Thursday marks 30 years since former President Bill Clinton signed into law one of the most important gun safety laws in America: The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which established the national background check system governing the purchase of firearms that is still in place today. Sitting next to Clinton as he spoke about the signing was the man the bill was named for, James Brady, White House press secretary under former President Ronald Reagan.
It was through the efforts of Brady and his wife, Sarah, that the bill became law over the objections of the gun lobby. But in the three decades since, conservatives and the gun lobby have made meaningful new gun laws nearly impossible to enact. Indeed, the Brady Act itself would stand little chance of passing in today’s Congress.
In March 1981, less than three months into Brady’s tenure as press secretary, he was shot and partially paralyzed during an assassination attempt on Reagan by the mentally disturbed John Hinckley, Jr. After the shooting, Sarah Brady joined the board of Handgun Control Incorporated, a group formed to press for stricter gun laws. (Its nonprofit wing has since been renamed the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.) At the time, under the 1968 Gun Control Act, the only real requirement for purchasing a gun was filling out an application and offering proof that you lived in the state where you were making the purchase.
According to Sarah Brady’s memoir, “A Good Fight,” the need for new legislation was obvious:
“It’s impossible, of course, to say for certain that a background check would have saved Jim Brady from the nightmare of March 30, 1981. But I do know this: John Hinckley bought the gun he used in Washington in a Dallas pawnshop for twenty-nine dollars, and he lied by giving an address that was no longer his and showing an old Texas driver’s license as “proof” that he lied there. A background check would have caught that lie. And because lying on a federal form is a…
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