With the ban on military-style, semiautomatic assault weapons lapsing, expect a new flood of Tec-9s, Uzis and so on. Manufacturers and guns dealers have been running ads for weeks, licking their chops and counting down to that grand moment when the wraps would come off and these extraordinarily dangerous weapons, disproportionately favored in the most violent crimes, could once more go on sale in our already hectic gun bazaar.

When George W. Bush was running for the presidency four years ago, an official of the National Rifle Association was caught saying aloud what the gun lobby was trying to keep to itself: that if Bush won, the NRA wouldn't need to worry about reaching the Oval Office. It would be in the Oval Office.

And so it is. Bush has said that he supports the assault weapon ban and would sign a bill to extend it, but that's more than a little disingenuous. The president hasn't lifted a finger to continue the ban. His is a deeply cynical pose. He is smirking out of both sides of his mouth.

It would be one thing if there were somehow a broad clamor to start cranking up the nation's firepower and firing rate again, but just the opposite is true.

The ban is supported by leading law enforcement organizations - the chiefs of police and so on. It is supported by major religious denominations. It is supported in polls by 68 percent of the public.

No matter. The gun lobby won't hear of it, and the NRA is spending some $20 million on this year's elections, mostly to bankroll Bush and Republican lawmakers. Congress always runs scared before the lobby and never faster than when a president refuses to share responsibility with legislators for sensible controls.

The semiautomatic weapons fill no sporting purpose. They aren't used for hunting, unless you like your venison shredded. They are not necessary for target shooting. They are, at the end, finally just very efficient people-killers.

At campaign stops, Bush is pounding the point that he supports, as he puts it, the individual right to bear arms. That may sound like ho-hum political boilerplate to most ears, but the key word there is "individual," and it is music to the gun lobby.

The Second Amendment is the only conditional article in the Bill of Rights: "A well regulated militia, being necesssary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

As a collective right geared to state security - the way it has legally and generally been understood - the amendment leaves plenty of room for public-interest gun controls. Asserted as a near-absolute individual right, the options for control narrow and, as some would have it, disappear altogether.

Bush, in short, is promoting a radical lobby-driven interpretation that could call most customary gun laws into legal question, and he is appointing, into the bargain, federal judges who often appear to lean that way, too.

Meantime, didn't he say he favored continuing the ban on semiautomatics? What more could you want? Action?

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers.