Edwards, Gunning For Cheney, Fires A Blank

Let me mention one charge that Sen. Edwards leveled against the Vice President last night that will probably receive no press attention and that the Republicans will be just as happy to let lie even though the truth of the matter actually makes Cheney look good.

In response to Cheney’s mentioning Edwards’ striking absentee record since he’s been in the Senate, Edwards replied:

The vice president, I’m surprised to hear him talk about records. When he was one of 435 members of the United States House, he was one of 10 to vote against Head Start, one of four to vote against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors.

This attempted zinger was discussed to death right after Cheney was selected as Bush’s VP candidate in 2000, and it’s clear that the Kerry-Edwards opposition research teams is competent enough to have found on Google the hundreds of repetitions shocked exclamations about this vote (one of only four in the House) “against banning plastic weapons that can pass through metal detectors.” But they are not competent enough to have looked beyond the rhetorical gas to discover that the issue was, and is, totally bogus. Either that, or Edwards didn’t care whether it was bogus or not because it sounds good (which is to say, bad).

A little background (more can be found here and here). Briefly, the Austrian Glock pistol was the first to popularize using a plastic material in the grip and frame. When Glocks began being imported into the U.S. in the 1980s there was a loud, but uninformed, hue and cry about these “plastic guns” that could pass undetected through metal detectors. (Google this, and you’ll be swamped with hits.) In fact, all Glock pistols contain over a pound of steel — the barrel, slide, slide rails, etc.

But where there is hue and cry there will soon be legislation, and soon legislation was introduced that would ban the manufacture and importation of all guns with less than four ounces of metal. Since there were no guns in production by any manufacturer anywhere with less than four ounces of metal, and none on any drawing boards, even the NRA signed off on this classic piece of feel-good but totally meaningless legislation.

Dick Cheney and three other House members refused to endorse this empty legislative fraud whose only purpose was to make legislatiors look like they were “doing something.” John Edwards, however, has shown either that he is unaware that there were no “plastic guns” to be banned, or that he’s willing to make a fraudulent charge because it sounds good.