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'... The whole “assault weapon” panic of 1989 never would have turned into a major issue for the next fifteen years if not for Republican Drug “Czar” William Bennett linking it to the drug war."

This is precisely how it happened, truth is told.

Completely unable to do anything useful about the Crack epidemic of the late 80s, the Bush Administration made a big sideshow about 'assault weapons', thinking that the NRA was just about skeet guns and huntin' rifles and wouldn't protest. The FBI reported to the White House that dangerous 'Gangsta Rap' albums had lyrics of slinging drugs and guns, and the safety of law enforcement all over the nation was at stake unless we rid the streets of assault rifles that were used in 0.01% of violent crimes.

Today, every inner city Skid Row bum from the late 80s who was hooked on crack is dead, and phony 'gangsta rapper' Ice Cube makes second rate 'Daddy takes his kids on a comical cross country trip' family movies full of wacky hijinx. Yet, get caught with a flash suppressor on a post-1989 imported semi-auto target rifle that doesn't have 10 domestically produced parts, and the ATF will try to put you in jail for 10 years and give you a $250,000 fine. If the same damned gun has 10 domestically produced parts and is otherwise indistinguishable, oh that's good to go! Fire away to your heart's content!

William Bennett is an asshole.

I agree 100% with you. This article was especially enlightening on the history of the gun rights movement and its setbacks in the late 80s/early 90s. Dave Kopel has been instrumental in the cause for a number of years. I also found this article from Dave Kopel in 1996 (prior to Clinton's reelection) interesting and you may as well. It captures politicians as we saw them at the time and not through the rosy-red glass of revisionist history:

George Bush and the NRA, here's a snippet:

By the end of the Reagan Presidency, Ronald Reagan’s declining faculties had made him almost irrelevant to the Machiavellian policy-making going on in the White House. Attorney General Edwin Meese—not exactly a libertarian—was getting ready to have the administration endorse Senator Howard Metzenbaum’s bill to ban “plastic handguns.” (There’s no such thing, but the Metzenbaum bill would have outlawed many thousands of small, all-metal handguns, such as derringers, which were claimed to be invisible to airport metal detectors.)