This being campaign season, there is more posing in Congress than at a Mr. Olympia contest. Exhibit A: The spectacle of senators prattling about whether to amend the Constitution to prevent gay marriages. Everyone knew that the proposed amendment had no chance of getting the two-thirds support necessary to pass, but Republican leaders staged the debate anyway. They wanted to score campaign points with the religious right.

Strangely enough, the GOP potentates in the House used precisely the opposite reasoning to deny Democrats a debate on extending the assault weapons ban. That ban, enacted in 1994, expires on Sept. 13. Yet Majority Leader Tom DeLay insisted that because a majority of votes to pass the extension was nowhere in sight, there was no point in debating a bill. Thus, the Republicans denied the Democrats a chance to score points with the anti-gun left.

There is a difference between these two issues, however. If two gays marry, no one is harmed. If the assault weapons ban, weak as it is, expires, it will become at least marginally easier for mentally ill people or criminals to get their hands on the kind of semi-automatic firearms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris used to wreak havoc at Columbine High School.

The National Rifle Association and other enemies of firearms regulation claim that the existing assault weapons ban is ineffectual and senseless because it only outlaws cosmetic features of certain guns whose action is identical to that of legal hunting rifles. They are largely right.

The ban outlaws 19 specific guns, plus certain combinations of military-style features, such as folding stocks and detachable magazines. It exempts 670 hunting firearms. But the ban is not more effective because the NRA and its allies have worked hard to make sure that it isn't, and manufacturers can skirt it.

The goal should be to create a new law that not only extends the current ban but strengthens it to accomplish the original intent, which is to ban military-style, semi-automatic weapons that fire many rounds in quick succession.

No hunter needs that kind of killing power, unless the quarry is other human beings.

Admittedly, at this point in the congressional calendar, even a successful vote to extend the ban in the House would be only symbolic, because the Senate rejected an extension in March, and it is unlikely to take up the issue again this session.

Meanwhile, the president, who said during his first campaign that he supported extending the current law, has remained quiet throughout the debate.

That, too, is a powerful symbol, and a pose that matters.