http://www.davekopel.com/2a/mags/george-bush-and-the-nra.htmThe aptly titled drug “czar” William Bennett—on his first day in office—convinced the Treasury Department to outlaw the import of several models of so-called “assault weapons.” The NRA, attempting to preserve a relationship with the White House, praised the “temporary” import moratorium as providing a cooling-off period for a rational discussion of the “assault weapon” issue.
But a few weeks later, President Bush dramatically expanded the import ban to cover many dozens of additional firearms models. Bush Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater added that President Bush wished that he had the additional authority to simply outlaw the domestic manufacture of so-called “assault weapons.”
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In May of 1989, President Bush made the import ban permanent, and proposed a ban on all magazines holding more than 15 rounds, but he backed away from active support for a ban on any additional guns. Under the Bush proposal, all large-capacity “ammunition feeding devices” currently in private hands would have to be registered with the federal government, under terms similar to the current registration of machine guns.
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The White House offered to sign the Brady Bill and a more comprehensive ban on semiautomatics (including a retroactive registration requirement) if the gun control laws were included in a crime bill that the White House wanted.
Something else that struck me as prescient (this article was from 1996)- Dubya must've learned at his daddy's knee..
All the while, President Bush accelerated the trend begun in the late Reagan administration towards militarizing federal law enforcement and freeing it from Constitutional constraints. “No-knock” break-ins became the routine method of serving search warrants. Wiretapping rates set new records year after year. The use of informants grew rapidly. Law enforcement agencies acquired huge stocks of military equipment. The military became increasingly involved in domestic law enforcement, often under specious pretexts designed to avoid statutory restrictions on use of the military against the American people.
The Bush administration pushed hard for even greater restrictions on freedom. The centerpiece of the Bush crime bill would have allowed courtroom use of illegally seized evidence, if the evidence happened to be a gun. If the police broke into your home for no reason, and, literally, tortured you until you told them where your unregistered gun was hidden, the gun could be used against you in court. Other elements of the Bush crime bill (now included in President Clinton’s proposed Terrorism Bill) included trials with secret evidence for certain legal resident aliens, and destruction of the right of habeas corpus, by which federal courts review whether state or federal prisoners are being illegally held in prison.