While not impossible, fresh firearms legislation is far from certain, says Robert Spitzer, a professor at the State University of New York and author of The Politics of Gun Control.

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Those laws grow directly out of the Second Amendment ethos the NRA has championed: "the ethos of individualism, of having a gun, of individuals taking the initiative, " said Robert Spitzer, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Cortland and at Cornell University who has studied and written about the NRA for decades.

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Wednesday's 23-13 party line vote came a few weeks after psychiatrist Robert L. Spitzer, in a letter to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, apologized for his 2003 study of reparative therapy, which suggested that it could help gays and lesbians become straight.

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Spitzer was a clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Robert Sweet in New York.

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Although he spent eight years in private practice, Spitzer has made his name in public service, first in the Manhattan District Attorney's office under Robert Morgenthau, later becoming head of its Labor Racketeering unit.

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