July 9, 1970
Page 23393
SENATOR TYDINGS AND GUN CONTROL
Mr. MUSKIE: Mr. President, in the June 27 issue of the New Republic, Alex Campbell has written a perceptive article about the political situation in which the Senator from Maryland (Mr. TYDINGS) presently finds himself being the object of attack from both the left and right. I think this short piece clearly demonstrates what happens to a public figure when he takes on the tough issues without ducking. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
TYDINGS OF NO JOY
While not susceptible of proof, a plausible hypothesis is that the unhappiest person in a lunatic asylum would be the one sane man. It is a tribute to his strength of mind that Senator Joseph Davies Tydings resists what must sometimes be considerable temptation to see himself in that role.
His efforts as chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia to restrain crime and to foster family planning have led some blacks to call him a fascist pig bent on genocide.
And, because Tydings is also pushing for saner gun laws, lavish displays of posters and bumper stickers paid for by you-know-who tell Maryland voters, "If Tydings wins, you lose."
What?
Their guns; therefore, they seem to fear, their manhood. Both fears are groundless; nevertheless Tydings, a self-confessed liberal, is now being depicted as a castrator as well. Tydings is Maryland's senior senator and faces in September a primary fight with George P. Mahoney, a Democrat who is an eight-times loser and is so far from being a liberal that in 1966 Spiro T. Agnew won the governorship from him largely by appearing to be by contrast a moderate.
Mahoney is counting confidently on gun lobby backing. Should Mahoney lose a ninth time, the gun lobby doubtless will back Republican J. Glenn Beall Jr. against Tydings in November.
Unregistered guns killed two of Tydings’ close friends, John and Robert F. Kennedy. The 1968 Gun Control Act is a flop; only three states require gun licenses and in 35 states, lunatics may legally own guns. Tydings wants guns registered and licensed. His assurances to hunters that this will not interfere with sport and to collectors of antique guns that these won't count, have failed to abate the trumped-up hysteria against Tydings' modest proposals; so have Tydings' terrible statistics – 99,000 armed robberies annually, more than doubled since 1964, and 9,000, Americans shot to death each year.
As a former United States Attorney, Tydings knows about crime statistics. He knows for instance that the chance is eight to one against the person committing a serious crime being arrested, and 16 to one against conviction. Last year in the District of Columbia, 56,419 felonies were reported (and many more committed) but the ratio of convictions was only 2.5 percent. Most of the D.C. victims are poor blacks. Their chance of being robbed is five times greater than other people's, and four times greater of being raped. Tydings in 1966 co-sponsored the Bail Reform Act, hoping to rescue poor suspects from the extortions of the professional bondsmen who soak them. He now says the reform failed. Some poor people accused of crime are held in jail before trial, by judges who set bond high. At the same time, of every eleven persons released on bail one is rearrested and charged with a new crime while still awaiting trial on the earlier charge. Tydings proposes that in certain cases arrested persons with criminal records may be held in jail without bail up to 30 days, but then be brought to trial. A man accused of brutal rape would not be able to go straight back and try to bash the woman's head in for telling, as has happened. Tydings would like top organized criminals, the Mafia and especially narcotics wholesalers, to get life sentences.
On the other hand, he wants probation for first offenders caught with drugs, and treatment and cure for addicts. To pay for their habit, addicts either steal or they push dope. Thefts by addicts add up to about 6400 million yearly in the Washington, D.C. area alone. Putting addicts on methadone would cost less than 10 cents per head a day. Tydings feels the Nixon Administration is stingy about funding treatment and cure of drug addicts and alcoholics.
Tydings' crime proposals have undammed floods of criticism, especially as the senator also supports a form of "no-knock" authority for police to enter premises, in quest of drugs or other. crime. Not everyone calls Tydings a racist. Rational critics concede that his no-knock provision is more circumspect than current practice – police do now enter without knocking, largely at their own discretion; Tydings would compel them to seek a judge's specific sanction. But the critics say that instead of asking for pre-trial detention, Tydings should work for speedier trials. Tydings replies that he is doing that too, but the courts are hopelessly clogged and won't unclog soon.
The senator has written a book, Born to Starve, to expose his views on population control. He says that 5.4 million American women who are poor don't want large families and do want family planning assistance, but fewer than 800,000 get it. The Nixon Administration has adopted elimination of unwanted births as a national goal, but Tydings is urging larger financial provision, $984,000 over five years. His less rational accusers blow up over his family planning stand. Some blacks say he's a rich white who aims to sterilize the black poor; others profess shock at his proposal to leave abortion "to individual conscience." If he politically survives the attacks generated by what seems to be everyone else's castration syndrome, Tydings may look good in 1972, when he will be only 44. Many of his liberal ideas match with those of Senator McGovern – and of Senator Ted Kennedy. Tydings would also fit a Muskie ticket, or a Hughes ticket. But sometimes, reading his hate mail, Tydings becomes a bit glum. The storm that is being worked up against him in his state is contrived by the gun lobby in part because he is a liberal, and people who fear and hate liberal views readily believe that Tydings is plotting to disarm them so as to leave them helpless prey of vaguely glimpsed powers of evil. But, meanwhile, Tydings' efforts to protect poor and black people from the criminals who prey on them are rudely rebuffed.