From latzko@ns1.rutgers.edu Thu Dec 9 14:40:09 1993 Received: from portal.unix.portal.com by jobe (4.1/1.34) id AA03024; Thu, 9 Dec 93 14:40:08 PST Received: from demon by portal.unix.portal.com (1.885) id AA02430; Thu, 9 Dec 93 14:40:05 -0800 Received: from nova.unix.portal.com by demon.corp.portal.com (4.1/ 1.20) id AA20029; Thu, 9 Dec 93 14:39:45 PST Received: by nova.unix.portal.com (5.65b/4.1 1.581) id AA10566; Thu, 9 Dec 93 14:40:03 -0800 Received: by ns1.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.5/3.08) id AA02031; Thu, 9 Dec 93 17:23:00 EST Received: from EDRC.CMU.EDU by ns1.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.5/3.08) id AA02011; Thu, 9 Dec 93 17:22:55 EST Received: from relay2.UU.NET by EDRC.CMU.EDU id aa11896; 9 Dec 93 17:21:59 EST Received: from camelot.dsccc.com by relay2.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA10121; Thu, 9 Dec 93 17:21:54 -0500 Received: from optilink.dsccc.com by camelot.dsccc.com (5.65c/SMI-V1.8) id AA22841; Thu, 9 Dec 1993 16:23:31 -0600 Received: by optilink.dsccc.com (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA13969; Thu, 9 Dec 93 14:21:42 PST Date: Thu, 9 Dec 93 14:21:42 PST From: cramer@optilink.dsccc.com (Clayton Cramer) Message-Id: <9312092221.AA13969@optilink.dsccc.com> To: president@whitehouse.gov Subject: how to prevent those sort of mass murders Cc: cramer@optilink.dsccc.com, firearms-politics@cs.cmu.edu, ca-firearms@shell.portal.com, walsh@optilink.dsccc.com Status: RO Clayton E. Cramer 7198 Camino Colegio Rohnert Park, CA 94928 (707) 795-7306 cramer@optilink.dsccc.com December 9, 1993 President William Clinton The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, DC Dear Mr. President: I see from today's newspaper accounts that you consider expanding "stop and frisk" authority for police to be "on the table" as part of your attempt to make the streets safer. I didn't watch your inauguration, but did they leave out the part of the oath that requires swearing to uphold the Constitution, or has the Fourth Amendment's clause prohibiting "unreasonable searches and seizures" been repealed? I see that you are insisting that more gun control is needed to avoid tragedies such as the one that happened on the Long Island Railroad. Hmmmm. This horrendous crime took place in the state with the strictest handgun laws in the nation, and the criminal purchased a handgun in California, only a little less strict, after passing our 15 day waiting period and background check. This wasn't caused by a shortage of gun control, but an excess. What would have happened if this same sorry incident had happened in Utah, Florida, Oregon, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Washington State? There is a strong possibility that the killer would have died somewhere after the second or third shot was fired. Why? Because in each of these states, residents without criminal or mental illness histories can easily obtain a permit to carry a handgun. In Florida, 1.3% of the population of the state now has such a permit. In Oregon, 2% of the adult population now has such a permit. In the case of Florida, it appears that this ready availability of handgun permits is why the murder rate in Florida has fallen from 11.4/100,000 in 1987 (when the law took effect) to 9.3/100,000 in 1991 -- at a time when the U. S. murder rate was rising. In New York, of course, concealed handgun permits are difficult to impossible to obtain (unless you pay a bribe), and so murderers can be pretty sure that no one is going to fire back. Details of the new wave of non- discretionary concealed handgun permits, and how they seem to have been moderately effectively at reducing murder rates, can be found in the Independence Institute Issue Paper 14-93, released June 18, 1993. The notion of banning high capacity magazines is utterly ludicrous. This will NOT reduce mass murder. How long does it take to replace a magazine with another magazine? My wife and I can both replace an empty handgun magazine with a loaded one in one second, even under pressure. The murderer on the Long Island R.R. changed magazines at least twice, according to newspaper accounts -- only being subdued when he ran out of ammunition. If he had been limited to 10 round magazines, he would have changed magazines one more time before finishing his murderous rampage. In short, the magazines aren't the problem, it's the nut holding the gun you better worry about! Remember that the largest mass murders in the U. S. in the last ten years have been done not with guns, but with gasoline: 96 murdered at the Dupont Plaza in Puerto Rico, and 87 murdered in New York City at the Happyland Social Club. (Not surprisingly, both places have very strict gun control -- and so the savages used gasoline, not guns.) Your continued efforts to characterize "legitimate" gun ownership in America as related to hunting and target shooting is inaccurate. My wife and I both have concealed handgun permits. Why? Because we live in an area that is beginning to develop a serious violent crime problem, in spite of very strict gun control laws here in California. Self-defense is a legitimate reason to own a gun. Three weeks ago, in a shopping center where I often go, a man was walking with his daughter. A group of teenaged gang members harrassed and chased him, culminating with the gang stabbing the father in the face with a screwdriver. Even if you could magically make every handgun in America disappear (and magic would be required), the violence problem will not disappear. You keep insisting that something needs to be done about "assault weapons," while insisting that there is no legitimate purpose to them. You are simply, utterly, wrong. First of all, there is no significant criminal misuse of military-style rifles. All the rifles combined (most of which are hunting rifles) make 1-3% of the murders in the U.S. each year. Studies such as the one done by the Florida Assault Weapons Commission found that tiny fractions of 1% of crimes in Florida were done with assault weapons -- and most of THAT tiny fraction was with weapons that are classed and restricted as handguns -- not with rifles. Second, there is a legitimate purpose to assault weapons. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, many, many shopkeepers used such weapons to defend their stores from rioters. Interestingly enough, there was no rioters actually killed during these confrontations -- probably because the shopkeepers were more interested in discouraging destruction than in killing people. In these situations, where hundreds of rioters are attacking a store or mall, a high capacity magazine is extremely useful -- it means that the defender can afford to waste a few shots into the air over the crowd as a threat, without having to immediately start killing rioters. Third, there is a constitutional issue here. Greenwood Press (a well-respected academic publishing house in Connecticut) will soon be publishing my second book, FOR THE DEFENSE OF THEMSELVES AND THE STATE: THE ORIGINAL INTENT & JUDICIAL INTERPRETATION OF THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS. This is a scholarly history of original intent and judicial interpretation of both the Second Amendment, and its analogs in the various state constitutions. In the course of my research, I was surprised to find that the primary concern motivating the various state requests for the Second Amendment was not individual self-defense (though this was assumed to be a right, everywhere), not foreign invasion, but tyranny from the new Federal Government. Repeatedly, debates about ratification of the Constitution expressed concern that the new federal government might abuse its powers, and the defenders of the new Constitution denied that this would happen. As James Madison pointed out in Federalist 46: Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the [Federal] Government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State Governments with the people on their side would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield in the United States an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. While some state supreme courts in the nineteenth century upheld laws that restricted or regulated the carrying of handguns, even these courts, taking narrow views of the meaning of the right to keep and bear arms, pointed out: There need be no fear, from any thing in these sections, that the citizen may not always have arms, and be skilled in their proper use, whenever the common defense may require him to take them up.[Haile v. State, 38 Ark. 564, 567 (1882).] A more typical decision of the period is that of the Georgia Supreme Court, which overturned a state ban on sales of concealable deadly weapons (including small handguns) based on the Second Amendment: The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, and not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all of this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is, that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right, originally belonging to our forefathers, trampled under foot by Charles I. and his two wicked sons and successors, reestablished by the revolution of 1688, conveyed to this land of liberty by the colonists, and finally incorporated conspicuously in our own Magna Charta! And Lexington, Concord, Camden, River Raisin, Sandusky, and the laurel-crowned field of New Orleans, plead eloquently for this interpretation![Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. 243, 250, 251 (1846).] The Texas Supreme Court's decision in English v. State, 35 Tex. 473 (1872), which upheld Texas' law restricting the carrying of handguns, argued that the right to keep and bear arms applied only to individually-owned military weapons. An AR-15, or an AK-47, certainly qualifies as a "military weapon," such as might be used to keep a tyrannical government in check. They used YOUR argument about the meaning of the Second Amendment, and even they acknowledged that military weapons were protected! Stop trying to disarm law-abiding people -- disarm the criminals. Stop pretending that you can solve the severe social problems that this country now has by attacking a symptom: violence. Above all, stop punishing those of us who are NOT the problem. You claimed during the campaign to be a "New Style Democrat," not one of those stuck in the traditional far left nonsense. There is no better evidence that you are, in fact, part of that lunatic left, than your continuing to chase this delusion that you can make America a safer place by criminalizing gun ownership, instead of criminalizing violent actions against others. Very Truly Yours, Clayton E. Cramer