More whining about gubs

The New York Times has an editorial (predictably) against the mythical 'gun lobby':

While the rest of the nation comes to grips with fresh concerns about terrorism, domestic and foreign, Congress is wrapped up in the peculiar obsessions of the gun lobby, most of which are certain to make Americans less safe in their homes and on the streets.
Congress, for example, is cowering before the gun lobby's insistence that even terrorist suspects who are placed on the “no-fly list” must not be denied the right to buy and bear arms. Suspects on that list purchased more than 1,100 weapons in the last six years, but Congress has never summoned the gumption to stop this trade in the name of public safety and political sanity.
Legislation to close this glaring threat continues to languish with little promise of enactment, because a bipartisan mass of lawmakers fear retribution by the gun lobby’s campaign machine. Firsthand pleas this week from New York City’s mayor and police commissioner— testifying after the attempted Times Square bombing attributed to a suspect who was also carrying a legally obtained gun— showed no sign of budging a timorous Congress.
It is a sign of the gun lobby’s growing confidence that it feels free to keep up the pressure, public and private, after the near-disaster in New York. Normally, the lobby goes quiet for a decent interval after a particularly heinous crime occurs.
On the contrary, Senator John McCain and other members of the gun lobby’s cohort are pressing for legislation to strip local taxpayers in Washington of such basic gun controls as owner registration and a ban on semiautomatic battlefield rifles, laws already upheld by the courts. The gun lobby cued Congress to take another run at scuttling the city’s gun controls after previously using the issue to stymie the district’s hopes to at last have a full-fledged voting representative in the House.
If Capitol supporters of the National Rifle Association agenda dared to check reality outside their windows, they would confront the district’s alarm over the four dead and five wounded citizens who fell six weeks ago in a spray of bullets from a semiautomatic weapon. Instead, the gun lobby aims at allowing residents to buy weapons and ammunition in lightly policed markets in Virginia and Maryland.
To protect its clout in the political arena, the gun lobby is challenging legislation needed to contain an expected flood of unregulated attack ads in this year’s federal elections. Corporations, unions, and advocacy groups were given this laissez-faire spending freedom in a misguided decision by the Supreme Court. An urgent countermeasure to require public disclosure of these groups’ stealthy money sources and donors is being opposed “in its present form” by the NRA.
It would be folly for Congress to create disclosure exemptions for the NRA or any other advocacy heavyweight by distinguishing them from corporate and union organizations under the bill. Disclosure would be rendered a joke by a flood of exemptions. Congress must hold the line and let the public in on the looming campaign machinations. It should not allow groups on the right or left to spend freely from the political shadows.