrow would vote for the Hatch- Craig amendment that covers all of these issues very clearly, very succinctly. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in adjournment until 9:30 a.m. on Friday, May 14. I further ask consent that on Friday, immediately following the prayer, the routine requests through the morning hour be granted and the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and that the Senate immediately resume consideration of the juvenile justice bill, S. 254.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. For the information of all Senators, the Senate will convene on Friday at 9:30 a.m. By previous consent, the Senate will then resume consideration of the Hatch-Craig amendment, with a vote to take place at approximately 9:40 a.m., followed by a vote on or in relation to the Schumer Internet firearms amendment. Other amendments are expected to be offered, including the McConnell public lands amendment, and therefore Senators can expect the first two votes at approximately 9:40 a.m., with the possibility of further votes during tomorrow's session of the Senate in an effort to finish the bill.

Mr. CRAIG

Mr. CRAIG. I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.