The 'Brady Bill' and the New England fall - 12 November 1993

An Englishman here on a combination holiday-business trip stopped me the other day, sometime in the long ago, he'd heard a talk about what visitors, foreigners tend to see on an American holiday and what I'd rudely suggested they might prefer to see if only they knew a little more.

I've found down the years that visiting Europeans, Britons especially, have already in their minds before they take the plane a picture of what their going to see, I don't mean just the places on their itinerary, but a fairly sharp picture of what the places are going to look like and, since travellers invariably find what they're looking for, they find it or they find that the legend doesn't live up to the reality. Most travellers who come here on a holiday without having links of family or business that dictate one or more destinations, sign up for a tour that includes New York City and not the splendours of the state, Miami, Disneyland or Disney World, Los Angeles meaning Hollywood and Las Vegas – a pretty bleak choice to anyone who knows much of this continent.

Well, what the man who stopped me in Boston last weekend wanted to say was that taking my advice, he had visited three national parks, Yosemite in California and the breathtaking canyons of Bryce and Zion in Utah and and was truly grateful. What, he added up there at the gateway to New England, was that he'd just that day returned from a foliage tour, so called – tours set up by the railroads and by charter bus companies, which begin on the middle weekend of October and go up through the hills of western Massachusetts and on into the mountains and valleys of New Hampshire and Vermont to catch the never-believable glory of the fall foliage at its peak, to see whole mountainsides bathed in a flood of scarlet and gold, to see green only in the grass and little stiff stands of evergreens.

There was a time some of you greybeards may remember when I did a regular talk in mid-October on the fall, the chemistry of it, why it happens here, the conditions that produce this flaming and twinkling landscape, such as the necessary alternation of frost and heat, the necessity of poor soil whose lack of nitrogen stimulates the marvellous range of yellows and golds in the great variety of American oaks. The developing out of the sugar in the maples as scarlet and so on.

The BBC engineers used to kid me whenever I came into the studio in mid or late October, "What's it today?" they'd say, "the beauty of the New England fall?" I resolved from then on not to mention it again, which I haven't done for 30 years or more. Why then do I bring up the beauty of the fall in New England just now, because it's just happened because I was in Boston on the edge of the last gorgeous days of it. Because as I talk to you, I look out on and over the still bulging foliage of Central Park in New York City, a Central Park that would be unrecognisable to anyone who saw it last two or three weeks ago.

For the past 10 days it has been glistening with every shade of lemon and yellow and orange and many of the larger oaks just blobs of blazing gold, I look at it and I think of it and I linger over it for a simple childish reason, it lifts the spirit in a gloomy time. It is this time anyway an unexpected refreshment by day after the unrelieved frightening news by night.

Of course I know and have often said that television loves most news that moves and is colourful, so it's naturally attracted to fires, to shootings, to arrests, to accidents. In the past month, you'd have got the idea that southern California was ablaze the whole length of its coast after the appalling firestorms that are kindled by that accursed Santa Ana, the roaring hot east wind from the desert.

A friend in our building sitting with us and watching the crackling, murderously swift destruction in Laguna and the Malibu hills thought she ought to telephone a friend up in San Jose to see, as we say, if she's all right. I consoled her with the reminder that California reaches from, so to speak, London to Rome, 900 miles, and that San Jose was about 400 miles north of Laguna and unlikely to catch a spark.

But granted that our nightly picture of news of American news anyway is bound because of the medium to focus on brilliant and violent action, so much of it these nights of children shooting each other, roving gangs taking potshots at passing cars, schoolteachers in despair about their job, which is not so much teaching as seeing that the classes get through the day without anybody being stabbed. To wake up from these nightly horrors and lookout on the blazing park has made me fumble in an amateur way for some philosophical consolation about the healing power of nature. Cor blimey what am I sinking into? Well, it's the truth and I understand a little late in life why so many people who live in the country are not downhearted and why so many women, unless they have growing children, are serene in the face of all this turmoil because they don't or don't have time to read the daily papers.

I'll say one thing for the nightly emphasis on guns and the recent television focus on teenage murder and obviously in a country of continental size it's happening somewhere everyday … Anyway, the Congress has finally responded to massive public anger overall, this and the sudden drastic reversal of public feeling about the gun lobby in general and the National Rifle Association in particular. So strong has this lobby been down the years, so effective in arguing the sacred constitutional right of Americans to bear arms, which as I explained last time doesn't exist in the Constitution that for 30 years since the assassination of President Kennedy they have always defeated every attempt to pass a gun control bill through Congress.

On Wednesday, that era ended, the House of Representatives passed a gun control bill that was first offered six years ago, was passed twice by the House and killed in the Senate. The bill is named the Brady Bill after James Brady, President Reagan's press secretary who was wounded and paralysed by shots intended for the president in the 1981 assassination attempt.

I ought to correct myself there, I forgot, in 1968, shortly after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Congress passed a bill that prohibited once for all the purchase of rifles, shotguns and ammunition through the post, mail-order sales as they're called. The present bill is modest; it requires anyone buying a gun to wait five days before taking possession until their past can be checked on. One opponent remarked correctly that the personal records of criminals are well organised in some states, chaotic in others and it will take about five years for a national computer file to be effective. That was enough for some opposing Southerners and rifle lobby boys, they joined the bill supporters at the price of an amendment they tacked on, which would let the bill lapse after five years and that suited the bill supporters since they should certainly know after five years if the thing works, if the bill reduces the crime rates.

All of this of course bypasses the question, which ardent gun-control people hate to ask, is an intending murderer going to go to a shop, give his name, pay his fee say, "yes sir, no ma'am" and wait five days before he goes out and does the deed? Also, I didn't read of any discussion in the House of the prospect of a second Prohibition backlash, the sort of unanticipated monster born of the 1920 bill that forbad, the sale, manufacturer or transport of alcoholic liqueurs, namely the rapid growth of a huge underground bootleg industry providing more liqueur than the country had ever drunk before. How about guns? We shall see.

But first things first, the Senate now has to look at the Brady Bill. Chances are that with some amendments it will pass this time, the Senate too appears to be waking from its voluntary coma over gun control. On Tuesday, it passed a bill prohibiting the sale of handguns to minors and it's now looking at a ban on all assault rifles.

Last Tuesday, too, you may have heard, there was a television debate not sponsored as such things have always been by some high-minded group like the League of Women Voters, but by the regular commercial talk show that launched Ross Perot into his noisy fame. It was his challenge to the administration to talk about the North American Free Trade Agreement and the president responded by sending into battle his vice president, the handsome earnest free trade expert Mr Gore. Mr Gore is no orator and everybody knows that Mr Perot is a cracker barrel philosopher, the poor man's – or should I say the very rich man's – Mark Twain. Mr Perot was expected to chew up the vice president. He didn't, the pollsters' count after the bout was two to one in Mr Gore's favour, but what the public thought is not evident.

Next week, the North American Free Trade Bill comes to a vote in the House and it's there we shall see how impressive Mr Perot's twangy arguments will be on congressmen and congresswomen who have to convince their constituents that Mr Perot is wrong in predicting that American businesses will flock down Mexico way just because labour down there can be hired for one seventh the wages American's get up north.

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