For all the anguish and outcry in the days after a community college dropout named Jared Loughner allegedly sprayed a Tucson crowd with 33 bullets from a semiautomatic pistol, one response was notably absent: any sense that America's latest shooting spree, which killed six people and wounded 14, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, would bring new restrictions on the right to own or carry large-capacity, rapid-fire weapons. The gun control debate has vanished from American politics, but it wasn't always so invisible. Twenty years ago, when another apparently deranged man fired a semiautomatic pistol into a crowd, killing 23 people in Killeen, Tex., politicians rushed the microphones to denounce the weapon itself as "a death machine," as Representative John Cony-ers Jr., a Michigan Democrat, put it on the floor of the House.
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