Legislation.

In the wake of the assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (4 April 1968) and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (5 June 1968), the United States Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968. For more than thirty years this legislation defined federal gun policy. It banned most interstate sales of firearms, licensed most gun dealers, and barred felons, minors, and the mentally ill from purchasing and owning guns. Culturally, the law represented a brief national revulsion against gun violence. Recent gun-control legislation has been more contentious and less extensive. During the first years of the Clinton administration the Democratic Congress enacted the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (1993), which required a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns and banned certain assault weapons. Since 1994, however, efforts to pass major antigun legislation have slowed. More modest pieces of legislation, such as a proposal for safety locks...