Voters under the gun. (Correction, Please!).

ITEM: "As the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, who was killed by an assassin's bullet, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has always favored gun control," reported Newsweek for October 21st. "But in a perhaps quixotic quest for rural votes, she had downplayed the issue in her Democratic campaign for governor of Maryland." That changed, said Newsweek, after a "sniper; using a high-powered rifle [began] to terrorize the Washington area...." She is now "offering gun control as one answer to the voters 'fears."

CORRECTION: There was nothing quixotic about the Kathleen Kennedy Townsend campaign, before or after she blew a 15-point lead. However, when sniper attacks began in suburbs of Maryland and Virginia around D.C., her campaign got new ammunition, Reneging on a vow not to exploit the shootings, Robert Kennedy's daughter did just that. She preened in Baltimore: "I have had a lot of tragedy in my life because of guns, and I know the pain of losing somebody. I don't want other Marylanders to feel that pain."

Gun controllers crave calamity: The National Firearms Act of 1934 followed the assassination of Chicago's mayor; the Gun Control Act of 1968 was one reaction to the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; and the Crime Control Act of 1994 proceeded from well-publicized school shootings. With many Marylanders already terrorized, Mrs. Townsend shamelessly rolled out a campaign ad -- complete with gunfire from the Columbine High School tragedy in Colorado -- accusing her opponent of siding "with gun-lobby extremists who threaten our neighbors."

Meanwhile, she and others are pushing ballistic "fingerprinting," trying to ride a wave of fear into the governor's mansion. Maryland, as it happens, already has such a law, but in two years it has not produced a single conviction.