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Op-Ed Contributor

Chris Matthews: What Robert Kennedy Knew About Gun Control

Credit...Sally Deng

Roseburg, Ore. It’s one of those American places — Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino — now branded by a mass shooting. On Oct. 1, 2015, a 26-year-old shot and killed eight fellow students and a professor at the local community college. When the town’s name was still hot with grief, the watchword from the gun people was “politics.” No one was to talk about what might have prevented it.

It has been just like that this month. Two years to the day after Roseburg, a man killed 58 people and himself in Las Vegas. Again, the gun-rights lobby warned against speaking now, of all times, of the case for gun control. Last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan ruled out action even on the “bump stocks” that the Las Vegas shooter used to make his semiautomatic rifles shoot like Tommy guns.

At Roseburg, someone did try raising the alarm earlier, much earlier in fact, early enough to have done some good.

On May 27, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, made the case right on the eve of that state’s primary for doing something about the ease with which people got guns. He was warned not to dare try it: The local sheriff said there would be hostile demonstrators facing him, knowing the personal interest he had in the subject.

Kennedy went ahead anyway. There he stood on the steps of the county courthouse looking out over a crowd of 1,500; before him stood wary lumberjacks, most of them gun owners, many of them carrying signs with pro-gun, anti-Kennedy messages.

Yet the New York senator refused to alter his course, making his case with angry indignation. He spoke of the outlandish case of a man on death row in Kansas, a murderer who had killed a half-dozen people, who had sent away to Chicago for a mail-order rifle and managed, with little difficulty, to have it delivered to his cell.

“Does that make any sense?” Kennedy demanded, “that you should put rifles and guns in the hands of people who have long criminal records, of people who are so young they don’t know how to handle rifles and guns?”

He looked at the hecklers. “I see signs about the guns,” he said. “I’m wondering if any of you would like to come and explain.”

A man with a “Protect your right to bear arms” sign did. He held a petition against a bill Kennedy was backing that “forbids mail order of guns to the very young, those with criminal records and the insane.”

“All this legislation does is keep guns from criminals and the demented and those too young,” Kennedy challenged him. “With all the violence and murder and killings we’ve had in the United States, I think you will agree that we must keep firearms from people who have no business with guns or rifles.”

Yet even this drew boos. “They’ll get them anyway,” came a shout.

It was easy enough for anyone there in Roseburg that day to fathom Kennedy’s own passion on the subject. His brother the president had been shot and killed five years earlier — by someone using a mail-order rifle. Just eight weeks before, Kennedy had stood in an African-American neighborhood in Indianapolis, telling those who’d come to cheer him that Martin Luther King Jr. had just been shot and killed in Memphis.

Then, while he could not know his own fate, 11 days after he addressed the Roseburg crowd, his own death arrived at the end of a .22-caliber revolver in Los Angeles, just after he won the California Democratic primary.

But there was Robert Kennedy, candidate for president, survivor of a president, consoler the night of King’s death, having to defend his daring to raise the issue of gun control.

We are a country blanketed by cities, towns and schools best known for killing sprees. Orlando, Fla.; Charleston, S.C.; Virginia Tech; Columbine, Colo. — the list grows, as John Wayne said, “as sure as the turning of the earth.”

Is this as good as it gets here? Assassinations by gunfire separate us from the rest of the world — from Lincoln to Garfield to McKinley to attempts on Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Truman, the killing of John Kennedy, the near-killing Ronald Reagan, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and all these mass shootings. They scream but refuse to be heard: “Only in America.”

I was in Montreal when Robert Kennedy was shot. A French-Canadian cabdriver taking me back to the airport kept mumbling: “The giant has stubbed his toe. The giant has stubbed his toe.”

We are not, we know, a giant stumbling in the dark. We know the country we live in. If some believe this is the best we can do, let them say so.

If there are those who believe we can do better, let them say so all the louder. Now, loud and clear, now more than ever.

Chris Matthews is the anchor of MSNBC’s “Hardball” and the author of the forthcoming “Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Robert Kennedy’s Gun Control Crusade. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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