THE LONG LIST OF "GUN-CONTROL" MYTHS rev. 1/5/98 [talk.politics.guns' Official Pro-Gun FAQ (fully indexed, w/glossary) Additions/suggestions are welcome. Your help is encouraged. Email to: Ken Barnes (kebarnes@cc.memphis.edu) This FAQ is now available at: http://www.rkba.org/research/rkba.faq by courtesy of Jeff Chan (jeffcfi@RKBAbest.com) and archived by the fine FAQ folks at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/talk-politics-guns and ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/talk-politics-guns/pro-gun-faq/part1 NOTE: As a courtesy to our contributors, all email addresses (except my own) mentioned in this FAQ include an anti-spambot string "RKBA" which must be removed before they are used. --KB] _________________________________________________________________ +This FAQ is dedicated to all who fought to secure the Blessings+ +of Liberty against Monarchism, Racism, Fascism, and Communism. + ----------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS (* indicates an updated entry, !* a new section) SECTION I. - Personal issues * 1.0 - "You don't need a gun, the police will protect you." 1.1 - "Guns aren't an effective defense, or, the 43:1 myth." * 1.1.a - "Chemical sprays and stun guns are just as effective." !* 1.1.b - "2.5 million defensive gun uses each year can't be true!" !* 1.1.c - "Is there independent evidence to support that number?" 1.2 - "Bad guys will just take your gun away and shoot you." 1.2.a - "...especially if you're a woman." * 1.3 - "Guns are too dangerous to own if you've got children." SECTION II. - Constitutional issues in the United States 2.0 - "The 2nd Amendment means you can't disarm the National Guard." 2.0.a - "What's the deal with the punctuation?" 2.1 - "The 2nd Amendment doesn't protect an individual right." 2.2 - "So you think everybody can own nuclear weapons?" * 2.3 - "The 2nd Amendment doesn't apply to states and localities." SECTION III. - Other "gun-control" fantasies * 3.0 - "We ought to register all firearms and ammunition." * 3.0.a - "We ought to license and register guns like cars." 3.0.b - "Gun registration reduced homicides in Washington, D.C." !* 3.0.c - "'Taggants' in gunpowder and explosives fight terrorism." 3.1 - "Guns increase the lethality of crime." * 3.2 - "Waiting periods save lives." * 3.2.a - "The Brady Act national waiting period is very effective." * 3.3 - "Ban assault weapons!" 3.4 - "Ban cop-killer bullets!" 3.4.a - "Ban Black Rhino ammunition!" 3.5 - "Ban Saturday Nite Specials!" 3.6 - "Ban plastic guns!" !* 3.6.a - "But how could you detect plastic guns?" * 3.7 - "Gun buy-backs are effective in getting guns off the street." 3.8 - "Concealed-carry reform will take us back to the Wild West!" 3.8.a - "What about the University of Maryland study?" !* 3.8.b - "Lott and Mustard's study is just gun industry propaganda!" SECTION IV. - Deterrence and resistance to tyranny 4.0 - "Small arms aren't effective against a modern army." APPENDIX I. - Federal "gun control" laws in the United States "Nonmailable Firearms Act" of 1927 - Public Law 69-583 National Firearms Act of 1934 - Public Law 73-474 Federal Firearms Act of 1938 - Public Law 75-785 (repealed) Gun Control Act of 1968 - Public Law 90-618 Firearms Owner's Protection Act of 1986 - Public Law 99-308 Armor Piercing Ammunition ban of 1987 - Public Law 99-408 Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 - Public Law 100-649 Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 - Public Law 101-647 (void) * Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 (void in part) - Public Law 103-159 Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994 (a.k.a. "assault weapons" ban) - Public Law 103-322 * APPENDIX II. - Data on concealed carry reform in Florida APPENDIX III. - "Gun Control": international comparisons JAPAN CANADA UNITED STATES OF AMERICA * GREAT BRITAIN SWITZERLAND GERMANY * AUSTRALIA APPENDIX IV. - Washington, D.C.: a "gun control" paradise * APPENDIX V. - The U.S. Supreme Court and the Second Amendment !* APPENDIX VI. - Pious Frauds: If It Sounds Too Good To Be True... INDEX AND GLOSSARY ----------------------------------------------------------------- SECTION I. - Personal issues "The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world, as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some_will_not,_ others_dare_not_ lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them;... the weak will become a prey to the strong." -=(Thomas Paine, "Thoughts on Defensive War," 1775)=- 1.0 "You don't need a gun, the police will protect you." Recommended reading: _In The Gravest Extreme,_by Massad Ayoob [available from Police Bookshelf, P.O. Box 122, Concord, NH 03301], ISBN 0-936297-00-1, (1980) _The Truth About Self Protection,_by Massad Ayoob, Police Bookshelf, ISBN 0553-23664-6, (1983) _Armed and Female: Twelve Million American Women Own Guns, Should You?,_ by Paxton Quigley, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-95150-7, (1993) _Not An Easy Target,_by Paxton Quigley, Simon and Schuster, ISBN 0-671-89081-6, (1995) _Strong On Defense: Survival Rules to Protect You and Your Family from Crime,_by Sanford Strong, Pocket Books, ISBN 0-671-52293-0, (1996) _Firing Back,_by Clayton E. Cramer, Krause Publications, ISBN 0-87341-344-X, (1994) _Stopping Power: Why Seventy Million Americans Own Guns,_by J. Neil Schulman, Synapse-Centurion Books, ISBN 1-882639-03-0, (1994) _Gun Laws and the Need for Self-Defense (Parts 1 and 2),_hearings before The Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, 104th Congress, 1st session, March 31, 1996, SuDoc# Y 4.J89/1:104/43/Pt.1, and 2nd session, April 5, 1995, SuDoc# Y 4.J89/1:104/43/Pt.2 [These hearings, called in response to the fledgling Republican Congress' efforts to repeal the 1994 Clinton/Feinstein gun ban (see 3.3 and Appendix I), featured testimony from a number of scholars cited elsewhere in this FAQ, including James Wright, Joyce Malcolm, David Bordua, Robert Cottrol, and Daniel Polsby, as well as law enforcement officers and crime victims.] A selection of relevant cases [most of which are listed and discussed in 'Dial 911 and Die!' by JPFO (Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership) 2872 S. Wentworth Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53207, Ph: (414) 769-0760, FAX: (414) 483-8435 JPFO also has a website: http://www.jpfo.org/ ]: [Note: For convenience of the reader, legal citations in this FAQ have been rendered in a more familiar "bibliography" style form, rather than standard legal citation form. Real lawyers would cite the first case below as 59 U.S. (18 How.) 396, 15 L.Ed. 433 ] South v. Maryland, U.S. Reports (18 Howard) v.59 p.396, Lawyer's Edition v.15 p.433 (1856) Riss v. City of New York, N.Y. Supplement 2nd series v.293 p.897, N.Y. Reports 2nd series v.22 p.579 (1968) Keane v. City of Chicago, Illinois Appellate Court Reports 2nd series v.98 p.460 (1968) Hartzler v. City of San Jose, California Appellate Reports 3rd series v.46 p.6, California Reporter v.120 p.5 (1975) Reiff v. City of Philadelphia, Federal Supplement v.471 p.1262 Eastern District of Pennsylvania (1979) Warren v. District of Columbia, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit 2nd series v.444 p.1 (1981) Bowers v. DeVito, Federal Reporter 2nd series v.686 p.616 U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Cir. (1982) Morgan v. District of Columbia, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit 2nd series v.468 p.1306 (1983) Cuffy v. City of New York, N.Y. Reports 2nd series v.69 p.255 (1987) Lynch v. N.C. Dept. of Justice, Southeastern Reporter 2nd series v.376 p.247 North Carolina Court of Appeals (1989) Kircher v. City of Jamestown, New York Reports 2nd series v.74 p.251, Northeastern Reporter 2nd series v.543 p.443 (1989) Marshall v. Winston, Southeastern Reporter 2nd series v.389 p.902 Virginia (1990) Berliner v. Thompson, et al., Appellate Division (NY) 2nd series v.174 p.220, New York State 2nd series v.578 p.687 (1992) In summary: Police can only act once a crime is occurring or has already been committed. They cannot be held liable for failure to arrive in time to save any particular individual from harm, so long as they aren't someone who has a special relationship with the police, like a protected witness. Indeed, it's_extremely_unlikely that police officers will be able to arrive and_save_you from harm faster than an attacker can harm you. There aren't, and there ought not to be, sufficient police to act as personal bodyguards for every citizen, 24 hours a day, and any guarantee to that effect would be extremely expensive in terms of both money and liberty. 1.1 "Guns aren't effective defensive weapons, and are '43 to 1 times' more likely to kill their owners or family members than they are useful to defend against criminal attack." See_Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America,_by Gary Kleck, Aldine de Gruyter, ISBN 0-202-30419-1 (1991) [Dr. Kleck's book is a valuable resource for all participants in the "gun control" debate. _Point Blank_received the American Society for Criminology's highest honor, the Hindelang Award, at the ASC's 1993 annual meeting, for the most important contribution to the criminology literature in the preceding three years.] also_Criminal Victimization in the United States,_1992_ A National Crime Victimization Survey Report,_Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dept. of Justice SuDoc# J 29.9/2:992 (1992) Kellerman, Arthur L. and Reay, Donald T., "Protection or Peril? An Analysis of Firearm-Related Deaths in the Home" New England J. Medicine, v.314, n.24, pp.1557-1560 (1986) Kleck, Gary and Gertz, Marc, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," J. of Criminal Law and Criminology, v.86, n.1, pp.150-187 (1995) In summary: The often-cited "studies that show" having a gun in the home is a far greater risk to you and your loved ones than to criminals, are a favorite topic of discussion here on t.p.g., in part to demonstrate the extraordinary statistical contortions that "gun control" advocates will go to in an attempt to support their flawed premises. The idea that guns (and handguns in particular) are ineffective as defensive weapons shows a distinct lack of imagination, especially since police carry them for that purpose. The 1986 Kellerman study, the source of the famous "43 to 1" ratio, is deceptive in several ways. The basis for comparison in this study is the ratio of "firearm-related deaths" of household members vs. deaths of criminals killed in the home (justifiable homicides). The "firearm-related deaths" in the study include suicides and accidents, neither of which are randomly distributed throughout the population, as the 43 to 1 "risk ratio" would imply. Both suicides and accidents are more likely to occur in specific categories of people than they are in the general population. Of the 398 "firearm-related deaths" included in the study, the vast majority (333, or, 84%) were suicides. The number of fatal firearms accidents in the study was 12 (or 3% of the studied deaths). Since sometimes a "gun cleaning accident" is actually a suicide reported under a name less likely to deny payment from a life insurance company, there may in fact have been even fewer accidents than are apparent from the reporting. When only the criminal homicides are considered, rather than including suicides and accidents, the "43 to 1" ratio disappears, and the ratio is far less dramatic, more like "4.5 to 1". There were 41 criminal homicides reported in the Kellerman study, and 9 instances of justifiable or self-defense homicide. People who are violent, unbalanced, or involved in a life of crime are much more likely to use their home gun unwisely, and their chances of using it to harm another (or themselves) are higher than would be expected for the majority of the population. As criminologists know and can demonstrate, the fallacy underlying the work of researchers who treat "gun violence" as an "epidemic" or as an issue of "public health" is the idea that people are all at equal risk for becoming a perpetrator of crime, and lack only a deadly weapon. If a person is stable, and not suicidal, and not prone to extreme violence, their chances of becoming involved in "firearm-related death" will be far lower than the Kellerman "43 to 1 risk ratio" would suggest. Persons with these risk factors are not only more likely to abuse guns to harm themselves or others, but they probably can't be trusted with knives, either. Aside from such obvious risk factors, the likelihood of being injured accidentally can be decreased further by training in safe gun handling, much as firearms accidents have declined in the U.S. population in recent years due to such safety education, despite an increase in the number of guns available. (See 1.3) The Kellerman study, based on data collected in King County, WA from 1978 to 1983, is skewed towards violence associated with an urban setting, and makes little mention of the thousands of gun-owning households where no "firearm-related deaths" occurred at all. If gun ownership was the crucial factor in an "epidemiology of violence," how to explain the fact that almost all gunowners' households weren't affected? Assessing the effectiveness of gun use against criminals as "number of criminals killed" (as the Kellerman study does) is an extraordinary presumption as well, since law enforcement officers aren't judged by such a restrictive standard. Why isn't "criminals deterred" or "crimes completed" or even "criminals wounded or apprehended" a legitimate means of measuring defensive effectiveness? Certainly in some proportion of gun-owning households where no "firearm-related deaths" occurred, it was because a firearm was used to deter, wound, or otherwise thwart an attacker. In point of fact, the reason these "studies" are structured as badly as they are, and are published in medical (rather than criminological) journals, is that the numbers don't work out in favor of the "gun control" viewpoint if considered in these other ways (see also 3.0.b). There's no more reason to judge the ability and effectiveness of armed citizens at fighting crime by the numbers of criminals they kill than it is to do so for the police. Surprisingly, however, the numbers are quite similar (see 3.8). Still, it seems absurd for the anti-gun side to imply that gun owners_ought_to kill as many or more criminals than the number of people that criminals murder (which is the only way for the law-abiding to make a good showing in Kellerman's "kill ratio")! Kellerman implies that a general "cost-benefit" ratio can be developed which can be used to weigh the harm committed with guns against the right of the individual to have a gun for self-defense, and if it happens that more people are being harmed with guns than there are instances of self-defense, we can simply allow those few people whose lives would be saved by having a gun to become victims too. According to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data, having a gun and being able to use it in a defensive situation is the most effective means of avoiding injury (moreso even than offering no resistance) and thwarting completion of a robbery or assault. In general, resisting violent crime is far more likely to help than to hurt, and this is especially true if your attacker attempts to take you hostage, such as sometimes happens in a carjacking situation. Most often in with-gun defenses, criminals can be frightened away or deterred without a shot being fired. Estimates of these types of defensive uses of firearms are wide ranging, from a low of 65,000 to 82,000 annual defensive gun uses (DGUs) reported to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), to a high end of some 2.1-2.5 million annual DGUs (see 1.1.b), but they seem to occur at least as often (if not far more often) each year as misuses of firearms by violent criminals. Since such defensive uses are rarely reported to the police (in some cases because firearms possession in the locality is illegal), it is difficult to quantify precisely the number of instances in which defensive use of firearms has saved lives. A variety of factors complicate the measurement of DGU, including the completeness and accuracy of self-reporting by witnesses, the nature and sequence of the questions asked (including the definition of what constitutes a DGU), the willingness of the witness to respond _at all_to questions about such incidents, and the difficulty in distinguishing between self-defense and assault based on a witness' own report. There is evidence to suggest that a substantial number of homicide victims have at other times been perpetrators, and Kleck suggests that criminals should comprise "a disproportionate share of both DGU and gun crime victimizations." Whether criminals are any more or less willing to report DGU in surveys than non-criminals is another factor to be considered when estimating the frequency of lawful gun use in self-defense. Even if the number of crimes deterred by lawful armed citizens annually is no greater than the number of violent crimes committed with guns each year, in the absence of these self-protective acts, the incidence of violent crime could be far higher than it is at present, and injuries to innocent victims could also increase. The annual use of firearms for other lawful purposes, unrelated to self-defense, dwarfs both defensive and criminal uses combined. 1.1.a "Chemical sprays, stun guns, and other nonlethal methods are effective and easy to use in stopping an attacker." see Ayoob,_In The Gravest Extreme_(see above) p.35-38. Air Taser homepage at http://www.airtaser.com/ Jonathan Glater, "Wild Wild Wet,"_Washington Post,_July 25, 1994, p.F3 In summary: Unfortunately, even_shooting_an attacker doesn't always stop them immediately, unless the shot is directed at the central nervous system. A fatally wounded assailant can still be dangerous for the few seconds or minutes they have left. Non-lethal methods, while they can be effective in some cases and can provide an additional option for personal defense, are not something you want to bet your life on when confronted with deadly force. The chemical sprays available to civilians (such as CS tear gas, or OC pepper spray) are not always as strong as those used by law enforcement, but even though the police carry chemical agents, they also carry firearms, since even the police sprays (like FREEZE+P) don't stop everybody, and aren't appropriate for every situation. The chemical sprays are most effective when they can reach the mucous membranes, such as when sprayed in the eyes or inhaled. Yet if an attacker is wearing glasses, or holds their breath, or is on drugs, or is just unusually impervious to the pain, the spray may not be effective. (After all, some people can_eat_extraordinarily hot peppers, and some people just have high pain thresholds.) Chemical sprays are designed for outdoor use, and will persist and can cause problems for the defender if used indoors. Outdoors, they can be affected by the direction of the wind, and blown off target, or back into the defender's face, if not delivered in a stream. Inclement weather can also affect their effectiveness as a defense, and they require a few seconds to fully incapacitate when they work. It should be noted that pepper sprays are more effective against dogs than man, since dogs expose their mouth and tongue when threatening attack, but chemical mace (CS tear gas) is not effective against dogs, since dogs' tear glands are less active, and they have smaller tear ducts, limiting the spray's effects. Use of OC sprays on non-human animals may require the highest concentration of pepper, i.e. 10%-13%, since it is believed that dogs, for example, are less sensitive to the pain. Many sprays contain visible or invisible dyes which are useful in identifying and apprehending a suspect, but if the victim ends up wounded or dead due to the essentially random chance that the spray is ineffective as a defense, that's a fact of interest primarily to the police. Criminals can be equally and more indelibly marked for capture by the use of a firearm, if use of deadly force is justified, since their wounds often require that they seek medical attention. Medical personnel are required to report patients seeking treatment for gunshot wounds to law enforcement authorities. Most stun "guns" available for civilian use require direct contact with the attacker's body, putting the victim dangerously in harm's way, when the objective is to keep as far away as possible. Many civilian stun guns are also underpowered, and can require several seconds contact with the attacker in order to incapacitate. They may also have difficulty penetrating heavy clothing, like winter coats. Their loud crackle and brilliant blue arc_are_certainly intimidating, however. Other stun guns (like the police TASER, and its civilian cousin, the Air Taser) can fire electrode darts with trailing wires _into_the target from a distance. The civilian version of the TASER, approved for sale as a "non-firearm" by the BATF in June 1994, uses compressed nitrogen to expel its electrode barbs, unlike the police version, which uses an explosive propellant and is regulated under the NFA (see National Firearms Act, Appendix I). Most stun guns are now equipped with safety devices designed to prevent them from being used against the defender if taken away. Criminal misuse of contact-type stun "guns" as torture devices has occurred, so this is a significant concern for stun gun users. The civilian TASER includes a weapon registration system which dispenses dozens of serial numbered microdots with each use, so as to deter criminal use of the weapon. However, as with any registration system, theft of the weapon or cartridges from their rightful owner could occur. The civilian TASER also doubles as a contact-type stun "gun" for use if the darts miss their target, or if there is no time to reload the dart cartridge system during an assault by multiple attackers. Another variety of stun "gun" is under development which squirts a stream of liquid electrolyte at the target, rather than using a wire to deliver its current. Like a TASER, it has limited range, but it could provide for a multi-shot capacity that current wire- launching stun "guns" lack. Still, it seems unlikely that carrying around a liquid electrolyte reservoir will do much to reduce the weapon's size or weight. Unfortunately, there is no "Star Trek" style weapon that can reliably and safely "stun" a person without some risk, however small, of lethality. People vary in their biochemical and physiological responses to various weapons, and the level of force which may be required to "stun" a person whose strength and stamina has been abnormally enhanced by drugs could prove lethal to some ordinary people. Persons who already suffer from significant stresses to their heart or other organs can die from the additional stresses of what would otherwise be a "less than lethal" weapon, particularly if such weapons are misused. But if sufficient force is not used in defending against a life- threatening attack, the_defender_runs the risk of injury or death. Even police stun "guns" don't always work, as evidenced by the 1991 Rodney King video. King was TASERed prior to being attacked by baton-wielding officers but was still able to move around and present a potential threat. (Some of the fired darts may have missed, but had he been incapacitated by the TASER, the baton attack would have been even more obviously excessive, and unnecessary.) Both chemical sprays and stun guns are virtually useless in stopping multiple attackers, while with sufficient practice, firearms (and particularly handguns) are quite effective at stopping violent attack, even by a determined gang of assailants. (See 3.3) Unlike these two common non-lethal weapons, a gun, when fired, acts to alert possible aid, and is less likely to be ignored than personal alarms. Also, unlike non-lethal weapons, guns offer an additional intimidation factor due to their lethality which may deter attack in circumstances where the risk of confronting a spray can or stun "gun" would not. Ironically, many of the same localities which have strict "gun control" laws also prohibit ordinary citizens from owning and using chemical defense sprays or stun guns, and the rationale is the same. Law- abiding citizens are disarmed of any possible effective means of self-defense because of the possibility of criminals misusing these weapons. Some people in high-crime "gun control" zones like Washington, D.C. and other U.S. cities have taken to carrying cans of aerosol spray oven cleaner (potassium or sodium hydroxide, a powerful caustic agent) because the laws in these localities deny them the right to carry a non-toxic pepper spray, or any other effective means of self-defense. This illustrates precisely the type of "weapon substitution" effect that opponents of "gun control" argue will occur if any particular class of weapons, such as "Saturday Nite Specials," is banned. People who are determined to have weapons, whether they are honest citizens defending against crime, or criminals obtaining the tools of their trade, will find a way around any ban, and will often end up having a deadlier weapon that the one that has been banned. (After all, if someone is breaking the law_anyway,_it matters little whether they break it to carry a "Saturday Nite Special" or a sawed-off shotgun or machinegun.) Oven cleaner can cause permanent damage and/or blindness, and aside from the child-resistant cap (which would make the can difficult to use in emergency situations), oven cleaner cans lack the safety mechanisms which are found on many tear gas or pepper spray containers to prevent accidental discharge. Its permanent and harmful effects may also be used by prosecutors to prejudice a jury, moreso even than if the defender had used a gun! There's very little chance that banning oven cleaner will occur, since the_only_localities which have this "problem" are the ones which deny their good citizens any other means to protect themselves. In Canada, use of pepper spray against bears and dogs is legal, but not against human predators. Only the police in Canada are allowed to use OC pepper spray on humans. Anyone else caught using this "prohibited weapon" to protect themselves faces a possible_10-year_ _prison_term!_ In spite of the law, Canadian citizens are "arming for bear" by exploiting this legal loophole, though the government is cracking down on sales. Pepper defense sprays are also legally unavailable to citizens in Germany, since German law requires that any such defensive spray be first tested on animals, and a 1987 German law prohibits the testing of weapons on animals. Pepper sprays are gaining popularity worldwide, however, since they are the most effective personal defense option for people whose governments don't trust their citizens with firearms, or for people who choose not to use firearms in defense of their lives and their families. There has been some concern expressed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in about 30 cases in which pepper spray has thought to have been associated with deaths of suspects in police custody, but a review of these cases by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a pro-"gun control" police organization, said that most of the incidents could be attributable to factors such as improper use of restraints like handcuffs in ways which restricted breathing, the suspect's obesity, and/or the suspect's use of alcohol and/or cocaine. That the ACLU could find only 28 such questionable incidents during the three year period of its investigation, and also the fact that ACLU did not claim that pepper spray directly caused the deaths, only underscores the essential safety of the sprays as a non-lethal defensive weapon. (In light of the ACLU's findings, users concerned about the remote possibility of killing an attacker with pepper spray should beware of using the spray against drunken asthmatic fat guys on "crack.") 1.1.b "2.5 million defensive uses of firearms each year can't be true!" See Kleck and Gertz (1995), above. See also testimony of David Bordua and Garen Wintemute in _Gun Laws and the Need for Self-Defense,_hearings (above) _Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1994,_Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dept. of Justice, SuDoc# J 29.9/6:994 (1994) In summary: In a nation of some 97 million households, about half of which own one or more firearms, is a rate of defensive gun use (DGU) which amounts to about 1.4% per year an unreasonably high figure? A study undertaken by a group led by criminologist Dr. Gary Kleck of Florida State University found that there are approximately 2.1 to 2.5 million instances annually in which individual Americans use a gun to defend themselves. Considered as households, the figure is 1.3 to 1.5 million annual DGUs (Kleck 1995, Table 2). If this figure is correct, defensive uses of firearms are much more common than crimes committed with guns. Kleck's study defines a DGU as a defensive action against a human (rather than an animal), involving actual contact with the person being defended against, in which the defender could state a specific crime which he or she thought was being committed at the time of the incident, and in which the defender's gun was actually used in some way, even if it was only as part of a verbal threat. A reported DGU incident must meet all of these criteria in order to be counted as a valid DGU for the purposes of the survey. Additionally, DGUs associated with work as a policeman, security guard, or member of the military are excluded. The data for the Kleck study were collected using an anonymous nationwide random-digit-dialed telephone survey of 4,977 adults conducted from February through April of 1993 by Research Network, a telephone polling company located in Tallahassee, FL. After a few general questions about problems in their community and crime, those polled were asked "Within the past five years, have you yourself or another member of your household used a gun, even if it was not fired, for self-protection or for the protection of property at home, work, or elsewhere? Please do not include military service, police work, or work as a security guard." Those who answered "Yes" were then asked whether their defensive use was against an animal or a person, asked to state how many defensive gun use incidents against persons had happened to members of their household in the last five years, and asked whether any of the incident or incidents had occurred in the last twelve months. Of those surveyed, 222 respondents reported DGUs within the past five years. All respondents reporting DGU, as well as 20% of those not reporting a DGU, were called back to validate their initial survey interviews. These raw data were then corrected for oversampling in the South and West regions, where gun ownership is highest; and oversampling for males, who are not only more likely to own guns, but also more likely to be victims of violent crime. The weighted results (corrected for oversampling built into the survey) were these: 1.125% to 1.326% of respondents reported having personally been involved in a DGU incident within the past year, with 1.366% to 1.587% of households reporting a household member being involved in a DGU incident within the past year (which would include those DGUs mentioned above involving the respondent). Calculations based on the estimated adult population of the U.S. and the estimated number of households in the U.S. show that at this rate there would be 2,163,519 to 2,549,862 DGUs in 1993 if considered on an individual basis, or some 1,325,918 to 1,540,405 DGU-involved households. For comparison, the estimated number of violent crimes committed with guns in 1993 was 588,140, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports. Kleck discusses the flaws inherent in previous surveys, including the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which gives the lowest estimate of all methods used to calculate the number of DGU incidents. The NCVS, Kleck argues, though based upon a much larger sample than his own survey, severely undercounts the number of DGUs because respondents are being asked by a government official to_volunteer_information about incidents in which they may possibly have done something that was illegal (such as committing assault with a deadly weapon by pointing a gun at someone), or which involved an illegal act (such as carrying a gun without a permit). Further, the NCVS never asks directly whether the respondents used a gun to protect themselves, and only asks its general question about self-protection after respondents have already reported the location of their victimization incident, which in most cases is reported as being away from the victim's home. Since carrying a gun without a permit is often illegal, there would be a strong motivation for respondents not to report DGU outside the home. But how accurate is the Kleck survey's estimate? What are some possible alternative explanations that could influence these results? First, consider some factors which could produce an overestimate. The sample size, or number of persons surveyed, while smaller than the NCVS, is several times larger than that usually used in most public opinion polls. Extrapolating from too small of a sample is one way to get an overestimate, but this is not a problem for Kleck's survey, since the Gallup Poll and the Roper Center routinely use samples smaller than this for their national surveys. (The results of such national polls are often promoted as newsworthy.) As Kleck notes, the random sampling error of his survey is less than 1%. The phenomenon known as "telescoping," in which past events are remembered as being much more recent than they actually are, could account for some increase in reported DGUs, but Kleck's survey, which uses two time periods, asking about events in the past five years, and within the last twelve months, takes this into account. Kleck's definition of a DGU to include defense of property could serve to increase the number of reported DGUs, since use of deadly force to protect property is not legally recognized in many states. Kleck notes however, that it was not the purpose of the survey to discern the legality or morality of the respondent's actions. One possible source of overestimation that has been seized upon by critics wanting to explain away Kleck's results is what Kleck terms the "dishonest respondent" hypothesis, or in other words, that the respondents made up a story about a DGU. Only 24% of respondents reporting a DGU claimed to have fired their gun, and even if one were to discard these reported DGUs entirely (and arbitrarily) as overly dramatic, this leaves well over a million and a half estimated DGUs, a rate_twenty times_that of the estimate derived from the NCVS. To assume that even 24% of respondents are actively trying to create a dramatic story which is internally consistent enough to deceive the experienced team of interviewers Kleck used, much less a sufficient number to account for the vast difference in estimates between the Kleck survey and the NCVS, is in itself hard to believe. For the NCVS to miss a DGU requires only that the respondent not volunteer the information, but as Kleck observes "[t]here is no precedent in criminological research" for the "enormous level of intentional and sustained falsification" on the part of respondents which would be required in order to account for the 30-fold difference in estimated annual DGUs between Kleck's survey and the NCVS. Indeed, Kleck argues, there is reason to believe that the estimate of 2.5 million annual DGUs is_too low._ There is the problem of self-censorship in reporting, since there is evidence that some respondents to the Kleck survey were wary of reporting such incidents to anonymous strangers, much less to government officials as in the NCVS. Several respondents expressed suspicion of the interviewer prior to answering "no" to the DGU question, perhaps because they view their actions as legally questionable. There may also be instances in which respondents regarded their own DGU incidents as too minor to report, or households in which DGU incidents of other household members were not known to the respondent, or where it was not considered appropriate to discuss the DGU incidents of other household members. The limitations of a telephone survey preclude sampling among the 5% of American households without telephones, most of which are poor and/or rural. As poor people are more likely to be victims of crime, and there is a higher rate of gun ownership in rural areas, this could also contribute to an underestimation of the number of DGUs. 1.1.c "Is there any independent data that supports Kleck and Gertz?" See Kleck and Gertz (1995), above. also _National Institute of Justice Research in Brief,_ "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," May 1997, SuDoc# J 28.24:G 95/3 (1997) In summary: A recent study funded by the National Institute of Justice, and conducted by criminologists Phillip J. Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of Georgetown University, on behalf of the pro-"gun control" Police Foundation (a non-profit Washington D.C.-based research group spun off from the Ford Foundation in 1970), found a reported 1.5 million annual DGUs in 1994, using the Kleck/Gertz criteria. The data for the Cook/Ludwig study were obtained from a nationwide random-digit-dialed telephone survey of 2,568 adults conducted during November and December of 1994 by Chilton Research Services of Drexel Hill, PA. While the authors of the Police Foundation study consider their survey to be "a reliable reference" for other purposes (such as estimating the percentage of gun-owning households), the DGU estimates, they say, are greatly exaggerated and not informative as to whether private gun ownership has a net positive or negative effect on crime. In attempting to explain away this particular finding, Cook and Ludwig argue by comparison to the NCVS data that for example, the number of DGUs reported to their survey as being associated with rapes or attempted rapes is greater than the total number of rapes or attempted rapes estimated by the NCVS. It has been argued by some criminologists, however, as Kleck and Gertz note in their survey results, that the NCVS severely undercounts rapes, and would miss "nearly all DGUs associated with" them (p.155). Cook and Ludwig describe other comparisons between their DGU counts and the NCVS data as "almost as absurd," and note that their survey also suggests that "130,000 criminals are wounded or killed by civilian gun defenders," which they say is "completely out of line with other, more reliable statistics on the number of gunshot cases." The Kleck/Gertz survey likewise found that DGU-involved respondents who reported firing their gun at the offender (which was in only 15.6% of the cases) were likely to "remember with favor" their marksmanship and report that they had wounded the offender (8.3% of respondents). Kleck and Gertz discount these wounding reports, writing that "If 8.3% really hit their adversaries, and a total of 15.6% fired at their adversaries, this would imply... a level of combat marksmanship far exceeding that typically observed even among police officers" (p.173). In explaining away their large number of estimated DGUs, Cook and Ludwig invoke a variation on the "dishonest respondent" hypothesis, namely that most such reports are "false positives," a result of the probability bias that some of the large number of non-DGU involved respondents will make up a story, while the smaller number of actual DGU-involved respondents will make less of a difference to the total estimate, no matter how they respond. Other factors, including "telescoping," or that respondents "may be geniunely confused due to substance abuse, mental illness, or simply less-than-accurate memories" could produce these "false positives," the authors argue. While "telescoping" may affect DGU estimates, the latter factors should also affect the overall reliability of other questions in the survey (indeed of any survey). Cook and Ludwig describe their results as "the most complete data available on the private stock of firearms in the United States." But considering the public stigma which has been placed on gun owners by much of the mass media, Cook and Ludwig's confidence in their finding that just 35% of respondents households own guns (by comparison to the approximately 50% of households found in previous surveys) may be misplaced. If Cook and Ludwig can't believe those respondents who claim to have used a gun defensively, how can they trust their respondents to report accurately about their "arsenals" of "cop-killer assault weapons," "junk guns," and "high powered sniper rifles" to anonymous strangers on the telephone? 1.2 "It's too easy for your attacker to take your gun away from you and shoot you." See Kleck,_Point Blank_(see above) p.122. also_Uniform Crime Reports: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted 19xx,_United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, SuDoc#s J 1.14/7-6:9xx-993 In summary: The techniques required for "weapon retention" are not all that difficult to master, but the greatest risk for being disarmed by an attacker appears to be from open carry in a holster as police officers do. Some ten to fourteen percent of law enforcement officers who are killed are shot with their own guns. By contrast, an average of 1% or fewer of armed citizens end up disarmed by their attacker, no doubt in part because criminals_expect_police to be armed, but are mostly unpleasantly_surprised_to find their intended victims are. Police are also more frequently in contact with desperate and dangerous people, who_they_must attempt to personally apprehend, increasing their risk of being in close enough proximity to be disarmed. Private citizens with guns need not take such risks, and can carry concealed, confronting their attackers at a distance in many situations, rather than permitting attackers to get close enough where a knife or brute strength can come into play. In a home defense situation this is particularly true, if the armed homeowner is alerted by the sound of forced entry, or by an alarm. For the physically weaker members of our society, for the elderly, or the disabled, no other means of self- defense negates the advantages of youth, agility and strength as effectively as a firearm (see 3.1), and none but firearms can defeat strength in numbers. In most cases, the credible brandishing of a gun convinces criminals to look for an easier target, but if life- threatening danger is imminent, and the situation permits, having a gun gives the defender an additional option of resistance, which can reduce the risk of being injured or killed (see 1.1 and 1.1.a). 1.2.a - "Women shouldn't have guns because men will only take them away and use them against them". see also Stange, Mary Zeiss, "Arms and the Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal," in_Guns: Who Should Have Them?,_David Kopel, ed., Prometheus Books, ISBN 0-87975-958-5 (1995), a book which is an excellent introduction to the political issues surrounding gun ownership. Another variation of the "your attacker will just take it away" scenario is sometimes used by those in favor of victim disarmament when the subject is women and guns. "The man will just take the gun away from you" is a very interesting statement which cries out to be deconstructed. All too often, this statement goes entirely unchallenged, not merely on factual grounds, but at a deeper philosophical level. Repeated requests for civilian examples of this phenomenon have gone unanswered in talk.politics.guns and other newsgroups. All acknowledge that a firearm is a dangerous implement capable of inflicting serious injury or death. That being the case, it would seem a simple matter for the woman in question to merely_shoot_the assailant attempting to disarm her. And in this scenario, the male assailant is_assisting_the female defender by presenting her with a larger, closer target, difficult even for an inexperienced shooter to miss. If the weapon in question is a handgun, wresting control of it is much more difficult than it would be for the attacker to grasp a longer-barreled weapon, such as a shotgun or rifle. The simplest of logic dictates that dead men don't snatch guns away, and that relatively smart men who don't want to become dead men, shouldn't try. Given the odds against the male in purely physical terms, we must look for another reason why "gun control" advocates might claim that the attacker can so easily disarm a woman. The only obvious explanation would be that the woman_voluntarily_gives the gun away. The entire foundation of the victim disarmer's argument is that when faced with a violent male attacker, a woman armed with a lethal weapon, instead of using that weapon to defend life and limb, will instead_give_that weapon to the man intent upon robbing, raping or murdering her. This "explanation" has numerous implications, which are quite understandably not commented upon by "gun control" advocates when they advance this scenario. If indeed women have an uncontrollable urge to arm those who would harm them, does this not call into question the very concept of armed policewomen? After all, what point is there in training, uniforming and arming women at great public expense, when all they'll do is just_give away_their weapons to any criminal who confronts them? And what of women in the armed forces? Why give a woman a Beretta or an M16A2 when she'll just go looking for an Iraqi soldier to hand it to? Certainly, if the victim disarmers' argument is to be accepted, no women should be allowed to serve in Artillery or Air Defense units, since the enemy will quickly amass a stockpile of 8" guns and Patriot missiles,_willingly_turned over to them by female soldiers. Can the nation really afford the risk that female pilots will go off in search of enemy airfields at which they might land their multi-million dollar fighter planes? If some in the "gun control" movement are to be believed, we might just as well ship F14s directly to Libya rather than allow women to fly them unbidden to Quadaffi's airfields. Only a few defections of female captains of aircraft carriers would be sufficient to completely neutralize the United States Navy. Dare we take the risk? What madman would think to put nuclear weapons into a woman's hands if indeed women are one tenth as easily cowed as the "gun control" lobby makes them out to be? It would be sheer national suicide to elect a female President when only a raised eyebrow or harsh word on the part of a Rafsanjani or Karadzic would reduce her to abject surrender... Of course it could be that women_aren't_the sniveling cowards that the victim disarmers make them out to be. Perhaps rather than the immobilized victims of a thousand slasher films, women are rather more like Buddhist nun Ng Mui, the philosphical antecedent of Bruce Lee. Perhaps rather than burst into tears, they're more likely to serve a cannon like the women who fought in the Revolutionary War. Perhaps rather than arm their assailants, they'll take a more proactive approach like the_soldaderas_of the Mexican revolution, or Soviet combat pilots like Lilya Litvak and the "Night Witches". Perhaps like Israeli women soldiers and female PLO guerrillas, they're quite capable of taking care of themselves. The simple truth is that the "He'll just take her gun away" scenario is wallowing in all of the worst condescending stereotypes inflicted on women. It proudly proclaims that women are weak, cowardly, and_want_to be attacked. If there's any good reason for "gun control," misogyny isn't it. -- Adapted from a posting by Chris Morton (cmort@RKBAnwohio.com) -- 1.3 "Guns are too dangerous to keep in the house if you've got children." See_Guns, Crime, and Freedom_by Wayne LaPierre, Regnery Books, ISBN 0-89526-477-3, (1994), where he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 9) to this. _Guns, Crime and Freedom_is also out in "trade paperback" (an oversize paperback) from HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-097674-8 (1995). [Wayne LaPierre is the chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, and one of its spokesmen. NRA can be reached at 11250 Waples Mill Rd., Fairfax, VA 22030, at (800) NRA-3888 for membership information, (703) 267-1000 for general inquiries, and on the Web at http://www.nra.org/ ] also Kleck,_Point Blank,_pp.276-280. _Accident Facts,_1994_by National Safety Council Staff, ISBN 0-87912-183-1, (1994) American Sports Shooting Council website at http://assc.org/index.html In summary: The death of children, whether by abuse, neglect, homicide, suicide, or accident, is a particular tragedy, because for most children their safety is dependent on adults to protect them from harm. This responsibility for protecting children is primarily that of their parents, as it is for so much of their physical, emotional, and intellectual sustenance. As with any potentially dangerous item in the home, it is the responsibility of parents to do their best to secure their firearms from misuse by children who are unaware of that potential danger, as much as responsible parents try to protect their children from the hazards of electricity, household chemicals, poisons, and physical injury from falls, sharp objects, fire, choking, or drowning. Part of that protection, when they are old enough to understand, is education. Safes are available which allow quick access to defensive firearms when needed, while preventing unauthorized access; and modern firearms (particularly semi-automatics) are designed with safety features to prevent accidental discharges. In an attempt to further reduce gun accidents in the home, fifteen major firearms manufacturers representing the American Sports Shooting Council (ASSC) voluntarily agreed October 9, 1997 to package locking devices (such as trigger locks) with each new handgun they produce. Six other companies are now considering joining the agreement. But "childproofing" a home is no substitute for "accident-proofing" or "gun-proofing" a child so that they can understand the dangers and actively avoid them, whether at home, at school, or at a friend's house. Irrationally, the same people who use accidental shootings of children to advance the cause of "gun control" are often opposed to educational efforts to teach children how to avoid gun accidents and injuries, though they may favor education as a means to make children aware of the risks of venereal disease and pregnancy. The U.S. National Rifle Association, for its part, has championed the cause of gun safety and training for over a century, and since 1988 has promoted a safety program for children in grades K-6 which tells those youngsters to "Stop! Don't Touch! Leave The Area! Tell An Adult!" if they find a gun. The NRA's "Eddie Eagle" program (originated by Florida grandmother and current NRA president, Marion Hammer) has been used in schools across the nation, and was awarded the National Safety Council's Outstanding Community Service Award in October 1993. The rate of firearms accidents generally has been declining since the 1970s, largely due to public education about the basic rules of firearm safety, even as the number of firearms in the U.S. population has increased. Firearm-related accidental deaths involving children 14 and under in the U.S. totaled 227 in 1991, trailing many more commonplace causes of accidental death among children, including car accidents (3,087 deaths), fire (1,104 deaths), and drowning (1,104 deaths). SECTION II. - Constitutional issues in the United States "Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the_real_object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?" -=(Patrick Henry, in_Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,_ Jonathan Elliot, ed. 1836, v.3 p.168)=- 2.0 "The Second Amendment is really just an irrelevant anachronism, but if it has any meaning at all today, it just means that the Federal government can't disarm the National Guard." See United States Constitution (U.S.C.), Amendment II: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." (See also 2.0.a) also U.S.C. Article I, sec. 8 (clauses 15 and 16, commonly referred to as "the militia clauses") -- Powers of Congress: "...To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;" also U.S.C. Article II, sec. 2 (clause 1) -- President to be Commander-in-Chief. (etc.) "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;" also U.S. Code Annotated (U.S.C.A.) title 10 sec. 311 (as amended Nov. 30, 1993) [relating to the definition of militia] "311. Militia: composition and classes (a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard. (b) The classes of the militia are-- (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia." also U.S.C.A. title 32 sect. 101 (as amended Sep. 29, 1988) [relating to the establishment of the National Guard] "101. Definitions [...] (3) "National Guard" means the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard. (4) "Army National Guard" means that part of the organized militia of the several States and Territories, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, active and inactive, that-- (A) is a land force; (B) is trained, and has its officers appointed, under the sixteenth clause of section 8, article I, of the Constitution; (C) is organized, armed, and equipped wholly or partly at Federal expense; and (D) is federally recognized. (5) "Army National Guard of the United States" means the reserve component of the Army all of whose members are members of the Army National Guard. (6) "Air National Guard" means that part of the organized militia of the several States and Territories, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia, active and inactive, that-- (A) is an air force; (B) is trained, and has its officers appointed, under the sixteenth clause of section 8, article I, of the Constitution; (C) is organized, armed, and equipped wholly or partly at Federal expense; and (D) is federally recognized. (7) "Air National Guard of the United States" means the reserve component of the Air Force all of whose members are members of the Air National Guard." also _A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language,_edited by Noah Webster (1803), p. 252 also Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.), 2nd ed. (1989) v.XX p. 138 for definition of "well-regulated" "WELL-'REGULATED, ppl. a. [participial adjective] 1709 SHAFTSB._Moralists_II. iv. 108 If a liberal Education has form'd in us . . well-regulated Appetites, and worthy Inclinations. 1714 R. FIDDES._Pract._Disc._II. 250 The practice of all well regulated courts of justice in the world. 1812 J. JOYCE._Sci._Dial.,_Astron._xii. II. 126 The equation of time . . is the adjustment of the difference of time, as shown by a well-regulated clock, and a true sun-dial. 1848 THACKERAY_Van._Fair._lviii, A remissness for which I am sure every well-regulated person will blame the Major. 1862 MRS. H. WOOD_Mrs._Hallib._I. v. 27 It appeared, to her well- regulated mind, like a clandestine proceeding. 1894 _Pop._ _Sci._Monthly._June 165 The newspaper, a never wanting adjunct to every well-regulated American embryo city." also v.XIII pp. 524-525 of the O.E.D. for the definitions of "regulated" and "regulation" also "Publius" (pseud. Alexander Hamilton), "Federalist VI," _The Independent Journal (N.Y.),_Nov. 14, 1787, p.2, col.2 also_Commentaries on the Laws of England,_by Sir William Blackstone, Oxford, (1765), Bk.I ch.I pp.136-139 also_A Discourse of Government with relation to Militia's,_[sic] by Andrew Fletcher, (1698) also Virginia Constitution, art. I, sec. 13 (See text at 2.3) also Cottrol, Robert J., and Diamond, Raymond T., "The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration," Georgetown Law J. v.80 pp. 309-361 (1991) [Reprinted in _Guns: Who Should Have Them?,_David B. Kopel, ed. (see above)] Kates, Jr., Donald B., "The Second Amendment and the Ideology of Self-Protection," Constitutional Commentary v.9 pp. 87-104 (1992) _That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right,_ by Stephen P. Halbrook, University of New Mexico Press [reprinted by the Independent Institute], ISBN 0-945999-24-0, (1984) _For the Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms,_ by Clayton E. Cramer, Praeger Publications, ISBN 0-275-94913-3 (1994) _The Constitution of the United States,_an annotated edition by the research staff of the Library of Congress, U.S. Senate Document 99-16 (1982) _To Keep And Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right,_ by Joyce Malcolm, Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-89306-9, (1994) _The Roots of the Bill of Rights,_by Bernard Schwartz, Chelsea House, ISBN 0-87754-207-4, (1980) [an illustrated 5-vol. edition of Schwartz' definitive work_The Bill of Rights: A Documentary History,_Chelsea House, ISBN 07-0796613-0 (1971)] _United States Statutes at Large,_published under the authority of the United States Congress; Little, Brown, and Co., Boston, Mass., [no ISBN] v. I, p. 21 (1861) and Dred Scott v. Sandford, U.S. Reports (19 Howard) v.60 p.417, Lawyer's Edition v.15 p.691 (1856) Perpich v. Department of Defense, U.S. Reports v.496 p.334, Supreme Court Reporter v.110 p.2418, Lawyer's Edition 2nd series v.110 p.312 (1990) (see abstract in Appendix V.) In summary: There is no historical basis to the claim that the Framers of the Second Amendment intended to limit its scope solely to protecting organized state militias from being disarmed by the Federal Government. In any event, the National Guard is a reserve unit of the United States Army, and not a creation of the individual state governments. It is essentially a Federal force which the governors of the states may "borrow" if the Federal Government does not object. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, governors attempting to enforce segregation by using the National Guard found out why it's called "National" (if they hadn't known already). The English common law tradition, and the works of political philosophy which influenced the Founders of our republic, as well as their own writings, show that the right to keep and bear arms (RKBA, as it's often abbreviated on t.p.g.) was considered the hallmark of a free people, and distinguished a free man from a slave (see 3.3). Prior to the January 21, 1903 establishment of the National Guard, the Militia Act passed by the Second Congress on May 8, 1792 had been in force, requiring "each and every free able- bodied white male citizen of the respective states" between age 18 and 45 to be enrolled in the local militia, and to "provide himself" with arms as specified by Congress (originally an eighteen gauge firelock or musket). Following the establishment of the National Guard, Congress provided for the arming and training of the National Guard under its powers raise and support armies, and made the organized militias of the states into a reserve unit of the U.S. Army called the National Guard of the United States. The National Guard has been part of the Army by law since June 15, 1933; another part of the trend towards an increasingly centralized national government which began after the 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War. 2.0.a "What's the deal with the commas, and the hyphen in 'well-regulated'? You gun nuts seem to be obsessed with them." In summary: Archaic punctuation, usage, and peculiar grammar (though certainly no more peculiar than many modern legal documents) to some degree obscure the plain meaning of the Second Amendment. As in any human endeavor, mistakes can be made, and from time to time here on t.p.g., the authors of this particular bit of the Bill of Rights get flamed over whether there is in fact (or ought to be) a hyphen in "well regulated" (and/or fewer commas overall) so as to clarify the Amendment's meaning to modern readers. The choice of the adjective "unalienable" rather than "inalienable" in the Declaration of Independence has scarcely received more notice than the issue of proper punctuation in the Second Amendment. Confusion over the punctuation dates back to the very drafting and ratification of the Bill of Rights, since some sources give the text of Amendment II as "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." with only one comma, and no internal capitalization. This version is found in the Senate Journal for Sept. 25th, 1789, and in the Library of Congress' annotated version of the U.S. Constitution, as well as in the ratification document for the Bill of Rights as passed by the State of New York. Another version of the Second Amendment, this one reading "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." can be found in the first volume of_U.S. Statutes at Large,_which was published by the Congress in 1861 (note the capitalization of "State" but not "militia" or "arms," and the single comma). The trouble is, the more commonly referenced version, which reads "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." is the version which can be found on permanent display at the National Archives, since it's in the Federal Government's original engrossed copy of the Bill of Rights which was signed by Speaker of the House Frederick Muhlenberg and Vice-President John Adams, and that is the version which was copied and submitted to the states for ratification. This is also the version found in the U.S. Code Annotated, and it appears to be the version which was ratified, but given that the one-comma version is the one that the Congress passed and published, it would appear that any of the versions can be considered correct, and the Great Comma Controversy is unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable). The issue of what "well regulated" meant to the Framers is a much simpler question to resolve. To the modern reader, "well regulated" has acquired the primary connotation of_government_regulation, rather than that of "efficient" or "well functioning" which it had in the 18th Century. About the only common usage today of "regulate" in this sense is found in those commercials dealing with "occasional irregularity," and as such, modern dictionary definitions, especially such as are found in legal dictionaries, have little relevance to the issue. The first dictionary of American English usage, published by Noah Webster in 1803, gives no entry for "well regulated," but does include an entry for "regulars," which Webster defines as "standing troops, [as] opposed to militia." The Oxford English Dictionary includes as one of the definitions of "regulated" a meaning which directly applies to troops, that of "properly disciplined," and includes a citation to a 1690 article in the_London Gazette._ Indeed, Alexander Hamilton uses "well regulated" in this same martial sense in_Federalist #6_when he writes that ancient "Sparta was little better than a well regulated camp..." --in other words "an armed camp." The British Whigs, whose arms right incorporated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 was the antecedent for similar (but more generous) provisions in the Bills of Rights of the American states, and later the Bill of Rights of the United States, thought of a "well-regulated militia" as a check on the power of the King, and that the RKBA was an individual right, just as was the right to petition the King. The great English jurist Sir William Blackstone wrote of the right to keep and bear arms as just such an individual right in his 1765 _Commentaries on the Laws of England,_and termed it the "fifth auxiliary right" of the subject, and as important as those of "applying to the courts of justice for redress of injuries," "the right of petitioning the king," and the statutory "limitation of the king's prerogative," all of which served to "protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights, of personal security, personal liberty, and private property." Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish Whig, in his_Discourse on Government with Relation to Militia's,_[sic] wrote of the necessity of "well-regulated militias" to defend not only against invasion by a foreign force, but against the "danger of slavery at home," a prospect that seems unlikely if "well-regulated" means anything other than "properly disciplined." While "regulated" and "regulation" can certainly be said to have "government regulation" among their meanings at the time of the writing of the U.S. Bill of Rights, that connotation was far from as dominant at that time as it has become today, in an age when self-regulation was the rule, and a "well-regulated militia" was "the body of the people, trained to arms." Indeed, one of the most important characteristics of a "well-regulated militia" as it was understood by the British Whigs, and by the American Founding Fathers, was that it be a "general militia" composed of the majority of citizens of the republic, rather than a "select militia" or armed minority of troops who could impose their will on a disarmed people, as the standing army of the King had done upon his subjects. The term "regular army" (as opposed to "irregulars") gives some idea of the type of discipline and order which the authors of the Second Amendment were trying to evoke with respect to the militia, which they saw as the best available alternative to the dangers and expense of a standing army. (See 3.3) The Second Amendment is best considered as a modification of the existing militia clauses of the Constitution, so as to prevent them from being interpreted in a way that would permit the Congress to disarm the ordinary citizens and establish a "select militia" or standing army in place of the "general militia". 2.1 "The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee an individual right." A few relevant law review articles [from the list given in LaPierre,_Guns, Crime and Freedom,_(see above) pp.238-240]: Shalhope, Robert, "The Armed Citizen In The Early Republic," Law and Contemporary Problems v.49 pp.125-141 (1986) Levinson, Sanford, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," Yale Law J. v.99 pp. 637-659 (1989) Amar, Akhil, "The Bill of Rights as a Constitution," Yale Law J., v.100 pp.1131-1210 (1990) Cottrol and Diamond, Georgetown Law J. (see above) Kates, Jr., Constitutional Commentary (see above) Van Alstyne, William, "The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Arms," Duke Law J. v.43 pp. 1236-1255 (1994) and others also Halbrook,_That Every Man Be Armed_(1984) see also _The Right to Keep and Bear Arms,_report of the subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 97th Congress, second session, Feb. 1982, SuDoc# Y4.J 89/2: Ar 5/5 also "In conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed by law: (a) Freedom of Speech; (b) Freedom of the Press, (c) Freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings; (d) Freedom of street processions and demonstrations. In order to guarantee to all workers real freedom of opinion, the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic abolishes the dependence of the press on capitalism, and places at the disposal of the working class and the peasantry all the technical and material means for the publication of newspapers, pamphlets, books, and all other publications of the press, and guarantees free circulation for them throughout the country." --Constitution of the U.S.S.R., partially attributed to Stalin, Jan. 31, 1924 quoted in _The Great Thoughts,_compiled by George Seldes, Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-345-29887-X, (1985) In summary: The phrase "the right of the people" means the same thing in the Second Amendment as it does in the First and Fourth Amendments. The U.S. Constitution recognizes and protects, but does not_grant,_ the pre-existing right of individuals to keep and bear arms. This is because the Framers assumed that the basis of governmental power originates with the people, whose natural rights are either ceded to government in the form of governmental powers, specifically protected from the powers of government by listing them in the Bill of Rights, or retained by the people, according to the Ninth Amendment. The history of the drafting of the Second Amendment also makes clear that "the right of the people" means a civil right belonging to each individual citizen. The first proposed draft of the amendment as written by James Madison reads: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person." In addition to clarifying that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with guns owned for "sporting purposes" like hunting (see Gun Control Act of 1968, Appendix I.), this earlier draft clearly illustrates that the "person" whose religious scruples require that he_not_"bear arms" would not be compelled to do so by the Congress, and that the "person" referred to in the text is an individual, and not a group. This version of the Second Amendment also closely reflects the spirit of the First Amendment's clauses dealing with religious freedom, in that the Congress should have no power to prohibit the keeping and bearing of arms, but neither should it have the power to compel those persons we would today call "conscientious objectors" to do so. It's unlikely that Madison intended this earlier draft of the Second Amendment to prohibit the Congress only from calling up all the Quakers and other pacifists _en_masse_as a militia, but rather that each individual would respond to the nation's call as their individual consciences dictated, and that they would "keep and bear" their private weapons to that end. Indeed, the Militia Act passed by the Second Congress in 1792 did require exactly that, and such a requirement was in force for well over 100 years (see 2.0). This is not to say that the right to keep and bear arms is dependent upon the existence of an organized militia, or that_only_military weapons are constitutionally protected, since, as with the other enumerated rights found in the Constitution, the right is assumed by the Framers to be pre-existing. Just because the right to "peaceably assemble" is protected by the First Amendment explicitly for the political purpose of petitioning the government "for redress of grievances", this does not mean that_only_political speech and political gatherings are constitutionally protected. The authors of the Bill of Rights explicitly rejected any such narrow construction of the rights of the people, by means of the Ninth Amendment. The Senate, in revising Madison's proposal, rejected adding the words "for the common defence" to the amendment by a vote on September 9th, 1789; clearly implying that the right intended to be protected in the Second Amendment is a right to bear arms broader than simply for militia service. The Bill of Rights is about limiting the power of government, not the freedoms enjoyed and exercised by We the People, and consequently it should not be subject to such a narrow interpretation in any of its provisions. The Bill of Rights sets forth the_minimum_standards which its authors felt define a "free state". Ironically, Madison's "religious scruples" clause was deleted because of fear that the government could misuse those words to disarm whomever_it_defined as "religiously scrupulous". The often-heard phrase "states' rights" is likewise the basis of some confusion in arguments about constitutional issues, because states don't have_"rights"_under the American Constitution, they have delegated_"powers,"_ and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments_clearly_ distinguish between "powers" and "rights". Governments, whether state or federal, don't have "rights". They have_only_such powers as are granted to them under the law. This is a very crucial distinction in American law, and one which is the basis for every just government. Once a government claims the "right" to do_anything,_asserting the sort of natural rights which belong only to individuals, we have returned to an era of the "divine right" of kings. In American law, the idea of a "collective" right (a right belonging to everyone - but to no one in particular) has no place. It was by just such an idea of "collective" rights that the constitutional guarantees of rights enumerated in the Soviet Constitution were deprived of all practical effect. "The people" owned all the printing presses, and could publish whatever "the people" wanted, but if anyone dared to exercise their individual right to free expression, they might be shot, sent to the Gulag, or to the mental hospital for "rehabilitation." Interpreting the phrase "the right of the people" to mean a "collective" right in the Second Amendment places the First Amendment (and the Fourth Amendment) in peril of similar "re-interpretation". Does the First Amendment guarantee of assembly apply only to state legislatures? At the most basic level, the arguments for censorship under the First Amendment and the arguments for "gun control" under the Second are the same. Both involve prior restraint on liberty (see 3.0), and both rest on a paternalistic assumption that the general public cannot be trusted to exercise their liberty wisely. Underlying both is the implication that there are certain officials of the state, censors in the case of the First Amendment, and the police and military in the case of the Second, who may exercise the liberties which are denied to the people (watching and reading what is otherwise forbidden, or carrying arms in defense of themselves and other citizens) and who can be trusted not to abuse that power, or be corrupted by it, in ways which their fellow citizens (mere mortals that they are) cannot. In effect and in fact, to defend censorship, or to defend "gun control," is to assert that there ought to be some citizens who are "more free" than others, and that second-class citizenship for all but a select few is permissible. Such elitism, obviously, has no place among those who value equality before the law as a political ideal, or as the first proposition of the American republic. 2.2 "If the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear ordinary military weapons, then everybody can have their own tactical nuclear warhead." [This is what is known on t.p.g. as the "nuclear strawman" or "Ban guns, ban The Bomb!" argument, designed to get everybody off on a tangent about whether or not the U.S. Constitution protects privately owned nuclear weapons.] Reynolds, Glenn H. and Kates, Don B., "The Second Amendment And States' Rights: A Thought Experiment," William and Mary Law Rev., v.36 pp. 1737-1768 (1995) In summary: The Second Amendment protects all arms, though as is mentioned elsewhere (see 3.3), those arms which have some relationship to a well-regulated militia are better protected than those which do not, at least according to legal precedent. Many people (at least for the sake of argument here on t.p.g.) are justifiably distressed at the thought of private individuals owning such indiscriminately destructive and persistently dangerous weapons. Some supporters of the civil right to keep and bear arms, as a result, seek to interpret "arms" as meaning "personal arms" (i.e. those which can be carried and used by an individual against another individual). However, in researching the era during which Amendment II was drafted, it is possible to find individuals who owned cannon and privateer ships, much as it is possible today to find people who own tanks and planes from the World War II era (and later), some with functioning guns. Civil War re-enactor companies today sometimes own cannon and other weapons which were state-of-the-art for_that_period. If one attempts to "creatively interpret" the Second Amendment today to say that it should now only apply to "personal arms" (in the absence of any textual or historical basis for that interpretation), what legitimate objection can one have to others who "creatively interpret" it to say that it now applies only to the National Guard, or even to say that it's entirely outmoded and can be totally ignored? (See 2.0) Any of these is an arbitrary selective interpretation, and all are equally unsupportable, as would be any attempt to limit the First Amendment protection of a free press only to, say, presses like those used by Benjamin Franklin, and not the unimaginably more powerful telecommunications devices of today. It is perhaps not surprising, however, that the power which modern telecommunications gives to the individual is similarly opposed, out of fears of what can possibly be done with it (see also 4.0). The implications of the "states' rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment are also noteworthy in this regard. If the Second Amendment is properly understood to protect the militias of the state governments from being interfered with by the Federal authority, the existing structure of the National Guard would very likely be unconstitutional, and there could be no bar to the states possessing independent nuclear arsenals as a counterforce to the power of the Federal standing army. The types of "arms" available to a state government, particularly in a wealthy state like California, would undoubtedly exceed that of most every individual. The Second Amendment was indeed written to protect all arms, and thus nuclear weapons are included. If multibillionaires (or wealthy state militias!) funding their own private bomb development efforts seem to be a problem worthy of serious consideration, what's the solution? Follow the procedure that the authors of the Constitution provided for modifying the Constitution to adapt to changing times --amend it by following the procedures in Article V. The people who wrote the Constitution did not intend for it to be selectively interpreted in order to fit changing conditions. They planned that if conditions _did_change enough to warrant an alteration in a provision of the Constitution, it should be done with due care and consideration, and only upon the agreement of two thirds of each house of Congress, and three fourths of the legislatures of the states. _This_is the proper way to react to changing times-- through the amendment process, and not by arbitrary denial of the plain language of the Constitution, by whatever branch of government (see 2.3). -- Based on a posting by Dan Day (dcd@RKBAfirstnethou.com) -- 2.3 "The Second Amendment doesn't apply to state and local governments, so state gun control laws, or local ordinances like the Morton Grove, IL ban on handguns, are constitutional." See U.S.C. Amendment XIV, sec. 1: "1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." also Dowlut, Robert, "Federal and State Constitutional Guarantees to Arms," U. Dayton Law Rev. v.15, pp. 84-89 (1989): "Forty-three (43) states have constitutional guarantees on the right to keep and bear arms. ALABAMA: "That every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state." Ala. Const. art. I, S 26 ALASKA: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Alaska Const. art. I, S 19 ARIZONA: "The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the State shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain, or employ an armed body of men." Ariz. Const. art. 2, S 26 ARKANSAS: "The citizens of this state shall have the right to keep and bear arms for their common defense." Ark. Const. art. II, S 5 COLORADO: "The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question; but nothing herein contained shall be construed to justify the practice of carrying concealed weapons." Colo. Const. art. II, S 13 CONNECTICUT: "Every citizen has the right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state." Conn. Const. art. I, S 15 DELAWARE: "A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and State, and for hunting and recreational use." Del. Const. art. I, S 20 FLORIDA: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves and of the lawful authority of the state shall not be infringed, except that the manner of bearing arms may be regulated by law." Fla. Const. art. I, S 8 GEORGIA: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but the General Assembly shall have the power to prescribe the manner in which arms may be borne." Ga. Const. art. I, S I, para. VIII HAWAII: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Haw. Const. art I, S 15 IDAHO: "The people have the right to keep and bear arms, which right shall not be abridged; but this provision shall not prevent the passage of laws to govern the carrying of weapons concealed on the person, nor prevent passage of legislation providing minimum sentences for crimes committed while in possession of a firearm, nor prevent passage of legislation providing penalties for the possession of firearms by a convicted felon, nor prevent the passage of legislation punishing the use of a firearm. No law shall impose licensure, registration or special taxation on the ownership or possession of firearms or ammunition. Nor shall any law permit the confiscation of firearms, except those actually used in the commission of a felony." Idaho Const. art. I, S 11 ILLINOIS: "Subject only to the police power, the right of the individual citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Ill. Const. art. I, S 22 INDIANA: "The people shall have a right to bear arms, for the defense of themselves and the State." Ind. Const. art. I, S 32 KANSAS: "The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security; but standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and shall not be tolerated, and the military shall be in strict subordination to the civil power." Kansas Bill Of Rights, S 4 KENTUCKY: "All men are, by nature, free and equal, and have certain inherent and inalienable rights, among which may be reckoned: .... Seventh: The right to bear arms in defense of themselves and the state, subject to the power of the general assembly to enact laws to prevent persons from carrying concealed weapons." Ky. Bill Of Rights, S 1, para. 7 LOUISIANA: "The right of each citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged, but this provision shall not prevent the passage of laws to prohibit the carrying of weapons concealed on the person." La. Const. art. I, S 11 MAINE: "Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned." Me. Const. art. I, S16 MASSACHUSETTS: "The people have a right to keep and bear arms for the common defence. And as, in time of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the legislature; and the military power shall always be held in exact subordination to the civil authority, and be governed by it." Mass. Decl. Of Rights, pt. I, art. XVII MICHIGAN: "Every person has a right to keep and bear arms for the defense of himself and the state." Mich. Const. art. I, S 6 MISSISSIPPI: "The right of every citizen to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person, or property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall not be called in question, but the legislature may regulate or forbid carrying concealed weapons." Miss. Const. art. 3, S 12 MISSOURI: "That the right of every citizen to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or when lawfully summoned in aid of the civil power, shall not be questioned; but this shall not justify the wearing of concealed weapons." Mo. Const. art. I, S 23 MONTANA: "The right of any person to keep or bear arms in defense of his own home, person, and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall not be called in question, but nothing herein contained shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons." Mont. Const. art. II, S 12 NEBRASKA: "All persons are by nature free and independent, and have certain inherent and inalienable rights; among these are ... the right to keep and bear arms for security or defense of self, family, home, and others, and for lawful common defense, hunting, recreational use, and all other lawful purposes, and such rights shall not be denied or infringed by the state or any subdivision thereof." Neb. Const. art. I, S 1 NEVADA: "Every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes." Nev. Const. art. 1, S II, para. 1 NEW HAMPSHIRE: "All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property, and the state." N. H. Const. part 1, art. 2-a. NEW MEXICO: "No law shall abridge the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes, but nothing herein shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons. No municipality or county shall regulate, in any way, an incident of the right to keep and bear arms." N. M. Const. art. II, S 6 NORTH CAROLINA: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; and, as standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they shall not be maintained, and the military shall be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power. Nothing herein shall justify the carrying of concealed weapons, or prevent the General Assembly from enacting penal statutes against that practice." N. C. Const. art. I, S 30 NORTH DAKOTA: "All individuals are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inalienable rights, among which are ... to keep and bear arms for the defense of their person, family, property, and the state, and for lawful hunting, recreational, and other lawful purposes, which shall not be infringed." N. D. Const. art. I, S 1 OHIO: "The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security; but standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and shall not be kept up; and the military shall be in strict subordination to the civil power." Ohio Const. art. I, S 4 OKLAHOMA: "The right of a citizen to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person, or property, or in aid of the civil power when thereunto legally summoned, shall never be prohibited; but nothing herein contained shall prevent the Legislature from regulating the carrying of weapons." Okla. Const. art. 2, S 26 OREGON: "The people shall have the right to bear arms for the defence of themselves, and the State, but the Military shall be kept in strict subordination to the civil power." Or. Const. art. I, S 27 PENNSYLVANIA: "The right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned." Pa. Const. art. I, S 21 RHODE ISLAND: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." R. I. Const. art. I, S 22 SOUTH CAROLINA: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. As, in times of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they shall not be maintained without the consent of the General Assembly. The military power of the State shall always be held in subordination to the civil authority and be governed by it. No soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner nor in time of war but in the manner prescribed by law." S. C. Const. art. I, S 20 SOUTH DAKOTA: "The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the state shall not be denied." S. D. Const. art. VI, S 24 TENNESSEE: "That the citizens of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defense; but the Legislature shall have power, by law, to regulate the wearing of arms with a view to prevent crime." Tenn. Const. art. I, S 26 TEXAS: "Every citizen shall have the right to keep and bear arms in lawful defense of himself or the State; but the Legislature shall have power, by law, to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime." Tex. Const. art. I, S 23 UTAH: "The individual right of the people to keep and bear arms for security and defense of self, family, others, property, or the State, as well as for the other lawful purposes shall not be infringed; but nothing herein shall prevent the legislature from defining the lawful use of arms." Utah Const. art. I, S 6 VERMONT: "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State - and as standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to the civil power." Vt. Const. Ch. I, art. 16 VIRGINIA: "That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state, therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power." Va. Const. art I, S 13 WASHINGTON: "The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize, maintain, or employ an armed body of men." Wash. Const. art. I, S 24 WEST VIRGINIA: "A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, and for lawful hunting and recreational use." W. Va. Const. art. III, S 22 WYOMING: "The right of citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and of the state shall not be denied." Wyo. Const. art. I, S 24 Seven (7) states do not have a constitutional provision on arms: California, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Wisconsin." [NOTE: On March 26, 1996, the State Assembly of Wisconsin approved a RKBA amendment to that state's constitution by a vote of 79-19, and the proposed amendment was approved again by an 83-13 vote on January 28, 1997. The amendment, which still awaits approval by the State Senate, as well as the voters of Wisconsin by referendum ballot, reads: "The people have the right to keep and bear arms for security, defense, hunting, recreation and for any other lawful purpose."] also Cottrol and Diamond, Georgetown Law J. [also Cottrol and Diamond, "'Never Intended to be Applied to the White Population': Firearms Regulation and Racial Disparity --The Redeemed South's Legacy to a National Jurisprudence?," Chicago-Kent Law Rev. v.70 pp.1307-1335 (1995)] Halbrook,_That Every Man Be Armed_(see above) _No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights,_by Michael Kent Curtis, Duke University Press, ISBN 0-8223-0599-2, (1986) _Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty,_by James Bovard, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-10351-4, (1994) _Lost Rights_is now available in trade paperback as ISBN 0-312-12333-7. _Why the Solid South? or Reconstruction and its results,_by Hilary A. Herbert, et al., R. H. Woodward and Co., Baltimore, no ISBN, (1890) _The Reconstruction Period,_ by Peter J. Hamilton, Geo. Barrie and Sons, Philadelphia, no ISBN, (1905) _Negro Militia and Reconstruction,_by Otis Singletary, Univ. of Texas Press, no ISBN, (1957) _The Angry Scar,_by Hodding Carter, Doubleday, no ISBN, (1959) _But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction,_by George C. Rable, Univ. of Georgia Press, ISBN 0-8203-0710-6 (1984) and Dred Scott v. Sandford (see above) Butchers Benevolent Association v. Crescent City Live-Stock Landing & Slaughter-House Co. [a.k.a._Slaughter-House_Cases_], U.S. Reports v.83 (16 Wallace) p.36, Lawyer's Edition v.21 p.394 (1872) U.S. v. Cruikshank, et al., U.S. Reports v.92 pp.542, Lawyer's Edition v.23 p.588 (1875) cited in Presser v. Illinois, U.S. Reports v.116 p.252, Supreme Court Reports v.6 p.580, Lawyer's Edition v.29 p.615 (1886) cited in Quilici v. Morton Grove, Federal Reporter 2nd series v.695 p.261 (7th Circuit, 1982) In summary: Prior to the U.S. Civil War, "gun control" laws imposed by state and local governments may well have been constitutional, since the states had much greater legal powers to limit the rights of individuals than they do today, after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The history of "gun control" in the United States is undeniably rooted in racism. The infamous Supreme Court decision in the_Dred Scott_case mentions among the rights of a free citizen "the right to keep and carry arms wherever they went" and argues that to recognize negroes as citizens in any one state, with all the "privileges and immunities" of citizenship, might compel every state to do so, a prospect which the Court postponed with dread for over a century. The earliest "gun control" laws were aimed at disarming slaves, free blacks, and freedmen, and even provided that white citizen patrols "shall enter into all negro houses and suspected places, and search for arms and other offensive or improper weapons, and may lawfully seize and take away all such arms, weapons, and ammunition..." a situation not unlike today's warrantless sweeps of public housing projects for weapons and other contraband. Penalties for selling or providing arms to blacks were likewise steep, for instance, an 1811 Louisiana statute provided for a $500 fine and up to a year in prison for selling arms to slaves. Following the Civil War, these same types of provisions were included in "Jim Crow" laws, with the disarmament of black Americans enforced by the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. The U.S. Congress moved to deal with this and other violations of the civil rights of black Americans through the Fourteenth Amendment, which created a national citizenship, gave the Congress the power to protect citizens of the United States from abridgment of their Federally recognized rights under the Constitution by the state governments, and guaranteed equal protection of the rights of all citizens by the governments of the states and the Union. In the case of_U.S. v. Cruikshank,_the Supreme Court continued the denial of the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment which it had begun in the_Slaughter-House Cases_by ruling that the federal government had no power to protect citizens against private actions which violated their constitutional rights, despite the fact that failure to afford equal protection of the law was clearly within the scope of the Amendment. In this case, William Cruikshank and a mob of some one hundred others were indicted under the Enforcement Act of 1870 with criminal conspiracy to violate the civil rights of two black men, Levi Nelson and Alexander Tillman, including their right to peaceably assemble, and their right to keep and bear arms. Cruikshank and the rest of the white mob were participants in what was perhaps the most violent racial incident of the Reconstruction Era, the Colfax Massacre, in which over 100 black Americans were killed. Nelson and Tillman were part of a militia of freedmen occupying the courthouse in Colfax, the seat of government in newly-created Grant Parish, LA. On April 13, 1873, the two sides fought on a small but violent scale a battle that had taken shape first in New Orleans. Following the elections of 1872, the government of Louisiana was in dispute. Both Democrat John D. McEnery, the handpicked successor of corrupt Democrat-allied Republican governor Henry C. Warmoth; and the Radical Republican gubernatorial challenger, carpetbagger William P. Kellogg, claimed victory. Warmoth had attempted to pack the board which counted the ballots, and the Kellogg faction managed to obtain a federal court order to prevent the Warmoth-approved state legislature from meeting. The result was that the Kellogg faction produced a board which declared Kellogg the governor without having seen the ballots, and for a time the state had two rival governments, complete with two different state legislatures. Kellogg, however, had something Warmoth's candidate lacked: the support of Republican President and former Union General Ulysses S. Grant, as well as support from Warmoth's estranged Lieutenant Governor, P.B.S. Pinchback, an influential and ambitious Republican of mixed race, who served briefly as acting Governor in late 1872 following the impeachment of Governor Warmoth by the newly elected Radical Republican legislature. But, as historian Peter Hamilton noted in his 1905 book on the Reconstruction Era, "there was not a great deal to choose between the two factions." President Grant, and a number of the Radical Republican state governments themselves, were no strangers to corruption. Governor Kellogg, at the urging of two white citizens, had first recognized a Warmoth man, C. C. Nash, as elected sheriff for Grant Parish, but within four months reconsidered, and declared Daniel Shaw the winner. Late one night, Sheriff Shaw and the Kellogg-backed parish Judge R. C. Register climbed through the window of the courthouse in Colfax, and assumed office. Captain William Ward, formerly an officer in a Grant Parish negro militia company, and now a member of the Kellogg legislature, soon arrived with three other Kellogg men and summoned negro militia from Smithfield Quarters, a nearby all-black settlement, and from the surrounding area to defend the courthouse and the Kellogg- installed parish government. The use of black militia to support Radical Republican governments in the South was understandably controversial. Many defeated southern whites saw it as provocative, and literally violently rejected the idea of an end to white political supremacy. Such was the case in Grant Parish, the namesake of the sitting President. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, Warmoth-backed Sheriff C. C. Nash arrived with a posse of poor whites, including Cruikshank, to retake the courthouse, and with it, the government of the parish. The negro militia, perhaps as many as 400 men, were entrenched at the courthouse, a brick building which had been converted from a plantation stablehouse, and were armed with a few makeshift cannon fashioned from steam pipes, and guarded by pickets with shotguns and Enfield rifles, who patrolled the countryside for 25 miles around, some on horseback. The courthouse was also ringed with a line of earthworks 2 1/2 to 4 feet high. The few whites in Colfax, including white Republicans, had long since abandoned the town, fleeing downriver to New Orleans; Kellogg's men, including Sheriff Shaw and Captain Ward among them. Ironically, final attempts at defusing the situation had broken down when word came that a local negro farmer, Jesse McKinney, had been shot and killed by a gang of white vigilantes as he was mending a fence. Governor Kellogg, ever indecisive, considered sending state militia under the command of reformed former Confederate General James Longstreet to take charge of the worsening situation, but it was too late. Nash's posse, numbering as many as 300, advanced, and the two sides exchanged fire. One of the makeshift cannon exploded. The whites launched a frontal assault, but at the same time a smaller contingent, who had flanked the crescent-shaped earthworks, attacked from the rear. The negro militia fled in all directions, some 150 taking up positions inside the courthouse itself. Sheriff Nash's men brought up a cannon and began firing on the building. In the ensuing violence, the shingled roof of the courthouse was set ablaze, and the building gutted by fire. No quarter was given by the whites, who shot at any who tried to flee the flames, and chased down blacks who escaped into the woods. Even the few dozen prisoners that were taken, were murdered during the night by drunken young whites who had been left to guard them. Some whites, and even some of Kellogg's black allies, suspected that Kellogg had engineered the incident to further his political hold on the state, and to justify greater numbers of Federal troops to support him. Though the authors of the Reconstruction Amendments, of which the Fourteenth was a part, clearly expressed their intent to extend the "privileges and immunities" of the federal Bill of Rights to all men, regardless of race, the Court in_Cruikshank_took it upon itself to decide which parts of the Bill of Rights were binding upon the states, through a doctrine of selective "incorporation," thus allowing the injustice of statutory racism to persist until the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. "Gun control" advocates who rely upon_Cruikshank_(or the later decision in_Presser v. Illinois_) to support the idea that the Second Amendment is not binding upon the States via the Fourteenth are relying upon the same arguments used to deny the civil rights of black Americans after the Civil War. Further, the constitution of almost every state includes a provision protecting the individual right to keep and bear arms, to various degrees. This fact further undermines the contention that the Second Amendment protects only the state's organized militia (see 2.0), especially considering that some of the state constitutions, like Virginia's, pre-date the federal constitution. (Such arms-right provisions at the state level cannot reasonably be interpreted as being intended to prevent the state from disarming an organized state militia over which it presumably has complete command and control!) The right to keep and bear arms is fundamental, because the right to self defense is fundamental, not only against the actions of common criminals, but against those uncommon criminals acting under the auspices of government as well (see 3.3). SECTION III. - Other "gun-control" fantasies "And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities." -=(U.S. President Bill Clinton, MTV's "Enough is Enough," 4/19/94)=- "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an_out_right_ban, picking up every one of them... "Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in," I would have done it. I_could_not do that. The votes weren't here." -=(U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, CBS-TV's "60 Minutes," 2/5/95, speaking about her authorship of the 1994 "assault weapons" ban)=- 3.0 "Registration of all firearms and ammunition will assist police in solving crimes committed with guns." See particularly LaPierre,_Guns, Crime and Freedom_ where he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 10) to this. also Kleck,_Point Blank,_pp.335-342. Bovard,_Lost Rights_(see above), pp.218-224. _Lethal Laws,_by Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman, and Alan Rice, published by JPFO (see above), ISBN 0-9642304-0-2, (1994) Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1997, p. B1 In summary: Currently, all handgun buyers must fill out the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms' Form 4473, which remains on file with the federally licensed firearms dealer (along with a notation of the transaction in a bound book with numbered pages) who sells the gun. If more than one handgun is purchased at a time, a Multiple Purchase form is filled out, and forwarded to the BATF for their records. Firearms transaction records of legitimate licensed dealers, though stored in this decentralized paper-based manner, are still readily accessible and traceable by law enforcement on request, if, for instance, a gun used to commit a crime needs to be traced to its original point of sale. The records include the gun make, model, caliber, and information about the original purchaser, as well as the gun's unique serial number. Wholesale transactions, between dealers and manufacturers (or importers), and among dealers, are noted in the bound book, so tracing a firearm involves calling the manufacturer and tracing it down through these records to the point of sale. All weapons covered by the National Firearms Act of 1934 (see Appendix I) are recorded by the BATF in their centralized National Firearms Registry. If a licensed dealer goes out of business, all records of its firearms transactions are acquired by the BATF, but the Bureau is forbidden by law from computerizing these records so as to create a national registry of non-NFA weapons. (Nevertheless, the Bureau's current policies, such as raising the licensing fees, have driven many dealers out of business, and the Bureau is now working to computerize the records of defunct licensees, a direct violation of the expressed intent of Congress, and Federal law. The BATF, in its defense, claims that it is merely using its computers to index the paper records, and not compiling them into a centralized list of non-NFA weapons and their purchasers.) Such national registration could be used, as it often has been used in the past in particular locales, not to trace guns used in crime, but to aid in the confiscation of firearms from the public at large. In 1967, New York City required that all owners of rifles and shotguns register their guns with the police, and obtain a license to own what was_already_their property. Later, in 1992, New York City banned the ownership of most semi-automatic rifles, and even certain other types of rifles, claiming (falsely) that they were "assault rifles" (see 3.3). The existence of the registration lists enabled police to send out threatening letters to gun owners demanding that they surrender what had been, until that time, their legal property, without compensation. Police even went door-to-door demanding that gun owners turn over their weapons, even though they had not been found guilty of committing any crime (other than that they were violating the "gun control" law), and many of the guns which were prohibited cost several hundred, or even thousands of dollars. Most recently, registration lists in Great Britain and Australia have been used to assist in confiscation of firearms from the public on a massive scale (see Appendix III). Registration lists, in other countries, while produced with perhaps the best intentions, have later been used by tyrannical governments to disarm political opponents or targeted minorities, such as happened with registration lists generated by the Weimar Republic when the Nazis came to power in Germany. Anti-semitic laws were passed requiring that Jews turn in their weapons, which most Jews dutifully did, unaware of the horror of the Shoah which awaited. "Gun control" schemes, such as these, have contributed to aiding and abetting genocides throughout this century (see 3.3 and 4.0). For gun registration laws to be useful in solving crimes, some rather unlikely things all have to happen. The gun must be used in the crime, recovered by the police at the scene or from the suspect, the suspect must have fled the scene, leaving only the gun to directly tie him to the crime, and the suspect must have registered the gun using his true name or unique identifying marks like fingerprints, or the owner of the gun must be able to provide police with a lead to the criminal. Further, the gun's serial number must still be readable, so as to identify that particular gun from all others of that make and model, and the ballistics characteristics of the gun cannot have changed very much from the time it was used in the crime. Firing the gun with an abrasive in the barrel, or placing it in conditions where it could rapidly corrode could easily change the ballistics, and grinding off or multiply stamping the serial number could produce an untraceable weapon. Such "sterile" guns are fairly common among criminals concerned about the traceability of their weapons, and evidently quite unconcerned about the fact that tampering with the serial number or other identifying marks on a gun is a serious crime in itself, not to mention the fact that mere possession of a gun by a convicted felon is also a crime. Registration of ammunition sales is laughable as a crime control measure, for several reasons. Stamping an individual unique serial number on every bullet of the_billions_of rounds of ammunition used lawfully by Americans each year is impossible enough, both due to lack of space on the bullet (how do you label shotgun shot?), and the sheer scope of the task (considering that you cannot repeat a number in subsequent years, because ammunition produced in one year isn't all shot up during the year, and it can remain stable and usable for many years); but expecting such an identifying mark to survive impacting a target, and not be torn to pieces or smashed into illegibility, is even more fanciful. (Nevertheless, "gun control" proponents haven't been joking when such schemes were proposed.) Serializing ammunition also ignores how easy it is to cast one's own bullets, or machine them, and load them into existing cases (and there are thousands of hobbyist reloaders out there who tinker with ammunition performance and accuracy in an effort to outdo the mass-produced ammunition made by companies such as Winchester, Federal, Remington, and others). Just recording the sales of ammunition in the manner required by law for recording gun purchases, as was once Federal law (see Firearms Owner's Protection Act, Appendix I), quickly generates mountains of useless paper, with no value in solving crimes. (The city of Pasadena, California, which with much publicity passed a similar ammo registration law in February 1995 --despite the earlier demonstrated uselessness of ammo registration at the federal level-- repealed the law on August 18, 1997, after police proclaimed the law "useless". The city government, which delayed repeal of the law for several months in order to allow "gun control" groups to propose alternative legislation, wisely rejected the "new-and-improved" ammo registration law as well.) The overwhelming majority of ammunition used in this country is purchased and used lawfully, and the amount used by criminals to commit crimes in any given year could likely fit into a small closet. Most ammo is used for target shooting and hunting, and for keeping in practice for self defense, so if buying ammunition is in itself a suspicious act, half of America is guilty. 3.0.a "Guns ought to be licensed and registered like cars." See particularly LaPierre,_Guns, Crime, and Freedom,_ where he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 7) to this. also _Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996,_U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, SuDoc# C3.134:996, p.762 also _Establishments Authorized to Operate Under the Supervision of The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms as of September 30, 1990,_ U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, SuDoc# T 70.2:Es 8 also National Safety Council Staff,_Accident Facts_(see above) In summary: Automobiles must only be licensed for use upon public roads, and licenses are not required for the purchase of one car (or many cars). There are no waiting periods or background checks on the purchase of cars. People who misuse their cars are punished for their own actions, and particular types of cars aren't banned or taken away from those who use them safely. Unlike driving on public roads, which is a privilege, owning a gun is a right explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution (see 2.1). The right of self- defense is fundamental and inalienable, but requiring a license to own the means of self defense gives government the power to deny that right, for whatever reason. Waiting periods have a similar effect (see 3.2 and 3.2.a). Licensing of law-abiding citizens to carry a concealed weapon is permissible, because, like driving, the State has an interest in maintaining public safety by ensuring as best it can that only the law-abiding carry in public. However, some supporters of the civil right to keep and bear arms oppose requiring a permit for concealed carry, and prefer a permitless system like that of the state of Vermont, which simply punishes misuse of guns, rather than restricting their lawful use (see 3.8). Restricting the ability of law-abiding citizens to own and use firearms on their own property, and in defense of their homes and families, is unjust, and constitutes prior restraint (that is, punishment before any harm has been committed). Guns, which "gun control" supporters claim are "designed only to kill" were involved in about 1,400 accidental deaths in 1990, and an additional 18,800 suicides, and 13,600 murders, for a total of 33,800 firearm-related deaths. There are more than 200,000,000 firearms in private hands in the United States. By contrast, motor vehicles, which are not (supposedly) "designed to kill" were involved in about 46,000 accidental deaths in 1990, and an additional 1,900 people decided to suck on an exhaust pipe to end their lives, for a total of some 47,900 motor-vehicle related deaths. There are about 143,000,000 passenger cars in use in the United States. From looking objectively at the numbers, these_licensed_and_registered_transport devices routinely kill more people than the (for the most part)_unlicensed,_ and_unregistered_deadly weapons do. And it isn't because these devices "designed only to kill" aren't used a lot; U.S. gun owners go through about 4,000,000,000 (that's four BILLION) rounds of ammunition a year. Much has been made by some "gun control" advocates of the fact that there "are more gun dealers than gas stations" in the United States. While arguably true (there were 269,079 Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs) in 1990 according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and approximately only 205,000 gasoline service stations and auto dealers _combined_in 1990), it doesn't require an federal background check to run a gas station or to be a car salesman. Those Federal Firearms License holders who had no retail location, often called "kitchen- table dealers" by anti-gun activists (and who until recently were a significant percentage of FFL holders), got their licenses primarily for the added convenience of being exempt from waiting periods, to facilitate purchases from out-of-state dealers or mail-order companies, and/or to simplify the purchase of restricted weapons, like machineguns (see National Firearms Act of 1934, Appendix I). There's nothing sinister about wanting to be exempt from the onerous regulations which the supporters of "gun control" have placed on the right to keep and bear arms, and, by undergoing the FBI background check required in order to get an FFL, these people have shown they are law-abiding. Such low-volume gun dealers have been the target of BATF policymakers recently however, and many have had their licenses revoked for not having a retail location, and have been turned in to local authorities and harassed for violation of zoning laws (see 3.0). This has resulted in a sharp decline in the number of FFLs, according to Congressional testimony in April 1997 by BATF Director John McGaw, who puts the most recent figure at 119,708 licensees as of February 1997, a drop of 56% below the 1990 levels quoted above. It should be noted that in many localities, private sale of firearms by unlicensed individuals not considered by BATF to be "engaged in the business" are legal, and almost completely unregulated. After all, firearms_are_ considered property, and so long as the owner does not knowingly sell or transfer a gun to a person who is underage or who is forbidden by law from owning firearms (such as felon), one may dispose of one's own property as one sees fit. How ironic that the low-volume dealers who have gone to the trouble and expense of obtaining an FFL are the ones the BATF has chosen to target, rather than going after armed felons and the illegal and/or unlicensed dealers who supply them. The fact is, most people use guns at least as responsibly as they use their automobiles, and the vast majority of gunowners never harm anyone. That being the case, why punish everyone for the wrongs committed by a few, whether they be criminal car drivers or criminals with guns? --- Adapted in part from a posting by William Gray (gray@RKBAvisi.com) --- 3.0.b "Gun registration reduced homicides in Washington, D.C." see_Uniform Crime Reports for the United States, 19xx-1994,_ Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Dept. of Justice, SuDoc# J 1.14/7:9xx _Vital Statistics of the United States, 19xx-1991, Vol. II - Mortality Part B, National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Public Health Service, SuDoc# HE 20.6210:9xx/v.2/pt.B _Statistical Abstract of the United States 19xx-1994, Bureau of the Census, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, SuDoc# C 3.134:9xx Loftin, Colin; McDowall, David; Wiersema, Brian; and Cottey, Talbert J., "Effects of Restrictive Licensing of Handguns on Homicide and Suicide in the District of Columbia," New England J. Medicine, v.325, n.23, pp.1615-1620 (1991) Washington Post, March 22, 1996, p.A1 In summary: In September 1976, the District of Columbia, home to the federal government of the United States, enacted a highly restrictive "gun control" law which in effect "froze" the number of legally owned handguns in the District by stopping the issuance of new handgun licenses. In addition, new strenuous registration requirements were placed on the ownership of rifles and shotguns, and the law further required that all firearms be kept either under lock and key, or kept unloaded and disassembled when not being used for recreational purposes. Violations of the law were to be punished by ten days in jail and a $300 fine, and this penalty was later increased to a_year_in jail, and a_$1,000_fine. D.C. thus became a test case for the effectiveness of highly restrictive "gun control" laws at the local level. A 1991 article in the anti-gun New England Journal of Medicine attempted to show that the registration law in D.C. reduced the average (arithmetic mean) number of gun-related homicides per month following the implementation of the law. As with other "gun control" studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine (see 1.1), and as with a recent study of the effects of concealed carry reform laws (see 3.8.a) by researchers from the University of Maryland (to which the authors of the Loftin study were affiliated), this paper has serious flaws in its methodology. (For the sordid statistical details, please see Appendix IV.) The most curious aspect of the Loftin study is the particular span of years which the researchers chose to examine. The study period covers the years 1968-1987, which can best be described as a "plateau" period, before which murder/non-negligent manslaughter (MNNM) rates (as measured by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports data) were much lower than during the period of study, and after which the MNNM rates in the District ballooned to record levels! (Ironically, in 1991, the very year Loftin, et al. published their work, the MNNM rate for Washington, D.C. had reached its all-time high.) As a result, Loftin, et al. begin calculating their averages in 1968, which (coincidentally) is the year before a large jump in the number of MNNM recorded by the FBI's UCR (195 to 287), and they end their study in 1987, just before another jump in MNNM numbers (another coincidence). In 1988, the MNNM number shot up to 369, from 225 in 1987. Data from years which would contradict the conclusions of the study are excluded from consideration (see below, and Appendix IV). The problems with the data used in the Loftin study don't end there, however. The study counts homicides, not MNNM as does the UCR data, and so does not distinguish between justifiable self-defense homicides, so-called "legal intervention" by the police, and unlawful homicides such as murder and manslaughter. The researchers consider only the absolute numbers of homicides, rather than homicide rates adjusted for changes in the size of the population. The use of average homicides per month as the measurement produces some very "noisy" data, and makes understanding the longer term trends more difficult (see also 3.8.a). The population of D.C. declined during the study period (1971-1983), declining from its peak in 1964, while the population of the suburbs which Loftin, et. al. used for controls was increasing during the study period. In 1994, D.C. had only 71% of the population it had in 1964, yet it had a MNNM rate 423% of the rate in 1964, which was prior to the enactment of "gun control" laws at the Federal and local levels! Despite declines in population in D.C., the MNNM rate has skyrocketed, putting to rest the notion that crowding necessarily results in greater murder rates. If that were true, the more-crowded D.C. of the 1960s would have had a high murder rate, while during the relatively less populated 1990s, the rate would have been expected to fall. The "prompt decline" in average monthly gun-related homicides which is the central claim made by Loftin, et al. in their study was very prompt indeed, since the homicide rate was already trending downward. The law only became effective at the end of September 1976, after which handgun owners had 60 days to register their guns, placing the effect of any of the law's criminal sanctions into late November 1976. The researchers note that there was a restraining order which went into effect at the beginning of December which prevented enforcement of the law for a 49-day period, ending in mid-February 1977. Curiously, however, the rate of MNNM was already declining in 1976, and for most of that year, the law wasn't in effect at all! Prompt action indeed, for a "gun control" law to begin reducing MNNM prior to it even being in force... Even using the same source and similar methods as the Loftin study, it can be found that for the period 1964 to 1991 (adding four years to each end of the study period) the average annual homicide rate (using numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, rather than the FBI's UCR) was 27.1 per 100,000 population prior to the law ('64-'76), and 37.4 per 100,000 population after the law was in force. Considering the absolute numbers rather than the rates, there was an average of 203 homicides per year prior to the law, and an average of 234 homicides per year after the law, during the same 1964-1991 period. Clearly, a more populous D.C. (with more guns available) was a safer place to live during the 1960s than a less populous D.C. with some of the most stringent "gun control" laws in the nation is today. Recently, the police in Washington, D.C. have begun advising city residents how to obtain guns for home defense. Lt. Lowell K. Duckett of the D.C. Police held a two-hour community meeting in March 1996, and was quoted in the Washington Post as saying "Gun control has not worked in D.C. The only people who have guns are criminals. We have the strongest gun laws in the nation and one of the highest murder rates. It's quicker to pull your Smith and Wesson than to dial 911 if you're being robbed." Duckett favors repeal of D.C.'s ineffective gun "bans." --- Adapted in part from a posting by Kevin M. Okleberry (kevmoky@RKBAcc.usu.edu) --- 3.0.c "Putting taggants in explosives and gunpowder will put bomb-making terrorists out of business." see _Taggants in Explosives,_Congress of the United States, Office of Technology Assessment, April 1980, SuDoc# Y3.T22/2:2Ex7 [This report, now rather outdated, is also available in a summary version with the SuDoc# Y3.T22/2:2Ex7/sum.] Shanley, Agnes, ed., Harriston, Deborah with Roberts, Sandra, "The Unmistakable Fingerprint of Taggants," _Chemical Engineering,_ v.103, p.35 (September 1996) Wu, Corrina, "Tagged Out," _Science News,_v.150, pp.168-169 (September 14, 1996) "Marking of products to establish identity and source," U.S. Patent #5,429,952 issued July 4, 1995 to Biocode, Inc. Isotag LLC website at http://www.isotag.com/ National Academy of Sciences website at http://www.nas.edu/ _Marking, Rendering Inert, and Licensing of Explosive Materials,_ by Committee on Marking, Rendering Inert, and Licensing of Explosive Materials, National Research Council, National Academy Press, ISBN 0-309-05990-9, (1998) In summary: The government-mandated addition of chemical "taggants" to gunpowder and explosives has often been proposed in the U.S. as a legislative strategy for combatting terrorist bombings, by giving such potential bombmaking materials a unique chemical "signature" which could provide investigators additional clues to work from in identifying bombing suspects. Recent high-profile bombing incidents, such as those at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, New York City's World Trade Center, as well as the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, and bombings at abortion clinics and elsewhere, have given new political currency to the "taggant" issue, which was last seriously debated by the U.S. government during the late 1970s. As the public treatment of former Atlanta Olympic security guard Richard Jewell shows, assigning blame for terrorist bombings is at best an inexact science given current techniques, so the question remains whether "taggants" will help or hinder the cause of justice and public safety. There are three technologies presently competing for the "taggant" market, all of which are in current use in other products, primarily to help identify counterfeit merchandise, such as bogus aircraft parts, gasolines, cosmetics, medicines, and even alcoholic beverages. In this role of assuring the quality and integrity of brand-name products, these covert identification methods may in fact help save far more lives than they ever could as additives to explosive materials. The earliest "taggant" technology, originally developed at 3M, is the one most often discussed when the issue is tagging explosives and gunpowder, since it was the method under consideration in a 1980 report by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The "taggants" in this case are tiny flecks of melamine plastic, which contain color coded layers sandwiched between a magnetic film on one side, and a fluorescent layer on the other side which glows under ultraviolet (UV) light. Detectives at a bombing scene, the theory goes, would use UV light to find the glowing taggants, collect them with a magnet, and read the color-coded layers under a microscope to trace the serial number of the batch of explosive used to make the bomb. Another kind of tagging method uses biotechnology derived from the immune systems of animals to detect the presence of specific chemicals attached to a larger inert carrier molecule. The chemical tags, called haptens, used in this method would only be identifiable by a specific immune system molecule, a monoclonal antibody, developed to recognize them. A microscopic plastic bead which had several different types of haptens on its surface could be "read" by treating it with the corresponding antibodies, in a similar manner to the way invading bacteria and viruses are recognized as "foreign" by the immune system. Determining which monoclonal antibodies could bind to the beads, and which could not, would identify the haptens present on the bead, and hence the code. The use of such a biological technique allows the taggant particles to be made much smaller, and used and detected in much lower concentrations than taggants using a color-code. Also, the biotaggants would be difficult to remove from the explosive mixture, and to identify, without the proper antibodies. Lastly, there is a tagging system available which exploits the fact that all the chemical elements can exist in the form of atoms having different slightly different weights, called isotopes. Hydrogen, for instance, can exist as "light" hydrogen, having only an electron and a proton; and "heavy" hydrogen, which has an electron and a proton, but also contains a neutron. (There is also a heavier radioactive isotope of hydrogen, but such a radioactive tag, though easy to detect, would not be ...technically suitable.) Both of these forms of hydrogen are chemically very similar (almost identical), but can be distiguished by using a sensitive piece of scientific equipment called a GC-mass spec (short for gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer), which is capable of weighing atoms and molecules. "Heavy" hydrogen atoms are much rarer in nature than the "light" kind, so substituting particular "heavy" hydrogen atoms for their "light" counterparts in some of the molecules found in an explosive would not change the chemistry of the explosive, but would create a unique pattern that is detectable using the proper instruments, even when present at very low levels. Best of all, such isotopically labeled explosives would not contain foreign materials which might cause environmental and safety problems, the technologies involved in making the tags are not easily duplicated, and the isotopes themselves cannot be destroyed except by nuclear processes which would also destroy whatever materials the tags are associated with. Putting foreign "taggant" particles into explosives and gunpowder is tricky and possibly very dangerous, and certainly useless for the intended purpose if it can be easily defeated. The color-coded flecks of magnetized plastic have several strikes against them. If they are easy to find and remove from the bomb residue, they may be easy to remove from the explosives beforehand. Treating gunpowder with a magnet could pull them out of the mix. It has been proposed to include some proportion of non-magnetic taggants, and/or conceal the fluorescent layer with a substance that looks similar to the explosive itself, and which would only reveal the fluorecence when it gets burned away in the explosion, so as to make removing the taggants much more difficult. However, unless the plastic particles are of similar size and density to the powder, they could separate due to settling, or be screened out. Settling out could cause changes in loading characteristics when powder is used to manufacture ammunition. For instance, if the load is adjusted to account for a certain proportion of taggant, the first part of a run may be correct, but later, after settling, there may be rounds loaded with high concentrations of taggant, and later still, rounds which are overcharged with too much powder. The taggant itself might react chemically with the highly reactive chemicals present in the powder or explosive, with possibly destabilizing and dangerous results. A 1980 report by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment noted possible instability resulting from the presence of high taggant concentrations at high temperatures, though it's doubtful whether this data has any relevance at the far lower concentrations in which the taggants would ordinarily be used. If the taggants tend to clump, they may become locally concentrated, however, causing ballistic inaccuracy. If not degradable, microscopic bits of plastic taggants incorporated into fertilizers, explosives and gunpowder would accumulate in the environment, making it difficult to determine what taggants came from where. Mixing several lots of tagged chemicals together as in a "home brew" type improvised explosive, and/or diluting out or substituting untagged chemicals for the tagged ones could defeat the system, or reduce the concentration of the tags to levels indistinguishable from the levels already present as a result of the use of explosives in mining the components of many commonly used materials, such as concrete, mortar, brick, and glass. The most powerful conventional explosives, the so-called "fuel-air" explosives, would not be suitable for labeling with such particles. Even if the particles were reduced in size, as in the hapten carrier molecules, it remains to be seen whether sufficient numbers of the haptens on the surface of the carriers would retain the shapes and chemical characteristics after an explosion which enable them to be recognized by the highly sensitive monoclonal antibodies. Though the hapten carrier tags would be tough to remove from the explosive, and almost impossible to read without the proper antibodies, there is still the possibility that the particles could react chemically with the explosive, becoming unreadable, or causing destabilization. There is also the possibility that the haptens could be chemically modified in some fashion as to make them unreadable by the antibody, in effect changing the chemical serial number present on the carrier, either as a result of environmental exposure, or human intervention. Treatment of the taggant particles with enzymes that destroy the unique three-dimensional structure of the haptens without damaging the explosive may be possible, depending upon their chemical properties. Putting a protective coating on the hapten carrier particles might prevent these problems, but it would probably also make the particles more difficult for detectives to locate and read, increasing the possibility of investigative errors. Again, substitution or dilution of the tagged chemical could defeat the system, and there is also a concern for accumulation in the environment. While the hapten carrier tags have some advantages, such as increased security, they share many of the drawbacks of the earlier color-coded plastic taggants, in that they introduce a foreign particulate substance into the reaction mix. As anyone who's cleaned a gun knows, there's always residue left behind from incomplete combustion of the powder, so there is the possibility that enough functional haptens can survive an explosion to be useful to an investigation. But buildup of taggants inside a gun might cause problems as well, and if foreign taggant particles tend to cause ammunition to be less accurate, then using tagged ammunition could put the user or bystanders at risk in defensive situations where accurate shooting is critical. Of all the current taggant technologies, isotopic labelling seems to be able to overcome every possible objection, since no foreign materials are being introduced into the powder or explosive, and the infinitesimal differences at the atomic scale make no difference to the performance of the chemicals they are included in. The isotopes which are used in the process are naturally occurring, and though they may accumulate locally for a while, they would gradually rejoin the natural chemical cycles of the Earth, in the same manner as their lightweight counterparts, with no adverse effect on organisms in the environment. The added labor costs involved in cleaning up after each batch of labeled explosive or powder so as not to cross-contaminate later batches would be passed on to the consumer of all products in which labeled substances are used, no matter what the taggant system. Mining, and even agriculture (with labeling of ammonium nitrate like that used in the Oklahoma City bomb) would be affected. And in the case of gunpowder, which is often pre-blended at the factory to achieve specific performance characteristics, with each lot being distributed in small quantities to thousands of end users, the costs could be substantial. Taggant evidence alone can't identify one particular individual. Finally, in response to a request by the U.S. Congress, the National Academy of Sciences is currently studying the types and use of taggants in explosives, with a final report due in February 1998. Whether the use of such technical evidence can make a difference for justice in a sensationalized criminal case is today a matter of substantial doubt, and that's a question no panel of distinguished scientists can resolve. If jurors lack a basic scientific background to evaluate the testimony of experts called upon to interpret the data, they may just ignore what they don't understand, and all of the best designed schemes for catching the bad guys will be for naught. 3.1 "Guns increase the lethality of crime." see_The Citizen's Guide to Gun Control,_by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins,_Macmillan, ISBN 0-02-934830-7 (1987) [The authors present their case in favor of "gun control," based in part upon the lethality of firearms, termed the "instrumentality effect" in the study of violence. Though somewhat dated, and factually incorrect regarding a few issues (notably the provisions of the 1968 Gun Control Act, the concept of "stopping power," and the notion that the majority of homicides are committed by individuals without prior histories of violence), the book offers a reasoned (rather than paranoiac) airing of the anti-gun viewpoint.] In summary: This argument ignores that, in the absence of guns, the younger, more agile, and/or physically stronger criminal has much less difficulty in overpowering his victim, particularly if the victim is elderly or disabled. This is certainly true in the case where there are multiple assailants, since, in the absence of firearms, there is no way for the physically weaker to overcome strength in numbers (see 1.1.a). While the existence of guns no doubt enables people who might not otherwise easily commit violence to do so, it also increases the ability of victims to resist violent attacks, when they might not otherwise be able to do so effectively. Guns are indeed "the great equalizer," and removing them from the hands of the public at large returns us at best to the "law of the jungle," where the weaker are prey to the stronger; and at worst affects only the law-abiding, leaving criminals to obtain guns by illegal means which they can then use with impunity against the otherwise defenseless (see 3.8). Proficiency with firearms is no guarantee of survival for potential victims of crime, but it is surely better than submission to the mercy of criminals, especially when that submission is compelled by government through "gun control" laws (see 1.1). Crime is not random, and criminal predators often choose the weakest among us for their prey, attacking in groups to better their chances of success. Guns may increase the lethality of crime, but for whom? The criminals, who have youth and strength and their partners in crime on their side, and who could kill by any number of means without a firearm? Or the victims of crime, who all too often lack any other means to resist? 3.2 "A waiting period saves lives, and it might even have stopped John Hinckley, Jr. from wounding Jim Brady (for whom the Brady national waiting-period law was named)." See particularly LaPierre,_Guns, Crime, and Freedom,_ where he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 5) to this. In summary: Waiting periods, ostensibly for the purpose of background checks, are ineffective against determined criminals, who can obtain illegal guns by a variety of means, including "strawman purchases" by individuals with clean records, theft, and purchase from illegal dealers and/or smugglers. All of these channels are illegal (and therefore by definition unavailable to the law-abiding), and avoid both waiting periods and background checks. Background checks, in principle, can be done in the manner of a credit card transaction, if appropriate databases are established. In the absence of such databases, the personnel and paperwork requirements placed upon law enforcement officers detract from time and resources needed for combating more serious crimes (see also Brady Act,_ Appendix I.) Establishing such readily accessible databases would greatly aid law enforcement in the apprehension of criminal suspects (particularly fugitives), and seems a good idea on its own merits, aside from "gun control". Waiting periods did not and would not stop John Hinckley, Jr. (who had a clean criminal record, and whose mental health history had been covered up by his wealthy parents, and who purchased a .22 revolver in Texas several_months_before his attempt to assassinate President Reagan); or convicted mass murderer Colin Ferguson (who purchased the 9mm Ruger in April 1993 he used to attack passengers on the Long Island Railroad in December after undergoing a fifteen-day waiting period and mandatory background check in California); or the murderer of John Lennon (who bought his .38 revolver in Hawaii, while working as a_security_guard_for a Waikiki apartment building, despite a violent marriage, and being treated for a suicide attempt!); or gay serial killer Andrew Cunanan, who stole the .40 caliber pistol he used to murder designer Gianni Versace from his first victim, former Navy officer Jeffrey Trail, whom Cunanan bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer at an ex-lover's Minneapolis apartment (Trail had bought the gun legally in San Diego, while in training to join the California Highway Patrol). Such cases point up one of the major impediments to effective background checks, which is the confidentiality of mental health and drug treatment records, as well as the difficulty of defining just what type of "mental health history" is sufficient disqualification for denying a person their civil right to keep and bear arms. Should people treated for clinical depression lose their right to protect themselves from violent crime? How about people with no criminal record, but who've sought marriage counseling? Recovering alcoholics or those who've abused other drugs at some time in the past? Far from stopping "crimes of passion," waiting periods can even make matters worse, if an abused spouse is denied the best means of self-protection, while the abuser can use whatever weapon is at hand (a knife, blunt trauma, strangulation, battery-- or a gun) to kill or maim. "Crimes of passion" are often the culmination of a long pattern of abuse, and anti-stalking laws and restraining orders, like waiting periods, only affect the law-abiding. The victims of violence in these situations may realize only too late that they need to defend themselves, and in such a situation, a waiting period (which considers everyone a potential criminal)_can_kill. People who already own and use guns responsibly need not wait for a background check, since they wouldn't require a_new_gun (or a gun at all) if they were inclined to commit a crime. People who already commit violent crimes with guns aren't going to be deterred by another law, and are already prohibited by law from possessing guns if previously convicted of a serious crime. 3.2.a "The Brady Act stopped thousands of violent felons from getting guns since its enactment in 1993." see_Uniform Crime Reports for the United States, 1992,_(see above) Houston Post, February 28, 1995, p. A1 _Gun Control -- Implementation of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act,_ General Accounting Office report, GAO/GGD-96-22 [This study of the effect of the Brady Act in selected law enforcement jurisdictions was issued by the General Accounting Office on January 25, 1996, but does not draw any nationwide conclusions.] In summary: According to a report released on February 28, 1995 by the Clinton Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Brady handgun waiting period law (see Appendix I.) was a success. But a success when compared to what? BATF's study of the effect of the law in 30 jurisdictions which had not had a waiting period before, conducted between March of 1994 and January 1995 showed that of 441,545 applications or background checks run, some 15,506 were denied, or about 3.5%. However, the BATF study admitted that only 4,365 of these were convicted felons, which brings the denials down to 0.99%. Of the total denials, 649 were illegal drug users, which is not a violent crime, but is a felony, and would disqualify a gun purchaser. Excluding this nonviolent category of felony from the count of convicted felons results in 0.84% denials, assuming there is no overlap between the violent felons and the drug users listed in the study. The Clinton Administration estimated that some 40,000 persons were denied under the Brady Act nationwide. Assuming that's correct, then the 15,506 included in the study constitute 38.8% of the national total, and the 441,545 checks run in the study are an equivalent proportion of the total checks run for the nation. This means that some 1,141,000 background checks were run, and assuming that this turned down violent felons at the rate of 0.84%, about 9,600 violent felons were turned down nationwide. If each check took 10 minutes to run, this amounts to some 11,410,000 minutes of law enforcement time, or 190,167 hours, or 15,847 twelve-hour workdays. If a law enforcement officer typically works a five day week, with twelve hour shifts, this amounts to 61 cop/years, or about 37 violent felons a day. In other words, a reasonable estimate of the number of full-time law enforcement officers the Act took off the streets during the study period is 61. If the amount of time it took to run each check was greater than 10 minutes, the number of officers taken off the street by the Act was even higher. Divided over the nation's law enforcement officers, a total of about 550,000, this amounted to about twenty minutes work for every cop in the country, with each cop catching 0.017 violent felons during the year. In other words, you had to have about 12 cops working an hour each before you catch one violent felon by running Brady Act background checks! Or, put another way, for each 100 cops that spent_all_day_ doing background checks, you would catch about 61 violent felons. Consider, in reality, that added workload was borne by only a fraction of the total officers, so in rural counties, with low numbers of law enforcement officers per capita, Brady checks may have well consumed a significant proportion of their workday. It's no wonder that rural law enforcement officers sued the Clinton Administration because of this unfunded mandate, and the impositions of the law on local law enforcement were found to be unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment by the U.S. Supreme Court. (See Appendix I., and Appendix V.) At the same time, it's important not to forget that 30,400 people who were not violent felons were denied purchase during the year, though perhaps as many as 1,677 of these were illegal drug users, and 177 were mentally disabled. This gives the Brady checks a false positive rate of about 2.5%, or one out of every 40 people who applied were unjustly denied, some 117 each workday. At the same time, 37 violent felons got caught each workday. The act would thus seem to "catch" law-abiding citizens at a rate three times as high as it "caught" violent felons! The proportion of violent felons "caught" by the Brady check would be expected to diminish as criminals shifted exclusively to other means of acquiring weapons. As a comparison, an estimated 742,130 arrests were made in 1992 for violent crime, or about 2,854 each workday. As a crime-fighting measure, Brady checks were a tiny blip on the screen, and inconvenienced both police and law-abiding citizens on a daily basis. The possibility existed, with so many false positives, that the Act might be abused to deny legitimate purchases due to_any_legal infraction, like a speeding ticket, and would have required going to court to show that your record does not disqualify you from owning a gun. The 1996 General Accounting Office report on the Brady Act did show that some denials were due to misdemeanor warrants on unpaid traffic tickets. The idea that violent criminals got more than a small fraction of their guns through legitimate channels, or that the Brady Act thwarted the acquisition of handguns by determined criminals to any significant degree, and lead to more arrests, is unsupported by the available evidence. By the time the background checks were run, a criminal would be long gone, or have already acquired a firearm by theft or through an illegal dealer. An instant background check system, like that supported by the NRA, and required to be implemented by the FBI by the end of November 1998, should help put more police out on the street, reduce the hassle and delay to the law-abiding, and provide an occasional opportunity to make a quick arrest. As of July 1995, the Brady Act had resulted in only_seven_federal convictions, of which none were against violent felons. 3.3 "No one needs an assault weapon, they have no sporting purpose, they're only intended to kill people." See particularly LaPierre,_Guns, Crime, and Freedom,_where he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 6) to this. also Madison, James, Hamilton, Alexander, and Jay, John, _The Federalist_#46 Halbrook,_That Every Man Be Armed_ Cottrol and Diamond, Georgetown Law J. Kleck,_Point Blank,_pp.70-82 Simkin, Zelman, and Rice,_Lethal Laws,_(see above) _Crime and the Sacking of America: The Roots of Chaos,_ by Andrew P. Thomas, Brassey's, ISBN 0-275-94913-3 (1994) also Aymette v. State, Tennessee Reports v.21 (2 Humphreys) p.154 (1840) cited in U.S. v. Miller, U.S. Reports v.307 p.174, Supreme Court Reporter v.59 p.816, Lawyer's Edition v.83 p.1206 (1939) In summary: So-called "assault weapons" are not machineguns (which have been heavily taxed and restricted since 1934), and are less powerful than many commonly used hunting rifles, like the .30-06 . They only fire one shot per pull of the trigger, not a "spray of bullets," and operate under the same principle as other semi-automatics. They are defined in law primarily according to their appearance, which often resembles a military-issue "select-fire" rifle or machinegun, including a pistol grip, a folding stock, a flash suppressor or muzzle brake, a barrel shroud, a bayonet lug, and/or a grenade launcher. None of these features makes these guns any more deadly, and even the most ominously named, the "grenade launcher," amounts to a metal clip at the muzzle of the gun which can hold a rifle grenade (the actual grenades, however, are considered "destructive devices" and cannot be sold to individuals without an FBI background check, and the payment of a hefty tax to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms on the sale of_each_grenade). So-called "assault weapons", like their military counterparts, may use the same ammunition as other small and intermediate sized game hunting rifles, and can accept a magazine holding a large supply of ammunition. Like their military counterparts, they are often equipped with lighter, more durable polymer or composite stocks, which don't require as much maintenance as wood stocks, and aren't so heavy to carry. These guns are often used for "varmint" control, competition target shooting, small game hunting, and other lawful purposes. In point of fact, their military counterparts were designed primarily to wound (rather than kill) enemy soldiers; since a wounded soldier must be carried from the battlefield by others, and continues to consume enemy resources, without continuing to be a threat. That, combined with lighter weight both for the gun and its ammunition, made the assault rifle (which, unlike the term "assault weapon," has a precise military definition) a military advantage over older infantry weapons which were often based on heavier caliber hunting guns. The right of civilians in a free society to possess "military- looking," or even actual military weapons, is essential if a monopoly of force is not to reside in the hands of government (see 2.0.a), where history shows the potential for far greater abuses and crimes exists than are possible for any deranged individual. Every major genocide in the twentieth century has been preceded by laws which disarmed the eventual victims of their ability to resist the progressive imposition of murderous tyranny. Once granted a monopoly of force, government acquires power that cannot be readily opposed or revoked. (See 4.0) And, if government fails to act, as in time of natural disaster or a riot, the ability to defend against roving gangs or to deter looting requires a dependable, versatile, and credible deterrent to whatever threat may appear, and possibly even a means to obtain small game for survival. Or, if government is too far away to act quickly, for instance in remote rural areas, or miles from shore out to sea, people faced with attack by packs of wild animals, human predators, or hijacking pirates must be able to respond with all necessary force, in order to preserve their lives from harm. Rifles of any kind are very rarely used in crime, since they are more difficult to carry and conceal than are handguns, and "military- looking" rifles are generally more expensive than both handguns and common long guns (rifles, shotguns) used for hunting (see 3.5). Further, the Supreme Court has ruled that weapons having no "reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia" may be taxed in interstate commerce, clearly implying that weapons having such reasonable relationship with the militia are those which the Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear, moreso even than other types of weapons. In other words, the arms protected by the Second Amendment are those "such as are usually employed in civilized warfare, and that constitute the ordinary military equipment." Prior to the passage of President Clinton's Crime Bill in 1994 (see Appendix I.), which included a controversial (and unconstitutional) ban on "assault weapons," sales as well as manufacturing of the to-be- banned weapons increased dramatically, and soon after the ban passed, it was revealed that Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D - WV), a supporter of the ban, in fact owned one of the weapons on the ban list, a Colt AR-15. President Clinton has admitted publicly that he believes that as many as twenty of the Democrat legislators who supported his gun ban were defeated for re-election on the basis of their votes. In the November 1994 elections, Democrats lost majorities in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. On March 22nd, 1996 the House of Representatives voted 239-173 to repeal the ban, but the measure was not taken up in the Senate, where Republicans hold only a slim majority. In 1996, Republican Presidential candidate and former Senate majority leader Robert Dole had initially taken a position in favor of repeal, but later reversed himself during a July 15 appearance on CNN's_Larry King Live,_saying "Keep the assault weapons ban." Dole's choice of former HUD secretary Jack Kemp as a running mate further estranged pro-gun voters, since Kemp had likewise abandoned his long pro-RKBA record in 1993, saying during an appearance on NBC's_Meet the Press,_ "Ban it any way you can," in response to host Tim Russert's question about his views on the "assault weapons" law. Dole and Kemp were subsequently defeated in the general election, losing 32 of 50 states. For President Clinton's part, it was revealed after the election that his Arkansas associate, Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, had arranged a February 6, 1996 fundraising coffee at which Mr. Clinton met Wang Jun, who runs the China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC), parent company of Poly Technologies, the arms manufacturing concern of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. (Poly Technologies' AK-47 copies were one of the weapons banned by name in the "assault weapons" law!) Wang Jun is considered to be one of the "young princes" heir apparent to the rulership of China, by virtue of his being the son of Wang Zhen, the late anti-democratic vice-president and general. Wang Jun is also believed to have met with then-Commerce Secretary Ron Brown the same day, according to State Department records obtained by House Rules Committee Chairman Gerald Solomon (R, NY). A day after the meetings with Clinton and Brown, the Democratic National Committee recieved a $50,000 contribution from investment banker Ernest G. Green, who had written a letter in support of Wang Jun getting an entrance visa to the United States. Four days prior to Clinton's meeting with Wang, the federal government had issued importation permits to a company called China Jiang An for a large multimillion-dollar shipment of over 100,000 semiautomatic weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition made by Poly Technologies and the other well-known Chinese arms maker, China Northern Industries Corporation, better known as Norinco, which is an ostensibly civilian-run company formerly known as the Ordnance Ministry. (One of Norinco's most familiar products is the Colt .45 auto copy bearing the unintentionally humorous marking "Model of the 1911A1" stamped on the slide.) None of the China Jiang An shipment made it into the U.S. market, however, because at about the same time, over 2,000 full-auto Norinco AK-47s and some 4,000 magazines (read "high-capacity ammunition feeding devices") were seized by BATF and Customs officials in March 1996 as part of a 16-month sting operation (code-named "Dragon Fire") targeting the Chinese arms industry. Fourteen indictments were issued June 4, 1996 (not coincidentally, the 7th anniversary of the massacre in Tian an men Square) against Norinco and Poly Technologies executives who had allegedly agreed to smuggle the machineguns to undercover agents posing as members of organized crime. President Clinton has since described having met with Wang as "clearly inappropriate." 3.4 "There's certainly no reason to allow the sale of cop-killer ammunition which can penetrate bulletproof vests." see_Uniform Crime Reports: Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted 1982-1985,_FBI (see above) In summary: Claiming that particular types of bullets or guns are responsible for particular types of crimes, rather than simply holding individuals who misuse guns responsible for their actions, is the classic myth of "gun control". In point of fact, any weapon can be a cop-killer in the hands of violent criminals. Often, it's the police officer's own sidearm which is grabbed by criminals in a struggle and used against him (see 1.2). Armor-piercing handgun ammunition, originally developed for law enforcement use in 1966, acquired public notoriety in 1982 when a major U.S. television network, NBC, demonstrated the ability of such bullets to penetrate soft body armor like that worn by police officers. Other networks and media outlets followed the "story," despite the fact that a little research would have revealed that common hunting ammunition like that used in large caliber rifles and in shotguns can also penetrate bullet-resistant vests. Rather than diminishing the threat, media publicity about the use of body armor by police contributed to some criminals redirecting their aim to the head, neck, and other unprotected areas of police, instead of buying expensive exotic ammunition or sawing off rifles and shotguns to achieve the same effect. [Officers shot in the head and killed while wearing bullet- resistant vests: 1982 - 5, 1983 - 9, 1984 - 13, 1985 - 8] Further, the "cop-killer bullet" scare, like the 1994 "Black Rhino" hoax (see 3.4.a), took place despite there never having been _one_law enforcement death resulting from such exotic ammunition penetrating an officer's protective body armor. Two shooting incidents occurred during the 1970s in which armor-piercing handgun ammunition was used against police officers. In 1976, a Florida State Highway Patrolman, Philip Black, and a visiting Canadian police officer, Donald Irwin, were killed in Broward County, FL by an assailant using AP ammunition, but neither of the two officers was wearing a protective vest. In the only other such incident, in 1974, Officer John Rixham, Jr., in Woodlawn, Maryland was shot through his vest by an attacker using AP ammunition, and seriously wounded. A ban on sales of any ammunition capable of penetrating soft body armor was proposed in Congress, but initially opposed by the National Rifle Association on grounds that the bill would prohibit most ammunition used by hunters and sportsmen, in addition to the so-called "cop-killer" AP ammunition. A revised bill, protecting both police and the interests of hunters and sport shooters, was passed and signed into law with the cooperation and assistance of the NRA, but not before anti-gun groups had made the most of the adverse publicity as a wedge issue between NRA and law enforcement. As part of his re-election campaign, on May 15, 1996, President Clinton called for banning any type of ammunition which can penetrate a bullet-resistant vest "like a knife through hot butter." He also introduced legislation in Congress March 5, 1997 which in effect resurrected the original "cop-killer bullet" ban proposal, which would have classified most ammunition, including that used by hunters and sportsmen, as armor-piercing, and thus prohibited. The President's proposal would also give to the BATF increased power to prohibit the sale of new ammunition by reclassifying it as armor-piercing, without requiring further action by Congress. This approach is seen by many gunowners as a "back-door" means of gun prohibition, and by the President's critics as an obvious political ploy. 3.4.a "Black Rhino ammunition, made from space age plastics, which can penetrate bulletproof vests and then fragment..." See Newsweek, Dec. 19, 1994 New York Times, Dec. 27, 1994, A10; Dec. 28, 1994, A8; Dec. 29, 1994, A16 and Wall Street Journal, Dec. 29, 1994, B2 and Code of Federal Regulations, title 27, chapter I, section 178.92 (b) [cited by lawyers as 27 CFR I, S 178.92 (b)] In summary: "Gun control" supporter David Keen, chief executive of Signature Products, a Huntsville, AL based defense contractor, staged a publicity stunt late in 1994 by claiming his company was about to market "Rhino" ammunition, capable of causing "nearly instantaneous" death, "a horrific wound," with "no way to stop the bleeding"; as well as an armor-piercing version, dubbed "Black Rhino" (suggestive of Winchester's "Black Talon," a brand name of non-armor-piercing handgun ammunition which was voluntarily withdrawn from public sale after "gun control" groups seized upon the name's publicity value) which Keen claimed would penetrate bullet-resistant vests and then "disintegrate" into "lethal shrapnel" "hurled into vital organs" just like the non- armor-piercing version. The initial story ran as a line or two in_Newsweek_magazine's "Periscope" column the week of December 19th (written by Newsweek's Peter Kotell), but the "Rhino" was first given national prominence in a story written by Associated Press reporter Robert Dvorchak, which was released on the AP wire the day after Christmas, when many businesses and government agencies (like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) would be closed, making fact-checking the story and its sensationalistic claims difficult. The Associated Press, for its part, promoted the story to editors with a notation that it was of special interest. Bob Walker, a lobbyist for Handgun Control, Inc. was quoted in the Dvorchak story, along with the alleged manufacturer, who Dvorchak wrote "acknowledges taking calls from worried police". Pro 'gun control' legislators like U.S. Rep. Charles Schumer (D - N.Y.) and Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D - N.Y.) quickly proposed extending the earlier "cop-killer bullet" ban (see 3.4) to include Keen's "Rhino" ammunition. National Rifle Association lobbyist Tanya Metaksa issued a statement saying "This has all the trappings of a hoax. What we have is an outbreak of mob journalism centering on the dubious claims of a would-be manufacturer." The claims could hardly have been_more_dubious to people familiar with firearms and the science of ballistics. Pre-fragmented ammunition for handguns, such as the Glaser Safety Slug, has been available for many years and is sold in part on the basis that it is less likely to penetrate walls or ricochet from hard surfaces, lessening the danger to people in adjoining rooms or apartments from discharge of a firearm indoors, as in a home-defense situation. This type of bullet typically makes a large, shallow wound, since the fragments produced are each a small fraction of the total bullet weight, and much of the inertia and energy of the bullet is expended as the bullet fragments, (something like Indy cars flinging parts everywhere, carrying away the energy of hitting the wall) resulting in limited penetration. Additionally, the binder or matrix containing the fragments makes the bullet lighter, and less dense, than if it was made of solid metal. The effectiveness of fragmenting ammunition in rapidly stopping an attacker is generally considered to be less than for non-fragmenting ammunition, like hollowpoints. The claims made for "Black Rhino" ammunition were even more preposterous, since the very characteristics which make a bullet capable of defeating soft body armor (that it be made of hard, non-deformable metal, preferably pointed, and that it have as high a kinetic energy as possible) are the exact opposite of the characteristics which would allow it to fragment. After Keen's inflated and sensationalistic claims were demonstrated false in independent tests by ABC-TV's_Nightline,_and it was revealed that Keen did not even have a license to manufacture ammunition (or armor-piercing ammunition, which is a separate license) as required by federal law, the company announced that it would not be marketing "Black Rhinos" after all. Signature Products, after attempting to sell its manufacturing rights for $500,000 (with an ad in_American Firearms Industry_magazine) is currently marketing "Rhino Ammo" under the name "Razor Ammo". That press reports about the "Black Rhino" would be so blatantly inaccurate is not particularly surprising, considering that Winchester's Black Talon (a hollowpoint designed to expand on impact, so as not to overpenetrate) has itself on occasion been misreported as an armor-piercing round. While all armor-piercing rounds are required by (somewhat melodramatic) federal regulations to_be_black at the tip, not all "Black Bullets Of Death" are armor-piercing. (The Glaser Safety Slug, in its marketing savvy, is tipped with blue plastic.) 3.5 "Cheap handguns, a.k.a. 'Saturday Nite Specials,' are the weapons of choice for violent criminals." See_Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America,_ by James Wright, Peter Rossi and Kathleen Daly, Aldine de Gruyter, ISBN 0-202-30303-9 (1983) _The Armed Criminal in America: A Survey of Incarcerated Felons,_ by James Wright and Peter Rossi, U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, SuDoc# J 28.24/3: C.86 (1985) _Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms,_by James Wright and Peter Rossi, Aldine de Gruyter, ISBN 0-202-30330-6 (1986) also Kleck,_Point Blank_pp.83-94 LaPierre,_Guns, Crime and Freedom_p.58 In summary: Unlike so-called "assault weapons," which are very rarely used in crime (see 3.3), handguns are commonly used by armed criminals, most often for their intimidation value, and due to the fact that they are easily concealable. However, the supposed preference of criminals for inexpensive, low caliber, poor quality handguns (the guns which "gun control" advocates term "Saturday Nite Specials") doesn't reflect the realities of gun preference and use by serious career criminals. Those who make crime their livelihood are likely to prefer the same sorts of guns as do legitimate users, guns which are accurate and well made, although with the additional requirements that they be untraceable (often meaning stolen), and easy to use and conceal. Price doesn't seem to be much of a factor when it's possible for a criminal either to steal the weapon he wants, or buy a stolen gun on the street. Guns are used to some extent as a medium of exchange by criminals, and traded for drugs, or sold to pay debts. While semi-automatics have increased in popularity among police, legitimate users, and criminals; revolvers and shotguns are also well-represented among guns used in crime, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver remains one of the most common handguns in general use, and is also very commonly used by criminals armed with handguns. It might be speculated that the shift by police from the .38 service revolver to the 9mm semi-automatic pistol will result in increased popularity of the 9mm among criminals, just as the popularity of the 9mm as a military sidearm, replacing the venerable Colt Government Model 1911A1 .45 caliber semi-automatic, has spurred increased interest by police departments in the so-called "wonder nine". Small, inexpensive, low-caliber handguns, by contrast, are primarily the weapons of those too poor to afford anything better, and bans of these so-called "Saturday Nite Specials" disarm largely those honest poor who typically face greater risk of being victimized by violent crime than do more affluent people who can afford to live in better neighborhoods, and homes or apartments with security alarms and armed guards. Further, restricting the availability of low caliber handguns, or handguns in general, can result in criminals arming themselves with heavier caliber, deadlier handguns or sawed-off rifles and shotguns. In fact, this "weapons substitution" effect may have already occurred. Since the importation of certain low-quality handguns (the original guns termed "Saturday Nite Specials" by "gun control" activists) was banned in the late 1960s, the guns favored by violent criminals, and particularly those individuals involved in the violence associated with the illegal drug trade, have been better-quality, more expensive handguns. These wealthy drug gangsters can obviously afford them. It's unlikely that, given that the U.S. has extreme difficulty in preventing the smuggling of_tons_of illegal drugs and_thousands_of illegal immigrants each year, we would have any greater success in preventing the smuggling of durable non-perishable goods like firearms (or their illicit manufacture in the United States, for that matter) in quantities sufficient to easily satisfy all criminal demand for them. In the meantime, we would have deprived law-abiding citizens, and particularly the most vulnerable among us, of any effective means to resist criminal attack, with predictably tragic results. 3.6 "Plastic guns, which can slip through metal detectors..." see Kleck,_Point Blank_p.82 _Inside the NRA: Armed And Dangerous,_by Jack Anderson, Dove Books, ISBN 0-7871-0677-1 (1996), pp.49-50 [Anderson's book serves as a concise and convenient collection of nearly all the recent press clippings maligning gun owners and/or the NRA, as well as many of the anti-gun myths debunked in this FAQ, all cloaked in the mantle of objectivity and sympathy for the ordinary gun owner.] Washington Post, Jan. 15, 1986, p.F14 In summary: The Austrian-made Glock 17 pistol was the subject of a "gun control" scare originating in 1986 with Washington Post columnists Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta (with assistance from anti-gun activist Josh Sugarmann), because it was one of the first widely available handguns to have a polymer frame (or handle) which reduced the overall weight of the gun. In his newspaper column (which, strangely enough, ran on the comics page) Anderson claimed that Libyan dictator Muammar Quadaffi was "in the process of buying more than 100 plastic handguns that would be difficult for airport security forces to detect" to use in anti-U.S. attacks. Though Anderson's column made the claim that the Glock 17 was "made almost entirely of hardened plastic," in reality the Glock still contained over a pound of steel (in the barrel, slide, magazine, and trigger mechanism), and is detectable both by metal detectors (due to the metallic content of the gun and any ammunition it might contain) and security X-ray machines (due to its clearly recognizable shape). The column referred to these "plastic guns" as being the "hijacker special," paralleling the rhetoric used to ban the so-called "Saturday Nite Specials". "Gun control" advocates agitated for a law which would ban "plastic guns", a threat they claimed would defeat security measures at airports, prisons, and courtrooms. No all- plastic undetectable firearms existed at the time, and except for a fictional depiction in the 1993 Clint Eastwood movie "In The Line Of Fire" none exist today. There is of course, an exemption in the Undetectable Firearms law for government agencies. (Intelligence agencies like the CIA may have such exotic weapons, but won't publicly reveal the fact.) The Glock, first made for the Austrian military, has since become a popular sidearm for police officers, who must carry a gun for long periods of time while on duty. Rather than exploring ways to upgrade security measures to deal with possible future technological threats such as non-metallic firearms, Congress banned their production in the United States and required that all firearms sold and manufactured in the U.S. must meet an established detectability standard. The National Rifle Association helped draft the law which was adopted, and fought to prevent the banning of detectable firearms containing plastic parts, like the Glock. The ban legislation, aimed at a non-existent threat, can of course do nothing to prevent the eventual development of non-metallic firearms in other countries, and the subsequent acquisition of such weapons by terrorists. Curiously, the theme of plastic tends to recur in "gun control" arguments, from "plastic" handguns, to "assault weapons" with black plastic stocks, to "plastic cop-killer bullets" like the mythical "Black Rhino" (which manages to combine two previous "gun control" motifs, "plastic" and "cop-killer"!). Some "gun control" supporters also advocate bans on plastic toy guns, and "high capacity" squirt guns, like the popular "Super Soaker". 3.6.a "But how could you detect plastic guns?" Harris, David A., "Superman's X-Ray Vision and the Fourth Amendment: The New Gun Detection Technology,"_Temple University Law Review,_ v.69 n.1 pp.1-60. "Contraband Detection System," U.S Patent #5,227,800 issued Jul. 13, 1993 to Millitech, Inc. Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) website at http://www.spie.org/ In summary: Ever-advancing computer processing power and the conversion of Cold War defense industries to other purposes have produced new technologies which improve upon the ability of x-ray machines and magnetometers to detect weapons. The most intriguing of these technologies is called millimeter-wave imaging (MMWI), which could give law enforcement officers the ability to see through walls and clothing to detect the location of concealed objects, including weapons. MMWI uses a device similar to an infrared camera to produce images of objects by detecting invisible radiation given off in the region of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwaves. This radiation, called millimeter waves due to its wavelength, includes the frequencies of 30 to 300 GHz, and can pass through many common materials. A millimeter- wave imager contains an array of microscopic antennas formed onto a chip called an MMIC (for monolithic microwave integrated circuit). Acting like film in a camera, or the CCD chip in an ordinary camcorder, millimeter waves are focused onto the MMIC through lenses, and the image produced by the detector can then be displayed on a video screen. Originally developed to enable soldiers (and their computerized weapons systems) to see through the dust and smoke of battle, and used by astronomers to see through the clouds of galactic dust between the stars, similar detectors are beginning to be used in collision avoidance radars to enable truck drivers and other motorists to see through fog, rain, and gloom of night. There are two types of millimeter-wave "radars" being proposed as additions to the crime-fighting arsenal. The "passive" version simply images the natural millimeter-wave radiation produced by warm objects like the human body, and uses the difference between the millimeter-wave emissions of the body and the lower emissions transmitted by contraband or weapons, detecting the "darker" objects that "eclipse" the radiation coming from the body. Due to the effects of the atmosphere, passive MMWI is limited to a range of 3 meters (about 10 feet). "Active" millimeter-wave imaging combines a source of millimeter-wave energy with the detector, and works much like radar, "illuminating" the area to be searched with millimeter waves, and then imaging the reflected waves. The active version has a range of 30 meters (90 feet) or more, and could be used to covertly "frisk" a crowd of people. Though MMWI can see through clothing, or other materials which transmit millimeter waves but look opaque to visible light, the resolution is presently not high enough to reveal intimate anatomical details. Understandably, this technology has raised Constitutional questions about the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Manufacturers of MMWI devices argue that they can be configured to only display an image if suspicious objects are detected, thus meeting the criteria for "reasonableness," much as the sensitive nose of a police dog can be used as pretext for a physical search. However, police dogs don't have the ability to search a crowd of people from 90 feet away. Objects which have a high moisture content are difficult for the MMWI to see through, since water absorbs microwave energy at frequencies close to those used in MMWI. (Indeed an ordinary microwave oven works by heating up the water molecules in food using frequencies about 12 times lower.) MMWI "stealthy" materials having similar dielectric constants to the body (such as a holster containing circulating layers of warm water) might be able to conceal weapons from a passive MMWI scan, or even an active scan at long range, if resolution is poor. But other technologies could detect even such MMWI "shielded" weapons, so long as the weapons have a certain amount of metallic content. (Certain items of contraband, such as illegal drugs, since they lack metallic content entirely, will be able to slip by undetected if properly shielded.) Other weapon detection schemes are on the horizon which, while they will not be able to detect non-metallic weapons like MMWI can, will enhance existing abilities to detect metallic weapons. One system being developed uses an electromagnetic pulse, called a Heaviside pulse, which induces metal objects to emit characteristic radio "signatures," and can (theoretically) be used from a distance. Another system is designed to detect the deviations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by the presence of metallic objects, and works like a walk-through metal detector, but can localize and to some extent "count" the number of possible weapons being carried on a person. (continued) THE LONG LIST OF "GUN-CONTROL" MYTHS rev. 1/5/98 [talk.politics.guns' Official Pro-Gun FAQ (fully indexed, w/glossary) Additions/suggestions are welcome. Your help is encouraged. Email to: Ken Barnes (kebarnes@cc.memphis.edu) This FAQ is now available at: http://www.rkba.org/research/rkba.faq by courtesy of Jeff Chan (jeffcfi@RKBAbest.com) and archived by the fine FAQ folks at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/talk-politics-guns ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/talk-politics-guns/pro-gun-faq/part2 NOTE: As a courtesy to our contributors, all email addresses (except my own) mentioned in this FAQ include an anti-spambot string "RKBA" which must be removed before they are used. --KB] ----------------------------------------------------------------- 3.7 "Gun buy-backs are an effective way to get guns off the street." See LaPierre,_Guns, Crime and Freedom,_where he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 8) to this. In summary: Gun buy-backs, or "guns-for-cash" programs, in which police departments or businesses pay a small amount of cash or merchandise for any gun which is turned in for destruction, have gotten an enthusiastic response in many cities, and have succeeded in getting large numbers of guns "off the street". But what kind of guns? For the most part, these programs act as an economic incentive to dump old, obsolete, unsaleable (and in some cases even non-functional) guns which are less valuable than the reward being offered. Many of these programs are set up to accept guns with "no questions asked" and full anonymity for the person who turns in a gun, and can be used by criminals to dispose of illegal firearms (like unregistered sawed-off shotguns) and/or guns which have been used in crimes (thus destroying potential evidence). More valuable modern or antique firearms have plenty of buyers, and sometimes, collectors (or even criminals looking for a bargain), have attempted to buy the more valuable weapons from people waiting in line to sell their guns at a buy-back, offering to pay a higher price than the buy-back is offering. Some people may have inherited a gun, or have an old war relic in their attic which they don't know the value of, and they may have no desire to keep the gun, so when the buy-back is announced, it sounds like a good deal. Thieves may steal a gun and take it to the buy-back for some quick "no questions asked" cash. And even the people responsible for destroying the collected guns have on occasion been known to pocket some of the better ones, either for their own use, or for later sale. Gun buy- backs have little chance of disarming serious criminals, since_they_ know how valuable their weapons are, both as tools of their trade, and as a medium of exchange (see 3.5). Recently, another form of "buy back" has begun to be used as a substitute for house-to-house gun confiscation in the United Kingdom and Australia. While called a "buy back," the compulsory nature of these programmes shows that they are really nothing more than an initially less obtrusive means of confiscation, to be followed by harsher measures once the majority of gun owners have been disarmed (see Appendix III). 3.8 "Permitting people to carry concealed weapons will lead to increased violent crime, and people killing each other at the slightest provocation." See LaPierre,_Guns, Crime and Freedom,_where he devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 4) to this. also _Commonplace Book_by Thomas Jefferson (G. Chinard ed., 1926), p.314 Kleck,_Point Blank,_pp.411-414. _Uniform Crime Reports,_FBI (1992) and Florida Statutes, title 46, sec. 790.06, pp.590-597 (amended 1992) In summary: Persons who go to the effort and expense of obtaining a permit to carry a concealed weapon (which, to use Florida's 1987 law as an example, requires 6 months or longer residency, being over 21 years of age, able bodied, not a drug abuser or alcoholic, completion of a firearms safety course, no felonies or violent misdemeanors or record of being committed for mental illness, sworn application on file listing name, address, place and date of birth, race, and occupation, and including a statement that the applicant meets the above criteria, a $125 application fee [renewable after three years for $100], a full set of fingerprints, and a color photo), and who submit to a full background check to verify the application and check fingerprints, are not the sorts of people who abuse firearms. The permit process acts quite effectively to select for law-abiding citizens rather than trigger-happy criminals, and the records of those states which have liberalized their concealed carry laws show this. Of the 204,108 licenses issued in the Florida law's first 6 1/2 years of operation, seventeen (17, or .008%) were revoked for unlawful conduct while the firearm was present, and many of these violations were either technical (such as carrying into a restricted area, like an airport or bar) or non-gun related (such as revoking a permit due to a drunken driving arrest). In Oregon, over 60,000 concealed carry permits have been issued, and none has been revoked. In light of these successes, many other states, Tennessee, Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, and most recently, Kentucky and South Carolina, have joined the ranks of states protecting the individual right to self defense through reformed concealed carry laws. One state, Vermont, even allows concealed carry without a permit, and has little crime. (The complete list of 31 states having non-discretionary, or so-called "shall issue" concealed carry laws: AL, AK, AZ, AR, CT, FL, GA, ID, IN, KY, LA, ME, MS, MT, NV, NH, NC, ND, OK, OR, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT*, VA, WA, WV, WY. *VT requires no permit.) The impact of such laws on fighting crime is debatable at a purely statistical level, but states which issue concealed carry permits to their law-abiding population show less violent crime in general than those which do not, and rates of some crimes (such as homicide and robbery) which are 50% lower than states in which concealed carry is not permitted. These states, it could be argued, may have had less crime than restrictive states to begin with, but the dire predictions by "gun control" advocates that violent crime would increase in these states following liberalization of concealed carry have not proven to be valid (see also 3.8.a). At an individual level, many carry permit holders have already saved their own lives and the lives of others in the face of criminal violence. Armed citizens, permit or not, kill almost as many criminals each year as do law enforcement officers (some 348 out of 763, or 46% of justifiable homicides in 1992), and armed citizens are less likely to have "bad shoots" than the police, since, unlike the police, they aren't usually arriving late at the scene and_then_having to figure out who the bad guys are. Armed citizens may in fact kill far more criminals in justifiable shootings than the police, since statistics which are available reflect only the initial determinations about a shooting incident, and not the verdict in the case after it has actually been tried. Police are more often given the benefit of the doubt in shooting incidents than are private citizens. But, as is pointed out elsewhere (see 1.1), the true measure of the ability of firearms to fight crime isn't found in the body count, but in criminals wounded, deterred from violence by fear that a potential victim may be armed, or driven away without even firing a shot. The fact that laws against carrying weapons were ineffective against crime was no secret to Thomas Jefferson, who hand-copied this quotation from the 18th century Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria's 1764 book_On Crimes and Punishments_into his own notebook on law and government, a quote which sums up well the arguments of those who defend the right to keep and bear arms: "False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty --so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator-- and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree." 3.8.a "Yeah, but what about the University of Maryland study that showed that murders increased after concealed-carry permits were issued in Florida? McDowall, David; Wiersema, Brian; and Loftin, Colin; "Easing Concealed Firearms Laws: Effects on Homicide in Three States," J. of Criminal Law and Criminology v.86, n.1, pp.195-204 (1995) Polsby, Daniel; "Firearms Costs, Firearms Benefits, and the Limits of Knowledge," J. of Criminal Law and Criminology v.86, n.1, pp.207-220 (1995) In summary: A recently published study by the University of Maryland's Violence Research Group, claimed that average monthly homicides by gun increased in four of five urban areas studied, after the adoption of liberalized concealed carry reform laws. This statistical "factoid" was first offered up March 13, 1995 by the Associated "Black Rhino" Press, and was widely reported (and misreported) elsewhere. However, the researchers do not attempt to argue that_any_of these gun-related homicides were committed by concealed carry permit holders, nor do they consider the relative proportion of concealed carry permit holders in each of the studied localities, which if one were to assume that less restrictive concealed carry is associated with increased homicide, would be a particularly important factor to consider. Information that is available from other sources, such as the state government in Florida, suggests that criminality by concealed carry permit holders is virtually unknown. (See 3.8, and Appendix II.) If increased carry by citizens with CCW permits is responsible for any increased homicide, the researchers do not establish a plausible explanation for the change in rate, if such a change actually exists. Also the researchers selected the cities they did on the basis of their status as "large urban areas," rather than looking at the homicide rates for each state as a whole, when the concealed-carry laws were enacted statewide. Three of the five localities studied were in Florida (where a statewide CCW reform law was enacted in 1987, and where "gun control" advocates predicted increased violent crime would make it into the "Gunshine State"). Both in Jacksonville, where the study claims that the monthly average number of gun-related homicides increased by 74 percent, and in Tampa, where the study claims the monthly average number of gun-related homicides jumped 22 percent, the study notes that the rates of homicide_without_firearms also increased. In Miami, a city of intermediate size relative to Tampa and Jacksonville, the study claims gun-related homicides per month increased 3 percent, but this analysis is based upon a different time span than that for Tampa and Jacksonville. The researchers claim that using a different baseline was necessary "because of an unusually sharp increase in homicide rates [in Miami] in May 1980 after an influx of Cuban refugees." Results of time series analyses such as this, and the similar study of the effects of Washington D.C.'s gun registration law by the same researchers (see 3.0.b., and Appendix IV), are highly dependent upon the time spans chosen for study. In those Florida cities for which the most dramatic results were obtained, the baseline used stretched all the way back to 1973, but for Miami, the baseline began in 1983. Presumably, given the higher initial Miami homicide rates that the researchers attribute to the Cuban refugees, starting off with same baseline year for Miami as for the other Florida cities would have produced a resulting increase_less_than the 3 percent observed. Complicating any analysis of Florida's crime rates is the fact that almost immediately following the passage of Florida's 1987 CCW reforms, the state changed the manner in which it collects crime statistics, so comparisons before and after the implementation of the law_can_be invalid on that basis. However, the number of homicides ought not to be affected by that, since to have a homicide, you need to have a body. Statistical changes ought not to affect the ability to count bodies, which is essentially what the Maryland study does (albeit very crudely, and without distinguishing between justifiable homicides and murders). The researchers cite FBI's Uniform Crime Reports data in asserting that justifiable homicides are uncommon, but the FBI numbers actually undercount the number of justifiable homicides by civilians, since FBI statistics rely upon the initial determination made about an incident (see 3.8). A statewide analysis of the Florida data (see Appendix II.), reveals that the U. Maryland researchers missed the overall downward trend in murder/manslaughter rates since the Florida concealed-carry law was enacted. The question of the direction of causality's arrow is critically important to consider. Does increased homicide lead to more people obtaining permits to carry, or does increasing the availability of permits to carry increase the homicide rate? The Maryland study's researchers seem to want to argue the latter, but they have thus far offered no evidence that CCW permit holders are doing the killing! The sampling of these particular localities, since nonrandom, can also be used to introduce bias into such a study, and sociological differences between localities also need to be controlled for. The wide disparities in the with-gun homicide rates given in the study seem very unusual at first glance, and this is the result of the fact that the study is calculating its percent increases in absolute terms (4 going up to 7) rather than per 100,000 population, as is necessary for any realistic assessment. The attempt by the researchers to control for population changes by lumping together data from all five studied cities is a less than adequate solution if they intend to consider the homicide rates seperately for each city elsewhere in their report (and in their quotes to the press). The researchers themselves admit that "[t]he population of all five areas grew over the study period, especially in the Florida cities. Homicide counts thus may have changed after the laws in part because of increases in the populations at risk." The two other localities examined were Jackson, Mississippi, where the average monthly gun-related homicide rate increased by 43 percent; and Portland, Oregon, where the average monthly gun-related homicide rate_fell_by 12 percent. The Portland data, the researchers note, did not provide enough homicides, so data from two adjoining counties were included as well. (Again, one presumes that if this had not been done, the Portland rate would have been seen to decline even more than the 12 percent reported.) Calculating average numbers of homicides per month serves to make the numbers smaller, and if there are few homicides in a locality to begin with, as was apparently the case in Portland, the degree of "noise" in the data can produce some "startling" percentage changes, if considered in absolute terms. (If one average has 6 homicides, and the next, 3, that's a "50% DROP!") It's also widely known in criminology that more violent crime occurs in summer months than in winter months, so averaging over the year, as a "moving average" technique does, can also serve to produce smaller numbers, more suceptible to "startling" percentage changes. This study design (and the similar study of Washington D.C.'s gun registration law) seems geared towards maximizing "noise," rather than discerning a longer-term trend. The researchers' conclusion is tentative: "While advocates of these relaxed [carry] laws argue that they will prevent crime, and suggest that they have reduced homicides in areas that adopted them, we strongly suggest caution. When states weaken limits on concealed weapons, they may be giving up a simple and effective method of preventing firearm deaths." This quotation also points up another aspect of bias in the study. What exactly is significant about_gun_ related homicides, versus total homicides? Does the fact that a homicide is committed with a firearm make the slain any_more dead than if the homicide was committed with a knife, or with hands and feet? The researchers claim that homicides by other means remained mostly steady, yet in the two Florida cities showing the greatest increases, both gun and non-gun related homicides went up. If the increased presence of firearms in the hands of the law-abiding serves to deter murders with other weapons, this effect would be discounted when only homicides involving firearms are considered. In the case of Florida, since the murder rates have_decreased_when considered on a statewide basis, these supposed increases in urban areas must have been offset by drastic drops elsewhere. The researchers do not consider Florida data later than 1991, since they say other laws, such as the 1991 passage of waiting periods and background checks on new gun purchases in Florida, would make it difficult to disentangle the results of the new laws from the concealed carry law. Yet presuming that the declines in murder rates since 1991 are attributable to background checks and waiting periods runs counter to the assumption that gun availability is a crucial factor driving murder rates. Neither background checks nor waiting periods would have any appreciable effect on the existing supply of guns available, while concealed carry opponents claim that CCW laws make guns more available in the heat of an argument. To compare the potential effects of these laws on the availability of guns is to compare apples and oranges. Concealed carry can be the ultimate test of the "gun availability" hypothesis. So far, the awful consequences that are habitually predicted by those opposed to concealed carry reform laws haven't been shown to occur. If anything, the available data is consistent with the view that concealed carry has a deterrent effect, or at the least has no direct negative effect. The researchers_attempt to_speculate that increased availability of legal concealed weapons is leading to an "arms race" between criminals and their potential victims, and more criminals are using firearms than previously. They write "[g]reater tolerance for legal carrying may increase levels of illegal carrying as well. For example, criminals have more reason to carry firearms --and to use them-- when their victims might be armed." As Daniel Polsby points out in the same journal, this "arms race" hypothesis would presumably also operate when greater numbers of armed police officers are introduced into a locality. But the legitimacy of availability of concealed carry permits to the law abiding is not predicated on the frequency of misbehavior of criminals-- except in the minds of "gun control" advocates who wish to prohibit any item that could potentially be misused by criminals (chemical defense sprays and stun guns included), regardless of its effectiveness in protecting the weak from the predations of the strong. (See 1.1.a) Theirs is a policy which demands that victims "lie back and enjoy it," rather than_fight_back, and reduce their risk of injury or death. 3.8.b - "The Lott/Mustard study is just gun industry propaganda! How can anybody believe that concealed carry reduces violent crime?" See Lott, John R., and Mustard, David B., "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns," J. of Legal Studies, vol.26, n.1, pp.1-68 (Jan. 1997) In summary: In the most comprehensive study yet conducted on the effects of the recent concealed carry reform laws in the U.S., two economists at the University of Chicago examined county level and statewide data for the entire United States from 1977 to 1992, obtained from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) program. Their conclusions that concealed carry reform laws have had a measurable effect in reducing violent crime rates, have prompted a barrage of criticism in the press by anti-gun activists, but the response of their academic colleagues has been much more cautious. Lott and Mustard found that county-level violent crime rates declined by 4.90% in states where concealed-carry laws went into effect, and that for specific categories of violent crime, the benefits associated with concealed-carry laws were even greater. County-level murder rates declined 7.65% in concealed-carry states, rapes declined 5.27%, and aggravated assaults declined by 7.01%. Based upon the numbers of violent crimes reported in 1992 in counties without concealed-carry reform laws, Lott and Mustard conclude that "at least 1,414 murders and over 4,177 rapes would have been avoided" in 1992 if states which lacked these laws instead had them in effect. The rate of robbery, while it was observed to decline in those counties where statewide concealed- carry laws went into effect, did not register such a dramatic change, dropping only 2.21%. Considering this decline in absolute terms, as above, concealed-carry reform would have meant 11,898 fewer robberies in 1992. Aggravated assaults in 1992 would have declined by 60,363 incidents, according to the same analysis. Property crimes, however, increased 2.69% in counties where statewide concealed-carry went into effect, with the largest jump occurring in auto theft, which increased 7.14%. Lott and Mustard argue that this finding supports "the notion that criminals respond to incentives" and "criminals respond substantially to the threat of being shot by instead substituting into less risky crimes" where contact with a potentially armed victim is less likely. Even with this increase in property crime, Lott and Mustard estimate a net economic gain from allowing concealed handguns of over $5.74 billion in 1992 dollars, using methods similar to those of a 1996 National Institute of Justice study which attempted to estimate economic losses due to crime. The changes in crime rates associated with concealed-carry reform laws were not evenly distributed geographically or demographically, according to the authors. Counties with larger populations showed larger effects, both greater declines in violent crime, and greater increases in property crime. When county-level data are aggregated, such as when considering state-level crime rates, low-crime rural counties and high-crime urban areas are lumped together, tending to average out their differences. Indeed, state-level analysis of the data set used by Lott and Mustard reflects_decreases_in property crime associated with concealed-carry laws across the country instead of increases! In the state-level analysis, violent crime rates declined 10.11% (rather than 4.9% as seen the county-level analysis), murder rates declined 8.62%, rape rates declined 6.07%, aggravated assault declined 10.9%, and robbery declined 14.21%. Property crime rates, which are observed to increase in the county-level analysis show a decline of 4.19% when analysis is done with state-level data aggregation. Auto theft, rather than showing an increase, declines very slightly in the state-level analysis, down 0.88%. Counties with larger populations are more likely to have had restrictive carry laws than low population counties, and so it is in these counties where the presumed benefits of liberalizing concealed-carry will be seen most strongly. "The implication for existing studies is that simply using state level data rather than county data will bias the results against finding any impact from passing right-to-carry provisions," the authors note. In order to better understand the changes brought by the concealed-carry reform laws, differences between the counties in arrest and conviction rates for various crimes, sentence lengths, and rates of issuance of carry permits before and after the laws also need to be controlled for, though such complete data were only available for a small subset of counties in the Lott/Mustard study. Data for counties in Arizona, Oregon and Pennsylvania showed that counties with higher arrest rates had lower crime rates, and the Pennsylvania data show a strong correlation between issuance of concealed handgun permits and decreased violent crime. The Oregon data did show decreases in violent crime correlated with concealed carry permits, but the effects were not nearly so dramatic. The Arizona law had changed too recently for any such correlation to be noticed. The authors suggest that the differences observed between Oregon and Pennsylvania may be attributable to Oregon having passed a 15-day "waiting period" law at the same time. Despite the fact that comparatively few women have acquired carry permits, the county-level data for states issuing CCW permits show correlations with reductions in rape rates which are comparable to the reductions observed in other categories of violent crime. This suggests, Lott and Mustard argue, "that rapists are particularly susceptible to this form of deterrence," and that "providing a woman with a gun has a much bigger effect on her ability to defend herself" than does providing a gun to a man. The benefits to other women ("positive externalities," in the terms used by economists), from a woman carrying a handgun are apparently "large relative to the gain produced by an additional man carrying a concealed handgun." Lott and Mustard also considered the question of whether increased concealed carry might result in a greater number of gun accidents. Adopting concealed carry was not found to have a statistically significant effect on gun accidents. At the time of the release of the Lott/Mustard study, a smear originating with Josh Sugarmann's Washington-based anti-gun group, the Violence Policy Center, was picked up uncritically by several news organizations, including the Associated Press. In a press release/editorial letter signed by VPC's Kristen Rand, the claim was made that Dr. Lott's research had been "in essence, funded by the firearms industry." The tortured logic used to reach this conclusion was this: since Dr. Lott is the John M. Olin Visiting Law and Economics Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and because the endowment for that position was provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, established by the estate of the late John M. Olin (who died in 1982), and who while he was alive was part of the family that owns Olin Corporation, one of whose subsidiary businesses makes Winchester ammunition, therefore... _argumentum ad hominem._ While Dr. Lott is the current occupant of that faculty position, he was not at the University of Chicago when it was created, nor is he the first professor to be the Olin fellow, nor does the Olin Foundation have any control over who gets appointed to the position (which is decided by a faculty committee), nor does the Olin Foundation (or anybody else) have input into the research topics chosen. Neither is such a fellowship unique to the University of Chicago, since the Olin Foundation has endowed chairs at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Virginia, and others. Dr. Lott's salary is paid by the University of Chicago Law School. After further investigation, the Associated Press printed a retraction of the smear, and other news organizations soon followed suit (so to speak). The data set used in the study, which Lott and Mustard have freely released, is currently being analyzed by other researchers, and academic criticism will hopefully soon take the place of political mudslinging. Section IV - Deterrence and resistance to tyranny "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." -=(Thomas Jefferson, motto found among his papers)=- "Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves." -=(Winston Churchill,_The Gathering Storm,_1948)=- 4.0 "Ordinary people can't fight a modern army with just pistols, rifles and shotguns! What chance does a_militia_have against tanks, planes, helicopters, and nuclear weapons?" See_War in the Shadows: Guerillas Past and Present,_2nd. ed. by Robert Asprey, Morrow, ISBN 0-688-12815-7, (1994) for a broad historical overview of guerilla warfare. _Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture In Post-Vietnam America,_ by James William Gibson, ISBN 0-8090-9666-8, Hill and Wang, (1994) attempts to explain the sociological origins of some aspects of America's gun culture and its development in recent decades. An interesting read, even if one doesn't agree with the author's assumptions. also _The Right to Bear Arms: The Rise of America's New Militias,_ by Jonathan Karl, Harper Paperbacks, ISBN 0-06-101015-4, (1995) [A generally well-researched introduction to the paramilitary militia movement in the United States. Karl does, however, repeat the media fallacy of the "hollowpoint 'cop-killer' bullet," p. 127] for a more sympathetic (and historical) view of neo-militias see: _Safeguarding Liberty: The Constitution and Citizen Militias,_ Larry Pratt, ed., Legacy Communications, ISBN 1-880692-18-X, (1995) [Larry Pratt is executive director of Gun Owners of America, an organization defending the political dimensions of gun ownership. Pratt was also in 1995-1996 a campaign co-chairman for Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. GOA can be reached at 8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151, at (703) 321-8585, and on the Web at http://www.gunowners.org/ ] for an opposing view, focusing on the violent racist fringe, see: _Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat,_by Morris Dees with James Corcoran, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-017403-X, (1996) [Morris Dees is the executive director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which collects information on and litigates against racist organizations. The working title of Dees' book was_Rebellion in the Heartland: The Story of America's Militia Network,_ but the more ominous and sensationalistic title better reflects Dees' own views of the paramilitary militia movement.] Dunlap, Jr. (USAF), Col. Chales J., "Revolt of the Masses: Armed Civilians and the Insurrectionary Theory of the Second Amendment," Tennessee Law Review v.62 pp.643-677 [Col. Dunlap presents a sober critical analysis of the argument that irregular forces can defeat modern professional armed forces. This article appeared as part of a symposium issue on the Second Amendment.] also _1984: Spring - A Choice of Futures,_by Arthur C. Clarke, ISBN 0-345-31357-7, (1984) pp. 3-13 _Paul Revere's Ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord,_ by David H. Fischer, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508-847-6 (1994) _Afghanistan: the Soviet War,_by Edward Girardet, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-00923-2, (1985) _Lethal Laws,_published by JPFO (see above) _The Bravest Battle,_by Dan Kurzman, G.P. Putnam's Sons, ISBN 0-399-11692-3, (1976) _Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter,_by Simha Rotem (Kazik), Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-05797-0, (1994) _The Gulag Archipelago,_by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-092104 (1991) _Schindler's List,_by Thomas Keneally, Touchstone Books, ISBN 0-671-88031-4, (1993) p. 374 _Victory,_by Peter Schwizer, Atlantic Monthly Press, ISBN 0-87713-567-1 (1994), which is now available in paperback as ISBN 0-87113-633-3 _War in Afghanistan,_by Mark Urban, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-01205-5 (1988) In summary: While the full scope of tactics involved in modern urban and guerrilla warfare would require a FAQ by itself, the common assertion by "gun control" supporters that resistance against a tyrannical government by the use of privately owned small arms is impossible today (given the destructive power of modern military weapons) reflects a degree of certitude which can hardly be called unanimous among those familiar with the history of low-intensity conflicts around the world. Certainly it is possible to_kill_greater numbers of people faster today than ever before in human history, but_enslaving_a people and_subjecting_them to tyrannical rule is becoming increasingly_more difficult_in the modern era, despite the destructiveness of modern weaponry. The astounding proliferation of computers, telecommunications devices, video recording devices, audiotape cassette recorders, photocopiers, and strong encryption methods in the industrialized (and industrializing) nations of the world has made imposing censorship on or jamming these multiply redundant means of command, control and communications all but impossible for even the most tyrannically minded nation-state. (And, ironically, nation-states which attempt to prohibit these liberating technologies pay a severe penalty in terms of their economic productivity, as is the case today in North Korea.) However,_knowing_that you're being tyrannized doesn't always mean that you'll be able to_do_anything about it, if the guns are all in the hands of the government. Government control over education and mass communications remains a powerful tool of indoctrination and propaganda, even when opposed by private ownership of liberating communications technologies like those listed above. The experience of the pro-liberty movement in Communist China during the student-led protests of June 3-4, 1989 shows this very clearly. Despite the presence of many foreign journalists who were there to cover the visit of then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and despite the e-mail and faxes and live satellite feeds which informed the world of the events, and despite the courage of people brave enough to stand in front of a tank column, some 5,000 people were slaughtered by an indoctrinated "People's Army" of peasants from the provinces. Governments (even democratically elected governments) have always held the potential for tyranny and mass murder, and the use of "gun control" laws has acted only to monopolize power further in the hands of the state. Throughout the twentieth century, governments have exercised their monopoly of force in ways far more villainous than any lone criminal or deranged individual is capable of. Tens of millions of deaths due to Communism in the Soviet Union and China, another million or so in Cambodia's killing fields, and the millions murdered at the hands of the Nazis in Germany, not to mention the millions who died in the wars fought to combat these infernal regimes, are a testament to the effectiveness of "gun control". Many lesser known tyrants have also racked up impressive body counts after disarming their political opponents or despised minority groups. The decades of tyranny which the former Soviet and Eastern European peoples endured, and fact that some people were misfortunate enough to have lived out their entire lives without tasting_once_of liberty, is indeed a tragedy. Could the wardens of such prison-states have survived, and plundered the wealth of their country, and enslaved their fellow citizens so effectively, without the help of "gun control"? In the United States, we have been spared such dictatorship, but we_have_seen the racist and unconstitutional internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II, the death of American Indians by the thousands in the wars to establish control of the Western territories, the statutory deprivation of the civil rights of black Americans in the century after Emancipation, and the sporadic oppression of other ethnic and religious minorities throughout our history. While one might hope to avoid such abuses in the future, it ought to at least be considered that these American atrocities were the product of democratically elected governments, and whatever past crimes may have occurred with the support of the people, at least_we_are at liberty to change the shape of our future. The Founders of our republic justly realized that granting_any_government (even a democratically elected one), a monopoly on force is a risky proposition, and a sure recipe for eventual tyranny. That is the real reason for the existence of the Second Amendment, and our history suggests that it has been a very effective deterrent to the kinds of tyranny and genocide which have arisen even in some so-called "civilized" countries of the world. Could American history have been far worse than it is, had the ambitions of would-be dictators not been restrained by the thought of the multitude of armed citizens ready to resist the loss of their liberties? And what of the progress of freedom on Planet Earth without America's strength and innovation, and the torch of her Liberty Enlightening The World? It_was_once intellectually fashionable to be a Communist, and there_were_initially prominent admirers in this country of the efficiency of the German Third Reich. How might history have changed, if there were no Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution? One shudders to consider the possibilities... Even today, despite the development of weapons capable of massive and indiscriminate destruction, tyranny must still be imposed at ground level, if it is to exist at all. Technology has made it far easier to kill people than to enslave them. Small arms are still sufficient to tip the balance in favor of survival and eventual victory, and when combined with the liberating communications technology that saturates the modern industrialized (and industrializing) nations, they can be potent weapons indeed. Coordination of forces, and careful choice of targets can result in the capture of heavier and deadlier weapons from the enemy, starting from the basic rifles and pistols of the infantryman, on up to artillery, tanks, helicopters, anti-tank and anti-aircraft rockets, missile systems, etc. Communications technology can be used to rally the people to the cause of liberty, much as VCRs helped the Solidarity movement win freedom for the people of Poland by putting news censored by the government onto hundreds of television screens. Even without sophisticated communications, the Afghan fighters of the mujahedeen were able to stymie the Soviet Army in Afghanistan for the first few years of the occupation, and, covertly supplied with tons of Soviet arms purchased for them by the U.S. and other sympathetic nations, as well as training and intelligence assistance, the mujahedeen were able to fight and kill tens of thousands of Soviet and Afghan Communist troops during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation, forcing the much vaunted Red Army to withdraw in defeat. Most of the weaponry of the mujahedeen militia in the early years was obtained by capturing Soviet equipment, or obtained from deserters from the conscript Afghan Communist army, and by manufacturing home-made copies of captured AK-47 assault rifles with basic hand tools, and this is what gave them the edge to survive until foreign help was available, much as France helped the U.S. win her independence. The Stinger anti-aircraft missiles the "muj" obtained later from the U.S. contributed to their victory, but the war was waged guerrilla- style, and as was the case for the U.S. in the difficult terrain of Vietnam, fighting an enemy which blended in with the locals, while being _obviously_foreign yourself, made the Soviets a big fat target. Both the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, and that of the U.S. in Vietnam also point to the difficulty in utilizing an armed force designed to fight a high-tech conventional adversary against a low- tech, elusive insurgency. The usual radio signals and heat signatures targeted by electronic warfare don't exist if the enemy is smuggling weapons through the countryside on horseback! The tactical difficulty in fighting an_urban_insurgency makes tyranny a particularly dangerous task in the city as well. The Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw was almost liquidated by the occupying Nazis between July and September of 1942, but there were a few hundred out of the few thousands of Jews who had not yet been sent on the trains to Treblinka and who felt that they would rather fight than surrender to Hitler's Final Solution. Armed primarily with pistols, Molotov cocktails, grenades and explosives, and desperately short of ammunition, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were able to hold off the Waffen-SS for almost a month in April of 1943, killing a dozen or more Nazis and wounding many more, before leading a few survivors out under the walls through the sewers of Warsaw, even as the Nazis demolished the Ghetto with aerial bombs and finally burned what remained to the ground. If these Jewish fighters had been as well-armed as some of their Israeli descendants are today, who knows how history might have turned out? Even the much-celebrated German war profiteer and industrialist Oskar Schindler armed his Jewish workforce better than the Ghetto fighters. By the end of the war, many of "Schindler's Jews" had been provided with_machineguns!_ (A fact that Steven Spielberg chose to leave out of his award-winning movie.) One need not be paranoid about the possibility of genocide, any more than one need be paranoid about flying in a jumbo jet. But the fact that airplane crashes that kill hundreds of people occur only _rarely_doesn't mean that we don't need the safety systems which help protect us from that eventuality, or that we ought to be dismantling them. A longstanding tradition of civilian control over the military, and a rich legacy and cultural love of liberty among soldiers and civilians willing to fight for its defense won't disappear overnight. Chances are only a few police or military would join in any tyrannical endeavor in these United States, but who knows what perils the future may hold for our great-grandchildren --and_their_grandchildren. One hopes the military will always take seriously its oath to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution against all the enemies of liberty, both foriegn_and_domestic; and that police will refuse to enforce laws which are unconstitutional, and will refuse to be corrupted by power and illicit wealth. But history has taught us that many unthinkable things are indeed possible, and that in Alexander Hamilton's words "To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character." The Founders of this country knew the road that "gun control" leads to quite well, no matter what "good intentions" are claimed for it. It was the British attempt on April 18-19, 1775 to seize and destroy the colonists' arsenal stored near Lexington, at Concord Massachusetts, that prompted Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Dr. Samuel Prescott to ride and alert the countryside. The contingent of 700 British troops marched up the road from Boston, and at Lexington Green were met by 70 colonial Minutemen (so-called because they were supposedly ready to fight on a minute's notice). The British had cannon, and would use them when the Minutemen refused the British order to throw down their arms and disperse. In the subsequent skirmish there were a few casualties on each side, but the Minutemen did disperse, and the Redcoats then proceeded past Lexington to Concord, where they destroyed what few munitions and supplies the colonists had been unable to remove in the additional time that eight Minutemen had purchased with their lives. From the countryside, alerted by the news of the riders and Minutemen, and by alarm bells and warning cannon shots, came the citizen militia, the good men of Lexington and Concord, some 4,000 strong, ready with their loaded muskets in hand. It was only then the Redcoats began their retreat to Boston, surrounded by angry colonial snipers shooting from cover behind trees, stone walls, hedgerows, and houses, who kept up the barrage in engagement after engagement along the length of the road, picking off 273 British soldiers (killing 73 of them) while incurring only 95 casualties themselves (of which 49 died). This was "The Shot Heard Round the World" and the humble beginning of the American Revolution. --- APPENDIX I. The Biggest Myths of "Gun Control": A Look At U.S. Federal Legislation [Disclaimer: Firearms laws change frequently, and vary from state to state. None of the information contained in Appendix I should be considered legal advice or a legal restatement of any Federal firearms laws or regulations. Consult a lawyer, your local law enforcement, and/or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for further information regarding firearms laws and taxes in your area.] "Nonmailable Firearms Act" of 1927 - Public Law 69-583 -- This act, actually titled "An Act Declaring pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person nonmailable and providing penalty," may well be the first "gun control" law enacted at the federal level in the United States. It provided for a fine of up to $1,000 and/or 2 years in prison for sending concealable firearms through the the mail, with exceptions for the military, other government agencies, and the repair and return of firearms by the manufacturer. National Firearms Act (NFA'34) - Public Law 73-474 -- The violence associated with alcohol Prohibition, and the threat of Communist and anarchist subversion during the 1930s, prompted in 1934 the restriction of so-called "gangster weapons" from availability to the general public. The weapons defined as "firearms" under the NFA include machineguns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, "zip" guns (homemade firearms) which use rifle or shotgun ammunition, silencers, and "destructive devices" (artillery, bombs, grenades, and other guns over .50 caliber, excluding ordinary shotguns). The act also considers any parts of these restricted weapons, or any weapons easily convertible into a restricted weapon, whether assembled or not, to be equally restricted. Because of the Second Amendment's limitation on the power of the Federal Government to simply ban these weapons outright, a strategy of licensing, registration, and taxation was used to limit the ownership of weapons which the Congress deemed undesirable. The act gave regulatory and tax collecting powers to the Treasury Department's "revenooers" (who were at the time busting up stills and "speakeasies" and barrels of moonshine), a department which eventually grew into the current Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), a tax collection agency with its own SWAT team. All NFA weapons are subject to a $200 tax every time their ownership changes from one federally registered owner to another, and each new NFA weapon is subject to a manufacturing tax when it is made, and it must be registered with the BATF in its National Firearms Registry. To become a registered owner of NFA weapons, a complete FBI background investigation is done, checking for any criminal history or tendencies toward violence, and an application must be submitted to the BATF including two sets of fingerprints, a recent photo, and sworn affidavit that transfer of the NFA firearm is of "reasonable necessity" and that sale to and possession of the weapon by the applicant "would be consistent with public safety." Because the transfer tax for one NFA weapon is just as high as the cost of a Class III dealer's license, most machinegun enthusiasts opt for the dealer's license also, if they want to buy more than one NFA weapon. The Class III FFL (Federal Firearms License) is good for three years, and a renewal fee of $90 must continue to be paid in order to maintain the license, every three years. The license fee to be a dealer in "destructive devices" (tanks, artillery, and bombs, for example) is considerably steeper, at $1,000_a year._ Even with a dealer's license, the transfer taxes must still be paid, but some of the paperwork involved in the transfer is reduced, such as for the background investigation. Since 1986, no new machineguns have been available to Class III licensed civilians, despite an unblemished record of lawful civilian ownership of these guns. (See Firearms Owners Protection Act, below.) Since 1934, only one legally owned machinegun (of some 100,000+) has ever been used in crime, and that was a murder committed by a law enforcement officer. On September 15th, 1988, a 13-year veteran of the Dayton, OH police department, Patrolman Roger Waller, then 32, used his fully automatic MAC-11 .380 cal. submachinegun to kill a police informant, 52-year-old Lawrence Hileman. Patrolman Waller pleaded guilty in 1990, and he and an accomplice were sentenced to 18 years in prison. The 1986 'ban' on sales of new machineguns does not apply to purchases by law enforcement or government agencies. --- Thanks to the staff of the Columbus, OH Public Library for the details of the Waller case. Federal Firearms Act of 1938 (FFA'38) - Public Law 75-785 (repealed) -- This legislation, not to be confused with the National Firearms Act passed four years previously, was repealed by Public Law 90-351 in preparation for the Gun Control Act of 1968 (see below). It required licensing of manufacturers and dealers for transportation of firearms and ammunition in interstate and foriegn commerce, and prohibited interstate and foreign commerce in firearms and ammunition if a valid license was not held by both parties. It further prohibited transfer of firearms or ammunition in interstate or foreign commerce to persons under indictment for a violent crime, convicted violent criminals, and fugitives from justice; transfer of stolen firearms in interstate or foreign commerce; and defacement of firearm manufacturer's serial numbers. It also authorized recordkeeping regulations for firearms and ammunition dealers. Government agencies and the military were exempted from the provisions of the act, as were certain other entities (such as museum firearms collections, and companies transporting money or valuables) that were exempted by the Treasury. Violations of the act were punishable by a fine of up to $2,000 and five years in prison. Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA'68) - Public Law 90-618 -- Amended the National Firearms Act of 1934 (which is a section of the Internal Revenue excise tax code) to ban the interstate shipment (primarily mail order, but also just transportation) of firearms and ammunition, and out-of-state purchase of firearms by individuals, require record keeping for sales of firearms and ammunition, impose stiff penalties for use of firearms in the commission of federal felonies, and prohibit sale of firearms and ammunition to felons and other dangerous classes of persons. This legislation was pushed hard by President Johnson and his Attorney General (the notorious Ramsey Clark), and enacted in the wake of the assassinations of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This law is believed to be modeled after Germany's_Waffengesetz_ [Law on Weapons] of March 18, 1938 (published in_Reichgesetzblatt_1938, Teil [Part] I, pp. 265-276), because the Act's author, late U.S. Senator Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT), had in his possession a copy of the Nazi Weapons Law around the time he was drafting the 1968 Gun Control Act. He later requested an English translation of the German text, a Xerox copy of which_he supplied_ to the Library of Congress, although the Library had copies of its own which he could have requested to be translated. This was an effort on his part to fend off criticism that his legislation closely resembled the law passed under the Third Reich. Senator Dodd didn't need the translation himself, since he could speak German, and had been a prosecutor at Nurnberg during the War Crimes Trials of 1945-46, so he was familiar with German law. The parallels between the two laws _are_striking (including for the first time the introduction into American firearms law of the European concept of "sporting purpose," a direct translation of "Sport-zwecke" in the 1938 statute), and there was no apparent reason for Senator Dodd to own a copy of the Nazi Waffengesetz, or any other Nazi law which did not figure in the evidence at Nurnberg. Yet own it he did. For more information about this incident, and a line-by-line comparison of the two laws, see the book _"Gun Control" Gateway to Tyranny,_by Jay Simkin and Aaron Zelman, published by JPFO (see above), as well as_Federal Firearms Legislation - Hearings Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary,_United States Senate, 90th Congress, second session, June 26-28 and July 8-10, 1968; SuDoc# Y4.J89/2:F51/3 , pp.489-496. Firearms Owners' Protection Act (McClure-Volkmer Act) - Public Law 99-308 -- Amended the Gun Control Act of 1968 to repeal some of the sillier provisions of that enactment, including the ban on transportation of one's own firearms to another state (which had been a hassle particularly for hunters), the record keeping requirement on the sale of ammunition (which generated enormous quantities of useless paper), the ban on interstate sales of long guns (which, then as now, are infrequently used in crime); and limited the surprise inspections of licensed gun dealers' premises to just once a year. It also made it a federal offense, whether a Federally licensed firearms dealer or not, to transfer or sell a gun to any individual who is prohibited by the GCA '68 from owning guns, such as a felon. In a peculiar procedural move, the House-passed version of this NRA-backed legislation contained a ban on the possession and transfer of new machineguns by civilians, which became effective when President Reagan signed the Act into law, May 19, 1986. Machineguns which were manufactured prior to that date are regulated under the National Firearms Act, but those manufactured after the ban cannot be sold even to civilians who are already licensed to own machineguns. The Senate approved the machinegun ban language of the House bill without a roll call vote, though their original bill did not include the ban amendment added in the House and sponsored by U.S. Rep. William J. Hughes (D - N.J.). (The parliamentary shenanigans surrounding this are quite strange, and are found in Congressional Record v.132 p.H1751 and p.S5358.) Essentially, at what was literally the last minute, the acting chairman of the Committee of the Whole in the then-Democrat-run House, New York congressman Charles Rangell, declared in a simple voice vote that Rep. Hughes' "poison pill" amendment had been adopted, and that the "ayes" had it. This ban has later been found unconstitutional in the case of_U.S. v. Rock Island Armory_(Federal Supplement, v.773 p.117) but the decision was not appealed to the Supreme Court. Armor Piercing Ammunition - Public Law 99-408 -- Banned the manufacture and importation of handgun bullets made of tungsten, steel, iron, brass, bronze, copper, or depleted uranium, or alloys of these hard metals. (Depleted uranium is currently used in ammunition for the U.S. Army's M1 Abrams main battle tank, so presumably the government can keep track of its limited supply of such an exotic material!) An exemption exists in the law for steel shotgun shot, which is needed by waterfowl hunters for compliance with environmental regulations. Armor- piercing handgun ammunition is regulated as a "destructive device" under the National Firearms Act, requiring federal permission to own and manufacture. This law also strengthened penalties for federal felonies committed with armor-piercing handgun ammunition, though at the time, no cops had been killed by so called "cop- killer" bullets. The NRA helped draft the version of the law which was adopted, so as to exclude ammunition for hunting rifles and shotguns, which is also capable of defeating soft body armor. President Clinton has recently revived the "cop-killer bullet" strategy for "gun control," but it is unlikely that his proposal will be accepted by the Republican majority in Congress (see 3.4). Undetectable Firearms Act - Public Law 100-649 -- This 1988 legislation banned production and sale of "plastic" guns undetectable by metal detectors and X-ray machines, a threat which (aside from that assassin's derringer in the 1993 Clint Eastwood movie "In The Line Of Fire") did not exist at the time, and still doesn't exist. The NRA helped to rewrite this law so as to narrow its scope, and exclude detectable polymer-frame guns like the light weight Glock 17 pistols now in common use by police departments. Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 (void) (Part of the "Crime Control Act of 1990") - Public Law 101-647 -- Made possession and/or discharge of a firearm on, or within 1000 feet of the grounds of, a public, private, or parochial school a federal felony punishable by a $5,000 fine and/or 5 years in prison. The legislation did not apply to non-school private property located within such a zone, or uses of firearms which had been approved by the school or by government (such as school rifle teams, and police). The U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 ruled this Act to be an unconstitutional extension of the "interstate commerce" clause (U.S.C. Art I. sec. 8 cl. 3) in_U.S. v. Lopez,_ (U.S. Reports v. 514 p.549, Lawyer's Edition 2nd series v. 131 p.626, Supreme Court Reports v.115 p.1624, 1995) in part because the Federal government was unlawfully encroaching upon the traditional powers of the states concerning matters of education and law enforcement. The Feds had rather tenuously argued that the effect of guns in schools upon learning, and hence upon U.S. economic competitiveness, gave them the power to enact such legislation. The implications of this case upon other Federal authority to ban possession of weapons within the borders of the states, and upon the very nature of American federalism itself and the increasing growth of the Federal law enforcement function, seem to be substantial. Indeed, the_Lopez_decision was cited as part of the Court's 1997 ruling in _Printz v. U.S._(see below) declaring parts of the Brady Act to be unconstitutional. Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (void in part) - Public Law 103-159 -- Imposes a five working-day waiting period (in reality, a seven day wait) on the purchase of a handgun, and initially required that the chief law enforcement officer of the jurisdiction where the sale is to take place make a "reasonable effort" to determine whether the purchaser is legally able to own the gun. Though the Feds had attempted to argue that a "reasonable effort" could mean _no effort at all_under certain circumstances, the impositions of the Brady Act on local law enforcement officers were voided as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in their June 20, 1997 ruling in _Printz v. U.S._(U.S. Reports v.___ p.____, Supreme Court Reports v.117 p.2365, Lawyer's Edition 2nd series v.138 p.914). Cases brought by Sheriff Jay Printz of Ravalli County, Montana _Printz v. U.S._(Federal Supplement v. 854 p.1503); and Richard Mack of Graham County, Arizona _Mack v. U.S._(Federal Supplement v. 856 p.1372) were considered simultaneously by the high court, after having been appealed from the U.S. Ninth Circuit. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Antonin Scalia described the Brady Act as promoting "forced participation of the States' executive in the actual administration of a federal program," and thus offensive to the Constitution's system of dual soveriegnty of the state and Federal governments. Federal power, the Court argued, "would be augmented immeasurably if [the Federal government] were able to impress into its service--and at no cost to itself--the police officers of the 50 States." In particular, Congressional power would be enhanced, and "the power of the President would be subject to reduction, if Congress could act as effectively without the President as with him, by simply requiring state officers to execute its laws." Further, noted the Court, "[b]y forcing state governments to absorb the financial burden of implementing a federal regulatory program, Members of Congress can take credit for 'solving' problems without having to ask their constituents to pay for the solutions with higher federal taxes. And even when the States are not forced to absorb [a program's] costs [...]they are still put in the position of taking the blame for its burdensomeness and for its defects." In addition to the Montana and Arizona rulings overturned by the Ninth Circuit and reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in _Printz,_ three other lower federal court jurisdictions, namely Vermont, Mississippi, and Louisiana, had earlier held the background check portions of the Act to be unconstitutional, leaving only the waiting period standing. See_Frank v. U.S._(Federal Supplement v.860 p.1030), _McGee v. U.S._(Federal Supplement v.863 p.321), and_Romero v. U.S._(Federal Supplement v.883 p.1076) which was a 1994 case in the Federal District Court for Western Louisiana. There was one opposing ruling: _Koog v. U.S._(Federal Supplement v.852 p.1376) which was decided in Texas. The_McGee_and_Koog_ cases were combined, (Federal Reporter 3rd series v.79 p.252) and both lawmen won their appeals prior to the Supreme Court decision in_Printz._ The appeal in the_Frank_case was decided after the Supreme Court ruling in _Printz_(Federal Reporter 3rd series v.127 p.273), as was an appeal in the case of_Lee v. U.S.,_which was brought by a New Mexico lawman, and appealed to the U.S. Tenth Circuit. The Supreme Court had spoken, and other pending cases were made moot. A question left unresolved by_Printz_is whether licensed handgun dealers must still forward Brady forms to their local chief law enforcement officers (CLEOs) even if CLEOs do not have to accept them! Remarkably, the Brady Act does not exempt persons who already own a handgun from the waiting period or background check (as though they would require a_new_gun each time if they were inclined to commit a crime!). A reasonable way to do this would be to exempt all holders of concealed carry permits. The Brady Act sunsets to a computerized instant background check system in those states which adopt such, and what remains of the Brady Act is scheduled to expire November 30, 1998, unless renewed. It is anticipated that a national instant-check FBI database will be in place by that time, but delay in implementing instant-check might be used as an excuse to renew Brady, although a repeat of the hard-won political struggle which produced this constitutionally misbegotten Act in the first place seems unlikely to proceed with a Republican-dominated Congress. The instant check provisions of the Brady Act were added thanks to lobbying by the NRA. And yes, it's true, the Brady law wouldn't have stopped John Hinckley. He had no prior felony record, his mental illness was covered up by his wealthy family, and he had bought the .22 revolver he used months earlier. Public Safety And Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act (part of the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a.k.a. the "Crime Bill" which was signed by President Clinton on September 13, 1994) - Public Law 103-322 -- Defines a new class of firearms "semi-automatic assault weapons" based upon their military-style appearance, despite the fact that they are functionally identical to and shoot the same ammunition as many other rifles, pistols and shotguns. Prohibits the manufacture of "semi-automatic assault weapons" for sale to civilians after the effective date, a provision which is prima facie unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. Classifies magazines which hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition as "high capacity ammunition feeding devices" and bans their manufacture for sale to civilians after the effective date, a provision affecting both handguns and long guns. Exempts customers of pawnbrokers from the Brady Act when recovering their pawned handguns. The parliamentary shenanigans surrounding this legislation are also curious, since the initial House rules vote effectively killed the Crime Bill, but the Republicans weren't content to declare victory, and subsequently the House trimmed a bit of the fat out of the spending portion of the bill, and passed it anyway, sending a crime bill opposed by the NRA, the ACLU, and most Americans on to the Senate for final passage. Democrats, despite being the majority in both houses, and holding the White House, found difficulty passing a supposed anti-crime measure in an election year! The Democrats subsequently suffered an historic defeat at the polls in November, leading to the election of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and the first Republican House since 1952. The most immediate effect of the "assault weapons" legislation was to encourage gun manufacturing and sales prior to the enactment date, including speculative investment in the banned weapons, some of whose prices increased greatly (though they have now begun to decline again). The ban is scheduled to repeal itself ten years after its date of enactment, which will be on September 13, 2004. Lawsuits are currently pending which attack the semi-auto ban as being unconstitutionally vague-- in other words, so poorly written that it is difficult to determine what type of weapons are permissible. 1994 was certainly a banner year! APPENDIX II. Concealed Carry Reality vs. "Gunshine State" Fantasy Murder rates in Florida Cities included in U. Maryland CCW 'study' Source: _Uniform Crime Reports_ for the United States, 19xx-1995, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Dept. of Justice, SuDoc# J 1.14/7:9xx pop. = population (city limits, in thousands) MNNM = murder/non-negligent manslaughter MN100K = population-adjusted rate of MNNM (per 100,000 persons) 1984 1985 1986 1987* 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 Miami pop. 400.6 385.9 396.4 385.1 381.2 358.5 367.9 373.8 372.5 380.0 378.7 MNNM 170 131 148 128 132 129 134 128 127 116 110 MN100K 42.4 33.9 37.3 33.2 34.6 36.0 36.4 34.2 34.1 30.5 29.0 Tampa pop. 289.3 285.3 293.0 285.9 289.4 280.0 287.4 291.9 288.9 294.7 289.9 MNNM 52 70 79 61 57 60 64 49 43 62 47 MN100K 18.0 24.5 27.0 21.3 19.7 21.4 22.3 16.8 14.9 21.0 16.2 Jacksonville pop. 582.4 601.0 616.7 629.9 654.7 636.7 653.5 663.9 672.3 685.8 679.1 MNNM 103 90 119 147 165 176 128 123 125 106 86 MN100K 17.7 15.0 19.3 23.3 25.2 27.6 19.6 18.5 18.6 15.5 12.7 Statewide, FL (FL, 1963 = 8.2) MN100K 11.5 11.4 11.7 11.4 11.1 10.7 9.4 9.0 8.9 8.4 7.3 U.S. (U.S. 1963 = 4.6) MN100K 7.9 7.9 8.6 8.3 8.7 9.4 9.8 9.3 9.5 9.0 8.2 * Data for 1988 in the states of Florida and Kentucky were not available due to reporting problems at the state level. Analysis: Figures for cities given are for city limits, not metro area, although metro area figures are available. As more violent crime tends to occur in urban areas, rather than suburbs, however, if anything, the figures ought to be biased in the direction of more murders, rather than fewer. Each of the cities included in the U. Maryland study has shown declines in murder/non-negligent manslaughter rates per 100,000 population since the passage of Florida's concealed carry reform law in 1987. This is not to say that the increase in concealed carry permits_caused_this decline, but it does show that murder rates have declined, rather than increased, since the law was enacted. Further, the statewide murder/non-negligent manslaughter rates for Florida (per 100,000 population) have declined from well above the national rate to slightly below the national rate during this same period, and are now below where they were over 30 years ago, prior to enactment of major federal gun control bills like the 1968 Gun Control Act, which prohibited mail order gun sales to ordinary citizens, among other restrictions. It is interesting to note that, of the three Florida cities selected by the U. Maryland researchers as the basis of their 'study', all three have historical rates of murder/non-negligent manslaughter_much_higher_than the average for the state as a whole, which raises questions concerning how representative a sample they are, especially considering that the concealed-carry law applies statewide. Essentially, the U. Maryland study may only have demonstrated what was already known, namely that urban areas often have higher violent crime rates than non-urban areas, and that the rates of violent crime in the U.S have increased since the late 1960s. (In comparing a baseline of 1973-1986 to the 1987-1991 period, the question remains whether one could observe similar or worse increases in homicides in areas_not_subject to concealed carry reform laws.) The University of Maryland researchers have not stated whether they blame concealed- carry permit holders for the increase in homicides which they noted in their study, but evidence from the Florida Department of State which issues the permits shows that crime among CCW permit holders is virtually unknown (Kleck,_Point Blank,_see 3.8). APPENDIX III. - "Gun control": international comparisons See_The Samurai, The Mountie, And The Cowboy,_by David Kopel, Prometheus Books, ISBN 0-87975-756-6, (1992) [Kopel's book received the Comparative Criminology award from the American Society for Criminology in 1992.] _Lost Rights,_by James Bovard (see above) [Disclaimer: The following represents the most recent information available to me regarding the listed countries, and is derived from publicly available sources. Firearms laws change frequently, and vary from place to place. None of the information contained in Appendix III should be considered legal advice or a legal restatement of the firearms laws and regulations of any of the listed countries. Consult a lawyer familiar with the firearms laws of the particular country or region of interest for further information. Your mileage may vary. Always read and follow label directions. The gun is always loaded unless you've inspected the chamber yourself. Always keep the weapon pointed in a safe direction. Identify your target, and know your backstop. Always eject the magazine before clearing the chamber, and never the other way around. Keep out of reach of children. Always wear your safety belt, even with airbags. Don't drink and drive.] JAPAN An island nation with a truly insular culture for much of its long history, Japan has only recently (since 1946) become a democratic state. The authoritarian values of its past still linger, both in the willing submission of most Japanese to the authority of the state, and their dependence upon that authority for their personal security (a faith somewhat shaken recently by the March 20, 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway). A remarkably homogenous, virtually monoethnic society, with strong traditions of conformity and propriety; combined with what many_gaijin_ (foreigners, lit. "outside people") would describe as extraordinary (and intrusive) police powers, helps keep crime rates very low. What serious crime that does occur is dealt with very strictly, and in keeping with Japan's traditional authoritarian tendencies. Most criminal suspects are induced to confess, either through offers of more lenient treatment, or are coerced into doing so through tactics like sleep deprivation and relentless interrogation, and on occasion, physical abuse. Particularly effective in extracting confessions and other expressions of remorse from criminal suspects is the fact that police can detain suspects for more than three weeks without charges, and conduct interrogations without legal counsel present. Suspects' confessions are a highly prized form of evidence in Japan, and can be admissible even if obtained through coercion. Confessions from criminal suspects are essentially a condition of bail, and a starting point from which to gather the evidence needed for conviction. Jury trials are not required in criminal cases, and search warrants are not ordinarily required either. Police have broad discretion to disarm people and seize weapons, and illegally seized evidence is often still admissible. There is a death penalty in Japan, hanging, though it is rare and exercised with great secrecy, such that even the families of the condemned do not learn of the execution until prison authorities send a telegram asking whether the family would like the body cremated or if they will come to the prison to pick it up! Condemned prisoners without close relatives are simply "removed" from the government's records when their executions are carried out. Though prison sentences are usually short, Japanese prisons often require that prisoners live in isolation, sometimes with little exercise, and have no communication with other prisoners, minimizing risks of prison riots, rapes, fights, and other violence, but at substantial cost to prisoners' physical and psychological health. Even with this harsh treatment, repeat offender (recidivism) rates are fairly high. Prisoners can also be forced to work for prison industries which are organized in cooperation with private corporations. In short, although "gun control" is very strict, even non-gun crime rates are kept low by implementation of what is essentially a police state. Broad police authority in turn makes for easy enforcement of gun laws against a population which has been kept disarmed by its rulers for hundreds of years. Handguns absolutely prohibited to civilians, yet organized criminals, called_Boryokudan,_"violent organizations," or_Yakuza,_"hoodlums," still have them, and commit some 200 violent crimes with them annually. Japanese police rarely use guns themselves, relying instead on martial arts training (judo and kendo), and police batons. About the only way a civilian can own or use a handgun legally is to be a competitive target shooter, and only 50 such pistol licenses are issued in the entire country! There are also 500 air pistol licenses issued, all for competition target shooters. The only legitimate reasons any civilian can own any gun in Japan are for target shooting or hunting, and never for self-defense. Rifle owners must be licensed, and rifles must be turned in to the police when the license holder dies. Shotguns and air rifles (the most commonly owned types of guns in Japan) must also be licensed, and all guns must be stored unloaded in a gun safe separate from any ammunition, and in a location known to the police. Pistols (other than air pistols) must be stored in a locker at the local police station. All firearms and ammunition in Japan must be registered, and no guns which hold six or more rounds in the magazine (3 rounds for sporting shotguns) may be owned in Japan. Needless to say, machineguns are prohibited to civilians. Licenses issued primarily to hunters and sportsmen, and for skeet and small caliber target shooting. Licensees for all guns (except air guns) must submit to a background investigation of their entire household. Background checks are extensive (including checking for political affiliation, a ten-year history of addresses, jobs, gun ownership, etc.), as well as medical certification that the licensee is mentally healthy and not addicted to drugs. Hunting with small- bore (.22 cal) rifles is already prohibited in Japan, and large-bore may soon be as well, once the existing hunting rifle licenses expire. Getting such a hunting rifle license requires, on paper at least, a ten-year history of continuous participation in shotgun or small- bore rifle shooting, and applying for the gun to the local police station. Prospective licensees wanting to own_any_gun must attend a one day lecture held only once each month at the local police station, and pass a written 20-question exam with a score of 14 or more correct answers, in order to be eligible to_apply_for a license. The certification of having taken this class is valid for three years, and Japanese gun owners must re-take the class every three years to get re-certified, but for the renewal there is no test required. New licensees for shotguns and rifles must also shoot a practical course. Then, it takes a month or so for the police to process the extensive paperwork required and to complete the background investigation before they can grant permission. Once this is completed, a license booklet, which resembles a passport, is issued, and the purchase is authorized. The licensee must return to the police station with the gun within two weeks of purchase in order to have the gun inspected and the proper stamp placed on the license. Permission from the police is also required to purchase ammunition for guns (other than air rifle pellets), and all guns (and ammunition expended) must be accounted for to the police on an annual basis. Hunters must obtain a separate license to hunt in addition to the license required for owning a hunting rifle. Hunting licenses are issued by the Governor of each prefecture, and applying for one requires an additional course and test which must be passed. The major shooting sports organization in Japan is the Nihon Raiforu Shageki Kyokai [Japan Rifle Shooting Association, abbreviated in English as NRA], and shooters are required to join at least the local NRA affiliate in order to participate in target shooting sports. Shooters must participate in matches in order to keep their license properly stamped and current. If the license is not kept current, and more than three years has elapsed since it was last used, it cannot be renewed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Japanese information adapted in part from postings by Masaaki Ishida (golgo17@RKBAcatnet.ne.jp) and Tetsuya Nishimura (tetsuyan@RKBAaol.com) CANADA Search warrants only required for residences (and then not in all circumstances), police given discretion to perform searches of persons, vehicles, and premises (other than homes) for illegal weapons and to seize weapons, use of registration lists as the basis for "reasonable grounds" to authorize search and as consent to search is commonplace. Police are less likely to use deadly force to apprehend and control criminals than in the United States. Handguns permitted if registered, as they are considered "restricted weapons" (as are many rifles and shotguns). All "restricted" weapons must be registered with the police, and "restricted" weapons may be only purchased for one of four purposes: protection of life where other protection is inadequate, target practice under the auspices of a shooting club, in connection with a lawful profession or occupation, or as part of a "bona-fide gun collector's" collection. All firearms must be stored unloaded in a securely locked container when not in use, and kept separate from ammunition. Trigger locks are required for those restricted weapons not stored in a safe or vault. Police may inspect the security of the storage arrangement of restricted weapons at their discretion. Transport of firearms requires a permit, and there are no actual "carry" permits issued except as a condition of employment. Firearms may not be transported without permit, and permits are only issued for transportation to and from the gunsmith (or a new address), to and from the range or shooting club, and to and from the police station where the gun is registered. "Prohibited" weapons in Canada include short barreled or "sawed-off" shotguns and rifles, silencers, and all machineguns not registered prior to January 1, 1978; as well as chemical defensive sprays (like OC), and electric stun guns. Since few machineguns were registered prior to that date, and all machineguns manufactured subsequent to that date are prohibited, many machineguns were converted to semi-automatic in Canada in an effort to comply with the law, but are still subject to confiscation. Hollowpoint handgun ammunition is prohibited to Canadian civilians, as is OC pepper spray, because effective self-defense is not considered to be a reasonable use of such weapons by anyone but police. Weapons may be added to the "restricted" list (or the "prohibited" list) by administrative fiat, called an "Order In Council," and issued by the Minister of Justice. Legislation passed by Parliament in 1995 (Bill C-68) has expanded this fiat power to include all previously non-restricted "sporting" guns (including antique guns as well), resulting in the addition of most semi-automatic rifles to the "prohibited" list, banning of .25 and .32 caliber handguns and all handguns with a barrel length of less than 4 inches [105mm] (which will be destroyed without compensation upon the death of their current registered owners), adding a requirement for registration of all firearms in Canada (not just "prohibited" weapons), and greatly extending police power to conduct warrantless searches for all types of weapons, including searches for/of paper-based and computer records, as well as compelling citizens to assist police in their inspections. Prospective firearms owners must obtain a licence, called a Firearms Acquisition Certificate (FAC), in order to purchase any firearms, which is good for five years, and is basically a "must issue" system, and also enables FAC holders to purchase non-restricted "sporting" rifles or shotguns by mail-order. Licensees must take classes, pass tests, supply a recent, good-quality photo, fill out a four page application and answer questions about recent relationships and business failures, supply the references of at least two persons who have known them for at least three years (must be a fellow employee, spouse, minister, doctor, lawyer, tribal elder, etc.), pass a background check in the Canadian Police Information Computer (CPIC) [which lists all "encounters" with police in Canada, not just criminal convictions], pay a $50 fee, and wait at least 28 days before getting the FAC (with a typical wait being six to eight weeks). Confidential medical information need not be disclosed to the police in Canada, unlike the situation in some U.S. states. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Canadian information adapted in part from posts by Skeeter Abell-Smith (ab133@RKBAsfn.saskatoon.sk.ca) UNITED STATES OF AMERICA America's "War on Drugs" has brought with it increased use of both warrantless searches and so-called "no-knock" warrants (in which police are authorized to break down doors without warning, in an effort to prevent destruction of evidence). Both practices are strictly contrary to Fourth Amendment protections against illegal search and seizure, but are nonetheless commonplace, particularly in public housing projects, where the Clinton Administration has sought to increase their use in "cleaning up" crime ridden slums by seizing drugs and weapons. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has recently ruled that the categorical issuance of "no knock" warrants in drug cases would render the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches "meaningless," re-affirming judicial review of warrants in the case of_Richards v. Wisconsin_ (U.S. Reports v.___ p.___, Supreme Court Reports v.117 p.1416, Lawyer's Edition 2nd series v.137 p.615, 1997). Such warrants aren't "unreasonable" the Court said, so long as police have a "reasonable suspicion" that announcing their presence would be dangerous or futile, or permit destruction of evidence. Police in the United States are more circumspect about violating the civil rights of wealthier Americans, though such violations too, have been more common of late. The use of asset forfeiture laws to seize property believed to have been obtained with drug money has resulted in some harassment of wealthy Americans, who must then prove that their assets were obtained legally, a requirement which turns the presumption of innocence on its head. Persons with large amounts of cash have been detained and their currency seized on suspicion of carrying drug money. Corruption of law enforcement has become a serious problem in several major U.S. cities, such as New Orleans and Washington, D.C. The threat of domestic and international terrorism has also been used as a pretext for limiting the civil rights of all Americans. Prominent cases of civil rights violations by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI have outraged millions of Americans, and increased their traditional distrust of government. The jury system in several prominent cases has shown signs of stress. High levels of violent crime associated with drug prohibition, while still confined largely to America's most blighted inner cities, have been terrifyingly recalcitrant to the efforts of the justice system, and have inspired fear even in those not directly affected by crime, resulting in the increased desperation of further "gun control" measures, adding one futile layer of prohibition upon another. Distrust of government and its demonstrated ineffectiveness at controlling violent crime has prompted_both_increased calls for "gun control" and the loss of other traditional American liberties, as well as increased purchase of guns, and political opposition to "gun control" by Americans suspicious of government's ability and inclination to protect them and their civil rights. Nevertheless, the U.S. Constitution still protects the civil rights of all Americans to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to peaceably assemble, and to be free from the abuses of arbitrary power which many of the peoples of the world still must endure. The United States is still one of the most heavily armed nations in the world, and weapons of all types are legally available to her citizens with a greater degree of freedom than in most any other industrialized nation. The right to keep and bear arms is a part of the constitutions of 43 of her 50 states, and is protected by the federal Constitution of 1789 as amended in 1791. Machineguns, short-barreled and "sawed-off" shotguns and rifles, silencers, and military heavy weapons such as tanks, artillery, and other "destructive devices" can be legally owned with the proper Federal permission, which requires an FBI background check, and a $200 transfer tax. New machineguns manufactured after May 19, 1986 have been banned from sale to civilians, in violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms which superficially resemble military weapons, and of magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds of ammunition has been banned from sale to the public since September 13, 1994; also a violation of the Second Amendment. As with the machineguns, all of the banned weapons and magazines manufactured prior to the ban dates are still legal to own. Handguns, rifles, and shotguns are prohibited in only some states and localities, usually those localities having a higher than average crime rate. There is no national licensing or centralized national registration system, except for those weapons which require Federal permission and the transfer tax (NFA weapons). Handguns are registered in a decentralized, paper-based records system which records information about the purchaser for those handguns bought through a federally licensed dealer, which includes all new handguns and a substantial number of used ones. There are several state and local licensing and registration requirements, ranging from de facto prohibition of firearms, to unlicensed concealed carry. If there is any correlation between gun ownership, gun laws, and crime, it is arguably an inverse relationship in the United States. GREAT BRITAIN As is the case in Canada, British subjects are subject to warrantless searches of persons and vehicles at police discretion, but searches of residences still require a warrant (in most instances). Arrests without warrant are common, and police have substantial discretion to conduct search and seizures of weapons. Interrogation without counsel is permitted, and evidence obtained from coerced confessions is permitted. Jury trials for serious crimes are conducted without many of the preemptory motions which can be used to dismiss biased jurors in the United States, and the distinction between prosecutors and defense attorneys (barristers) is not as clear cut as in the U.S. British subjects lack the protection of the rights of free speech, press, assembly, or to keep and bear arms, against the powers of the Parliament, which combines the legislative and executive functions of American government, and whose acts are not subject to judicial review by a Supreme Court, as there is no written Constitution. Liberty in Britain is protected only by the common law, and by tradition. Police in Britain are primarily unarmed, although their use of weapons is increasing in response to increased danger from criminals, who can still obtain firearms, despite being on an island with more easily defensible and secure borders than is the case in the United States. Those police who do carry weapons carry them concealed in many cases. Shrinking police budgets in some localities have resulted in the extensive use of public surveillance video cameras by police, a development which doesn't bode well for the right to privacy. As in Japan, shotguns are easily the most popular firearms in Great Britain, and have a special place in British firearms law (despite being perhaps the most deadly of firearms, short of machineguns). The special treatment of shotguns descends from the popularity of bird hunting among many British landowners. As large game is comparatively absent from Britain, rifles are more commonly associated with their military use than with hunting. All shotguns in Britain must be registered, and the prospective owners must show "good reason" in order to be able to purchase one having greater than a 3-round capacity. (Shotguns with 3-round or less capacity are exempt from the "good reason" requirement.) Bolt-action and lever-action rifles are likewise permitted only if the prospective owner can show "good reason" for such ownership, such as being a hunter, or member of a shooting club. All centre-fire semiautomatic and pump-action rifles are banned, whether they resemble military guns or not, and are subject to confiscation with reimbursement at half the gun's purchase price or L150, whichever is less. All handguns are banned, as a result of legislation passed by both the Conservative (Tory) and Labour governments since the murders on March 13, 1996 of 16 Scottish kindergartners and their teacher in Dunblane by a deranged man armed with four licensed pistols. The Firearms (Amendments) Act passed by the Tories on November 18, 1996 required handguns larger than .22 calibre be surrendered in exchange for a government cheque between July 1st and September 30th of 1997. When Tony Blair's Labour government got elected, they extended the ban June 11, 1997 to include_all_civilian-held handguns in Britain, which must be surrendered by the end of February, 1998. The first round of buybacks collected some 160,000+ primarily legally-held (and, of course,_registered_) pistols at a cost of L150 million. As in Canada, self-defense is not considered a "good reason" for owning any gun, and as in Canada, chemical defensive sprays like tear gas and OC pepper spray have been prohibited to the public. Martial arts weapons and the carry of knives in public has also been banned. (There have even been knife "turn-in" programmes!) Shotgun shells and other ammunition must be registered at purchase, and are only sold to shotgun or firearms licence holders. Hollowpoint ammunition is also banned by the recent Firearms Act. All firearms must be stored securely to the satisfaction of local police, or the required licences may not be renewed. Similar coercion is used to obtain inspections of the storage location, at police discretion. As many police chiefs in Britain, as in the U.S., are hostile to private firearms ownership, even the issuance of shotgun licences is on the decline. (There are currently about 500,000 shotgun certificates and 140,000 firearm certificates on issue in the U.K.) Further anti-gun legislation is expected by British shooters, including bans on cap-and-ball revolvers, lever-action rifles, and possibly even shotguns... British subjects who wish to own firearms must obtain either a shotgun certificate, or a firearms certificate (applicable to bolt- and lever action rifles) from the local police station, which requires, as in Canada, two personal references from persons of good standing (such as an MP, justice of the peace, minister of religion, doctor, lawyer, civil servant, etc.) who have known the applicant for at least two years, as well as showing "good reason" for being permitted to obtain the gun. The "good reason" must include proof of the applicant's membership in a shooting club, or a letter from a landowner granting permission to hunt on his land. The applicant must specify full details of the type and calibre of weapon, and explain where the weapon will be stored and used, as well as the maximum quantity of ammunition planned to be kept and purchased. The application fee is L56, and within two to four weeks a police officer will visit to interview the applicant and to inspect the storage location and security measures. Once issued a Fire Arms Certificate (FAC) it is valid only for purchase of the gun and ammunition specified on it, and a gun purchaser must notify the Chief Constable of the local Police Authority within a few days after purchase of the gun for which permission has been granted. Disposal of the gun doesn't renew the permission, and if another gun or another calibre is desired, a new application must be submitted. Each certificate must be renewed after five years, and the gun owner must go through the whole application procedure again, including payment of the L56 application fee. Issuance of these certificates is discretionary in Britain, unlike the case in Canada. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- British law coverage based in part on a posting by David Rees (drees@RKBAnovell.com.uk), as well as text of the Firearms Act (located at http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1997/1997005.html ), and press reports. SWITZERLAND Switzerland places a far heavier reliance on decentralized government, and individual responsibility, which, when combined with a greater degree of social control than Americans would likely tolerate, helps keep the crime rate low. Switzerland's current constitution, which was adopted in 1848, reflects the influence of the United States, in that it for the first time recognized individual rights, rather than only the rights of the various cultural, linguistic, and religious groups which form the basis of cantonal (state) distinctions. Crime has increased slightly in recent years, but much of Swiss crime is attributable to the drug trade and to foreigners. Swiss citizens are generally_very_law abiding, and the Swiss have not seen the need for the sorts of harsh justice and broad police powers seen elsewhere. There is no death penalty, and sentences in Switzerland are usually short for all crimes except murder. All prisoners must serve at least two-thirds of their nominal sentences. Judges are popularly elected in some cantons. Violent movies can be banned, and racist and anti- Semitic acts, speech or publications are strictly prohibited. Arrests can only be made with warrant, and suspects must be charged within 24 hours after arrest. Foreigners who have been denied political asylum, however, can be held in administrative detention for up to a year if they are considered a risk to escape deportation. Foreigners can also be stopped by police on the street and asked for their identity papers. Police permits are required for public meetings, but are generally issued unless there is the likelihood of violence. Some cantons have official state-sponsored churches, but taxes to fund them are optional. Though narcotics are illegal, the laws have only recently been enforced with any severity. Swiss banking secrecy laws have led to the Swiss confederation becoming a center for drug money laundering. Zurich's notorious Platzspitz "Needle" Park was closed several years ago for public health reasons, and because international publicity about the park had attracted drug dealers and criminals. Other Swiss cities with similar parks have also sought to close them to drug users, and some drug abusers are instead now being given their drugs under medical supervision, as a public health measure. Violent crime is still rare, despite the widespread availability of weapons. Switzerland requires mandatory military service for its men, but there is only a small standing army. The Swiss rely upon a militia system for defense of the confederation, and because of this, ownership of all types of military weapons is more widespread even than in the United States. The front line troops of the_Auszug_must keep their fully-automatic military assault rifle and seventy-two rounds of sealed ammunition at home during their term of service from age 21-32. The current issue militia weapons are the SIG Sturmgewehr 90 (.223) and SIG Sturmgewehr 550/551 (.223) assault rifles, and the SIG-Sauer P220 9mm semi-automatic pistol. Even after their service in the _Auszug,_Swiss men still remain part of the militia, either in a home guard (_Landwehr_), or reserve capacity (_Landsturm_) until age 42 (52 for officers). Practice with weapons is a popular recreation, and is encouraged by the government, particularly for the members of the militia. "Ordnance" ammunition is subsidized and available for sale at shooting ranges, and there is a regulatory requirement that ammo sold at ranges must be used there, but this is never really enforced. Sale of all ammunition is registered at the dealer if purchased at a private store, but it is not registered if purchased at a range. All types of ammunition are available for commercial sale, including calibers for military-issue weapons, and hollowpoints. Ammunition sales are registered only at the point of sale by recording the buyer's name in a bound book. Semi-automatic rifles are registered at the dealer and with the police in those cantons having registration at all, otherwise only full-automatics and other military guns must be registered with the government. Unlike the United States, handgun purchases aren't even registered in some cantons. Restrictions on the purchase of non-lethal weapons like pepper spray, which had been in effect in some cantons, have been eased. Purchase of handguns is licensed on a "must issue" basis at the cantonal (state) level, with "firearms purchase certificates" issued to all adult residents without criminal records or history of mental illness. Handguns and semi-automatic rifles are registered using the same "triple-sheet" form in those cantons which have any registration, with one copy going to the police, one to the dealer, and one to the owner. One canton doesn't require a license for handgun purchases, and purchase of hunting guns and most types of semi-automatic shotguns and rifles usually require no permits. Since actual military guns are issued freely (albeit with a licensing and registration requirement at the cantonal level), controls on other guns can be comparatively mild. There are no restrictions on the carrying of long guns, and only fifteen of the twenty-six cantons require carry permits for handguns (which usually require that "necessity" for carrying the handgun be demonstrated). Laws have been passed which restrict the purchase and carry of weapons by non-Swiss citizens like Turks and people from the embattled area of the former Yugoslavia. There have been calls for more "gun control" from some quarters in Swiss society (including Swiss anti-gun criminologist, Martin Killias) but the tradition of Switzerland's armed citizenry is being kept alive by the activist gun owners organization ProTell (named after Swiss hero and marksman William Tell), which is associated with the Swiss Riflemen's Society, much as the NRA-ILA is associated with NRA in the United States. There are also several other shooting sports organizations. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Swiss information updated with the kind help of Emmanuel Baechler (ebaechle@RKBAhospvd.ch) GERMANY Law enforcement in Germany is primarily the responsibility of the Laender (state governments) but the Federal Office handles crimes like narcotics smuggling, gun running, and counterfeiting. Search warrants are required for searches of residences, and arrest warrants are required for arrest. German police must charge suspects within 24 hours of arrest. Freedom of speech and assembly is constitutionally limited, and certain organizations (such as neo-Nazis) are illegal. Sadly, much of the neo-Nazi propaganda, and some of the organizers of such groups, have their origin in the United States. Although crime has risen in Germany since 1990, the criminal misuse of guns accounts for a tiny fraction of criminal acts. While negligible in comparison to the United States, the use of guns by criminals in Germany is on the increase, and a number of Germans have armed themselves in response (including ethnic minorities). There is also some increase in cross-border crime between Eastern Germany and the relatively poor neighboring nations of the former Soviet bloc like Poland and Czechoslovakia, much as occurs between the United States and poorer neighboring Mexico. Despite strict "gun control" laws, otherwise law-abiding Germans have engaged in smuggling guns into Germany from other European states such as France and Belgium, where their purchases are legal, and only a personal ID card is required. Some 14,000 firearms were seized in 1993, according to the German Federal Crime Office, and the French and Belgian governments are now reporting gun purchases by German citizens back to law enforcement in Germany. Not all guns in Germany come from other countries, however. Some guns were sold to eastern German civilians by departing Soviet troops! The ownership and purchase of firearms is very tightly controlled in Germany, and there is total firearms registration and licensing in place. Pepper spray is also prohibited in Germany, because of a bureaucratic foul-up. There is a constitutional requirement for military service in Germany for German men over age 18 (though it_is_commonplace to opt out of the Army through_Zivildienst,_or "civilian duty," which is like conscientious objector status, but one still must do another type of government job instead). What it amounts to is that if you're not in the armed forces or police, the government doesn't trust you with a firearm (at least not without an extensive investigation and a government-issued license). Gun owners must be licensed, and this requires a full background check, which can take several months. The background check is run through a central records office in Berlin. Once the background check is completed, and approval is for a license is granted, the license, called a_Waffenbesitzkarte,_or "weapon-holder's card," is issued. There are four types of licenses, a pink one issued to collectors, a yellow one issued to sport-shooters, a green one issued to hunters, and another kind which is granted only to people who are considered to be in "concrete danger," such as security guards, or (rarely) if the licensing office thinks you have demonstrated "need". The license serves as a "ration card" for recording firearms purchases, and as evidence that the buyer has passed the background check. The pink "collector's licenses" for antique guns are very expensive, and are nearly impossible for the average German to obtain. Collectors are not permitted to buy ammunition for the guns in their collection, or shoot the guns in their collection (where's the fun in that?), so they're mainly for museum-type collections. People who've acquired guns by inheritance are also prohibited from buying ammunition for them unless they get a proper permit to do so. The most common types of licenses are those for hunters and sport-shooters, but as a sport- shooter, you must get permission from your shooting club to purchase certain types of guns, and the club makes a notation on your card if they think you ought to qualify for the gun. Hunting is primarily a rich man's sport in Germany, since you must pay the landowner for the right to hunt (~$1,500-$6,000), and essentially this means that hunters will often form hunting clubs in order to split the costs. Sport-shooting is also a fairly expensive hobby since there is less of a market for guns and ammo in Germany, given the restrictions. Obtaining a hunter's or sport-shooter's license costs about 82 DM. Sport-shooters are permitted an unlimited number of single-shot rifles and/or shotguns, but only two handguns. Only with special permission from a shooting club can a sport-shooter get a multi-shot rifle or shotgun. Semi-automatic long guns with a magazine capacity greater than 2 rounds are permitted only to hunters. After purchasing a gun, it must be registered within two weeks, and the registration fee is 15 DM per gun. Most applicants for the_Jagdschein_[hunter's license] take courses to prepare for the test which is involved, and the test costs 200 DM. Licensed hunters are allowed an unlimited number of rifles and/or shotguns, but only two handguns. Hunters have 4 weeks to register new long guns. Sport-shooting licensees are only permitted to buy ammunition for handguns or sporting rifles and shotguns in calibers they actually own, but licensed hunters are allowed to purchase any caliber ammunition for long guns. Owning machineguns or other military weapons is prohibited to German civilians. The major civilian shooting sports organization in Germany is the_Deutsche Schutzenbund_[German Shooter's League]. While Germans may have highly restrictive laws on firearms, there are no speed limits on the autobahnen (highways), and proposals to impose speed limits have met with the type of passionate opposition that "gun control" laws face in the U.S.! Evidently the speed limiters in Germany have yet to convincingly wield the gun banner's slogan: "If it saves only one life..." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- German information updated with the valuable assistance of Andreas Miehe (andreas@RKBAbahamas.ipp.tu-clausthal.de) AUSTRALIA Police are organized on the state level, and there is a healthy distrust of authority in Australia, in some sense extending back to its 1788 founding as a British penal colony. Nevertheless, Aussie police are professional and effective, and criminals typically serve longer sentences sooner in Australia than is the case in the United States. Police are forbidden by law to search without warrants, but like other Commonwealth nations, and Britain itself, there is no Australian equivalent to the U.S. Bill of Rights, except for a constitutional prohibition against establishment of an official religion. Voting is_compulsory_for Australians over age 18, and those who don't exercise their civic duty in this way can be (and are) fined! In Australia, the "gun control" battle centers on long guns, as handguns have been tightly restricted along the lines of Canada's "need" based licensing system for some time. Handgun hunting is illegal, and those Australians who wish to own handguns must be part of a target shooting club, or must own the gun for some job-related reason. Self-defence is not considered a legitimate reason for owning a pistol, and as in Canada, non-lethal defensive sprays like tear gas and pepper spray are prohibited. Nonetheless, a number of Australians keep their pistols ostensibly registered for "target shooting" around for home and self- defence. Criminals, of course, can still get handguns, but Aussie criminals have frequently substituted deadlier and more easily accessible long guns. As a result of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre and other highly publicised shootings, the Australian government has implemented uniform British-style "gun control" over the entire country. However, because the national government in Canberra has no constitutional authority over gun laws, the new laws had to be passed in the state legislatures. Previously, gun laws varied from state to state, with the most controls in Victoria (where semi-auto rifles were banned to all but sport shooters with a special hard-to-get licence), and the least in Tasmania (which until 1993 was the only Aussie state to permit private ownership of machineguns, which had been banned to civilians in the rest of country since the 1920s). Semi-automatics had been legally available only in Queensland, South Australia, and in Tasmania. Under the legislation recently adopted, Australia has banned all automatic, semi-automatic and pump-action long guns for civilians (along the lines of the Victoria system), and has implemented a complete national gun registration system over what remains (only single-shot long guns are permitted to ordinary Australians, though semi-automatic pistols for target shooters are still legal), along with a uniform system of reciprocal licensing of gun owners. There is now a nationwide 28-day waiting period between permit and purchase, and a mandatory training requirement for gun owners. Gun owners are required to own a steel safe, and keep ammunition and weapons stored seperately. The passage of the Aussie gun ban laws, championed by John Howard's Liberal Party, spawned the largest gun import spree in Aussie history, as Australians tried to cash in on the government's A$500 million "buy back"-style confiscation programme. More than 640,000 guns of all kinds were turned in for "fair market value" payments between October 1 and September 30, 1997, with an estimated total value of A$314 million. (The state governments are now wrangling over how best to spend the "surplus" gun confiscation funds.) Those Aussies who chose instead to bury their guns (which has happened in some states) face a A$20,000 fine and as much as four years in jail if discovered. Many shooters who turned in guns are believed to have spent the money they recieved to buy additional legal guns, according to press reports. Prior to the adoption of the ban laws, 70,000 pro-gun protesters marched in Melbourne, believed to be the largest such public demonstration on Australian soil since the Vietnam War. Australia's experiment in strict "gun control" will be an interesting sociopolitical and criminological laboratory in coming years, whatever the result. Australian gun owners must obtain a licence, which requires a background check, and the completion of training classes. Licensees must show "need" at application, such as proof of membership in a shooting club, or permission to hunt from a landowner. Australia's gun owners have organized politically to oppose "gun control" (with limited success), and the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia has obtained some organizational assistance from the U.S. National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest on Australia's "gun control" struggle can be found on the SSAA's website at http://www.ssaa.org.au/ APPENDIX IV. Washington, D.C.: a "gun control" paradise Absolute numbers of murders and homicides in the District of Columbia, as well as population-adjusted rates of murder and homicide during the years 1957-1994, including those years studied by Loftin, et al. Sources: _Uniform Crime Reports_ for the United States, 19xx-1994, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Dept. of Justice, SuDoc# J 1.14/7:9xx _Vital Statistics of the United States, 19xx-1991, Vol. II - Mortality Part B, National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Public Health Service, SuDoc# HE 20.6210:9xx/v.2/pt.B _Statistical Abstract of the United States 19xx-1994, Bureau of the Census, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, SuDoc# C 3.134:9xx Pop(100K) = population estimates (D.C. only, excluding non-D.C. Metropolitan Statistical Area) and census figures for years ending in zero, in hundred thousands MNNM = murder/non-negligent manslaughter Homicide = Total homicides (including justifiable homicides and homicides due to "legal intervention" by the police) MNNM/100K and Hom(icide)/100K are population-adjusted figures (annual rates per 100,000 population) * (US)MNNM/100K reflects the population-adjusted MNNM figures for the entire United States (annual rates per 100,000 population), _excluding_the population and MNNM of the District of Columbia Formula: (US)MNNM/100K = ((usMNNM - dcMNNM) / (usPop - dcPop)) * 100,000 n.a. = not available LAW = 1976, the year in which D.C.'s Firearms Control Regulations Act became law (see 3.0.b) WASHINGTON, D.C. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Year Pop(100K) MNNM Hom MNNM/100K Hom/100K (US)MNNM*/100K 1957 7.63 78 68 10.2 8.9 4.7 1958 7.57 74 n.a. 9.8 n.a. 4.7 1959 7.61 74 75 9.7 9.9 4.8 1960 7.63956 81 88 10.6 11.5 5.1 1961 7.75 88 89 11.4 11.5 4.8 1962 7.8 91 99 11.7 12.7 4.6 1963 7.95 95 88 12.0 11.1 4.6 1964 7.98 132 117 16.5 4.9 1965 7.97 148 122 18.6 15.3 5.1 1966 7.91 141 133 17.8 16.8 5.6 1967 7.91 178 174 22.5 22.0 6.1 1968 7.78 195 157 25.1 20.2 6.9 1969 7.62 287 243 37.7 31.9 7.2 1970 7.56570 221 200 29.2 26.4 7.8 1971 7.58 275 263 36.3 34.7 8.5 1972 7.52 245 252 32.6 33.5 8.9 1973 7.37 268 260 36.4 35.3 9.3 1974 7.23 277 275 38.3 9.7 1975 7.12 235 242 33.0 34.0 9.6 1976 7.0 -- 188 -- 202 LAW 26.9 8.7 1977 6.85 192 187 28.0 27.3 8.8 1978 6.71 189 172 28.2 25.6 8.9 1979 6.56 180 184 27.4 28.1 9.7 1980 6.35233 200 175 31.5 27.6 high> 10.2 1981 6.36 223 223 35.1 7.9 1986 6.26 194 176 31.0 28.1 8.5 1987 6.22 225 210 36.2 33.8 8.2 1988 6.2 369 308 59.5 8.3 1989 6.04 434 360 71.9 59.6 8.5 1990 6.069 472 403 77.9 66.5 9.3 1991 5.98 482 417 80.6 9.6 1992 5.89 443 389 75.2 66.0 9.2 1993 5.78 454 n.a. 78.6 n.a. 9.4 1994 5.70 399 n.a. 70.0 n.a. 8.8 1995 5.54 360 n.a. 65.0 n.a. 8.1 Analysis: Hom(icide) represents the same source that Loftin, et al. used, although they had the raw data broken down by months, not years, and used the firearm-related homicides, not total homicides. They also did not correct for the gradual decline in D.C.'s population which began at about the same time as MNNM began to increase sharply in D.C. during the late 1960s. As can be seen from the data above, the D.C. MNNM stats are an exaggeration of the national trend. Attributing the slight decline in homicides which occurred during 1976-1979 to the enactment of the D.C. "gun control" law is somewhat doubtful, especially because the decline had already begun in 1976, and for most of that year, the law wasn't in effect. If there was actually any such decline, it was unquestionably short-lived. Loftin, et al. were fortunate that their study concluded in 1987, before the NCHS numbers illustrating D.C.'s skyrocketing homicide rate would have been available. The FBI's UCR numbers, which would be available sooner, told a shocking story even as Loftin, et al. were going to press. (Note also the vast differences between the total homicide numbers as reported by the National Center for Health Statistics and the MNNM numbers reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the 1988-1991 period! People were evidently getting killed so fast that the doctors lost count...) APPENDIX V. The U.S. Supreme Court and the Second Amendment The U.S. Supreme Court, for most of its history, has had no controversies brought before it dealing with the meaning of the Second Amendment. Until the twentieth century, there were no "gun control" laws at the federal level, and the state militias were controlled at the state level, by the governors. As a result, the history of Second Amendment jurisprudence by the U.S. Supreme Court begins with Reconstruction, and the infringement of the civil rights of black Americans, especially the emancipated slaves, by governments of the former Confederacy, and by extralegal private racist groups like the White League and the Ku Klux Klan. The decision of the high court in the case of_U.S. v. Cruikshank_helped form the legal foundation for official disregard of the Fourteenth Amendment, and kept black Americans in a condition between slavery and freedom for a century after Emancipation. 1875: _The United States vs. William J. Cruikshank, et al._ U.S. Reports v.92 pp.542, Lawyer's Edition v.23 p.588 Appellees in this case were indicted on June 16th, 1873 under the Enforcement Act of 1870 on thirty-two counts, including "an intent to hinder and prevent the exercise" by "two citizens of the United States, 'of African descent and persons of color'" of 'the right to keep and bear arms for a lawful purpose'". Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite wrote for the majority that "The right... specified" in the indictment "is that of 'bearing arms for a lawful purpose.' This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." The Second Amendment, Waite wrote, "declares that it shall not be infringed; but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress. This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government, leaving the people to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow citizens of the rights it recognizes" to the police powers of the states and localities. [p. 553] From this statement we see that the Court's view of the Second Amendment in_Cruikshank_was that it is an individual right, capable of being infringed upon by one's "fellow citizens," but that the Second Amendment only protects against infringement of that right by the federal government. The right to keep and bear arms, the Court said, pre-dates the Constitution, and "is not dependent upon that instrument for its existence." A decade passed before the high court again addressed the issue of the Second Amendment. 1886: _Herman Presser vs. The State of Illinois_ U.S. Reports v.116 p.252, Supreme Court Reports v.6 p.580, Lawyer's Edition v.29 p.615 Apellee in this case was indicted on September 24, 1879 for violating an Illinois state law which prohibited "any body of men whatever, other than the regular organized volunteer militia of this State, and the troops of the United States, to associate themselves together as a military company or organization, or to drill or parade with arms in any city, or town, of this State, without the license of the Governor thereof..." Justice William B Woods, writing for the majority, addressed apellees' argument that the Illinois statute violated the Second Amendment: "We think it clear that the sections under consideration, which only forbid bodies of men to associate together as military organizations, or to drill or parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized by law, do not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms. But a conclusive answer to the contention that this amendment prohibits the legislation in question lies in the fact that the amendment is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the National government, and not upon that of the States." Woods went on to cite the_Cruikshank_decision, among others, as precedent. "It is undoubtedly true" Woods continued, "that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as of the States, and in view of this prerogative of the general government, as well as of its general powers, the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms, so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security, and disable the people from performing their duty to the general government." [pp. 264-265] Thus, according to the Supreme Court in_Presser,_states may restrict private military organizations without violating the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The Court in_Presser_ repeated their argument from_Cruikshank_that the Second Amendment is only a limitation on the power of the Federal government, and not the states. However, the majority speculated that the Federal government's power over the state militia prohibited state laws which disarmed ordinary citizens of the means to carry out their militia duties. If the Second Amendment only serves to protect the right of the people to keep and bear arms against the depredations of the Federal government, what of the constitutionality of federal "gun control" laws? The National Firearms Act of 1934 was passed to restrict the availability of "gangster weapons" like machineguns and sawed-off shotguns, and just a few years later, the Court heard the appeal of the United States resulting from a dismissed indictment under the Act, which was the first major "gun control" law at the federal level. 1939: _The United States vs. Jack Miller, et al._ U.S. Reports v.307 p.174, Supreme Court Reports v.59 p.816, Lawyer's Edition v.83 p.1206 The U.S. District Court of the Western District of Arkansas, on January 3, 1939 dismissed the indictment of Jack Miller and Frank Layton under the National Firearms Act, declaring in part that the Act "offends the inhibition of the Second Amendment to the Constitution". Miller and Layton had been indicted for transporting a short-barreled shotgun from Claremore, OK to Siloam Springs, AR without registering the weapon and obtaining the $200 transfer tax stamp as required by law. The United States appealed the U.S. District Court's decision directly to the Supreme Court because the constitutionality of the law was at issue. The Supreme Court heard only the government's side of the case, since Miller and Layton were not represented before the Court. In the majority opinion, Justice James C. McReynolds wrote: "In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense." [p. 178] McReynolds cited _Aymette v. State,_Tennessee Reports v.21 (2 Humphreys) p.154 (1840) which defined "arms" as "the ordinary military equipment." Consequently, the Supreme Court reversed the District Court's decision, and reinstated the indictment. The Second Amendment, wrote McReynolds, had the "obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness" of the militia, and "[i]t must be interpreted with that end in view." The militia, "comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense... And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time." McReynolds also noted that "[m]ost if not all of the states have adopted provisions touching the right to keep and bear arms." [p. 182] The Court in_Miller_did not make an issue of the defendants' status as members of the militia, but rather focused on the applicability of a short-barreled shotgun for militia use, and particularly whether the statute in question, which taxed "gangster weapons," was an unconstitutional extension of federal power, as the lower court had contended. "In the absence of evidence" having been presented that such a weapon was "part of the ordinary military equipment," the court was compelled "at this time" not to draw any conclusions. The Court again implied that the Second Amendment protects an individual right against the infringement of federal power, but the Court was willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt in this case. The Court's recognition of_Aymette_is particularly interesting, since it implies that "arms" in the wording of the Second Amendment means "the ordinary military equipment," and that the ownership of military-type weapons is particularly well protected under the Amendment. The Court's reference to the state constitutional guarantees of the right to keep and bear arms is also interesting, since it implies some equivalence between the right protected under the Second Amendment, and the right protected by the similar state provisions, something that cannot be reconciled with the idea that the Second Amendment recognizes a right of the state militias not to be disarmed. The militia, as McReynolds points out, comprises_at least_"all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense," and the definition of "the people" in the Bill of Rights is today even broader. With rising violent crime rates since the 1960s, more and more federal "gun control" laws have been added to the books, but no cases have yet reached the Supreme Court to challenge these laws on a Second Amendment basis. A number of Second Amendment appeals have be denied by the high court, allowing some poorly researched lower court decisions to stand, and these form the foundation of many lower court decisions construing the Second Amendment as protecting only a right of the state militias. The most prominent examples are: _Tot vs. United States,_Federal Reports 2nd series v.131 p.261 (1942), and_Cases v. United States,_Federal Reports 2nd series v.131 p.916 (1942). Dicta (commentary) in some recent Supreme Court decisions gives insight into the Court's contemporary view of the Second Amendment, and though these cases do not have any substantive weight in the Court's Second Amendment jurisprudence, such statements may be worthwhile to refer to. 1980: _Lewis vs. United States_ Supreme Court Reports v.100 p.915, United States Reports v.445 p.55, Lawyer's Edition 2nd series v.63 p.798 _Lewis_concerned an appeal of a weapons conviction under the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act by a previously convicted felon who was not represented by counsel at the earlier trial. As a footnote, Justice Harry Blackmun volunteered that "[t]hese legislative restrictions on the use of firearms are neither based upon constitutionally suspect criteria, nor do they trench upon any constitutionally protected liberties." [p. 65] Blackmun cited_Miller,_as well as several lower court cases upholding various parts of the 1968 law. Of course, the fact that a felon may be deprived of the right to keep and bear arms (as a result of due process of law) has no bearing on whether an ordinary citizen has a right to keep and bear arms which must be respected by government. 1990: _Perpich vs. Department of Defense_ Supreme Court Reports v.110 p.2418, United States Reports v.496 p.334, Lawyer's Edition 2nd series v.110 p.312 Governor Rudy Perpich of Minnesota sued to prevent the state's National Guard units from being federalized and sent out of the United States to train in Central America in 1987. The opinion of the Court, delivered by Justice John Paul Stevens, noted that the Federal Government retains supremacy over the states "in the area of military affairs. The Federal Government provides virtually all of the funding, the materiel, and the leadership for the State Guard units. The Minnesota unit, which includes about 13,000 members, is affected only slightly when a few dozen, or at most a few hundred, soldiers are ordered into active service for brief periods of time." Congress, the Court said, has provided that if a federal mission were to interfere with the Guard's response to local emergencies, the Governor could veto the proposed mission. Additionally, as long as there is a provision in the law for a state to maintain its own defense force at its own expense, "there is no basis for an argument" that the present militia system deprives a state of having its own militia. [p.328-329] 1990: _United States vs. Verdugo-Urquidez_ Supreme Court Reports v.110 p.1056, United States Reports v.494 p.259, Lawyer's Edition 2nd series v.108 p.222 The appellee was a Mexican citizen who attempted to argue that the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures apply to seizures of foreign-owned property by U.S. agents operating in a foreign country. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, in writing for the majority, described "the people" in the Fourth Amendment as "a term of art" used in the text of the Constitution (as in the Second Amendment) to refer to "a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community." [p.232-233] The basis of the appeal was rejected, since at the time of the search, the appellee "was a citizen and resident of Mexico with no voluntary attachment to the United States, and the place searched was in Mexico." [p.239] 1997: _Printz vs. United States_ Supreme Court Reports v.117 p.2365, United States Reports v.___ p.___, Lawyer's Edition 2nd series v.138 p.914 Justice Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion in this case, which found unconstitutional the federal mandate for local law enforcement officers to perform Brady Act background checks, contains some hints about the kind of cases the Court, or at least Justice Thomas, expects in the future. In an extensive aside, Thomas observes that, like the First Amendment, "[t]he Second Amendment similarly appears to contain an express limitation on the government's authority." The Court, he writes, "has not had recent occasion to consider the nature of the substantive right safeguarded by the Second Amendment. If, however, the Second Amendment is read to confer a personal right to 'keep and bear arms,' a colorable argument exists that the Federal Government's regulatory scheme, at least as it pertains to the purely intrastate sale or possession of firearms, runs afoul of that Amendment's protections. Perhaps, at some future date, this Court will have the opportunity to determine whether Justice Story was correct when he wrote that the right to bear arms 'has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic.'" APPENDIX VI. "Pious Frauds: Or, If It Sounds Too Good To Be True..." In the Middle Ages, it seems that every church had a splinter of the True Cross, or a piece of cloth supposedly from the burial shroud of Jesus. While some of these were honest mistakes (and maybe one of those splinters was what it was claimed to be), a great many of the holy artifacts the peasants came to see were what we now call "pious frauds," manufactured relics made with the expectation that people would believe them to be real. It was easy for some monks and priests to justify this dishonesty, because they made it easier for the peasants to believe. Along with an enormous amount of good, well-researched evidence on the pro-RKBA side, there exist several items, mostly "quotations," which are popular, but in fact are "pious frauds." Whoever first put these items into circulation must have known that they were false, but figured it would "help the cause". It doesn't. Neither does spreading them around today. To help combat the spread of bad information, and prevent pro-gun authors and speakers from looking foolish when somone catches them with one of these apocryphal references, the texts of the most common ones are analyzed below: The "Liberty Teeth" Speech by "George Washington" -- "Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. The church, the plow, the prarie wagon, and citizen's firearms are indelibly related. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable. Every corner of this land knows firearms, and more than 99 99/100 percent of them by their silence indicate they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference; they deserve a place with all that's good. When firearms, go all goes; we need them every hour." --falsely attributed to George Washington, address to the second session of the first U.S. Congress This quotation, sometimes called the "liberty teeth" quote, appears nowhere in Washington's papers or speeches, and contains several historical anachronisms: the reference to "prarie wagon" in an America which had yet to even begin settling the Great Plains (which were owned by France at the time), the reference to "the Pilgrims" which implies a modern historical perspective, and particularly the attempt by "Washington" to defend the utility of firearms (by_use_of_statistics!) to an audience which would have used firearms in their daily lives to obtain food, defend against hostile Indians, and which had only recently won a war for independence. The "99 99/100 percent" is also an odd phrase for 18th century America, which tended not to use fractional percentages. It's clear that "Washington" is addressing "gun control" arguments which wouldn't exist for another couple of centuries, not to mention doing so in a style that is uncharacteristic of the period, and uncharacteristic of Washington's addresses to Congress, both of which exhibited a high degree of formality. This is a false quote, but bits and pieces of it still continue to crop up from time to time. Most recently, this quote has been seen circulated on flyers at gun shows attributed to Neil Knox's Firearms Coalition, but Knox isn't the original source of this "speech," and even national publications, such as_Playboy_magazine, have been snared by it. (_Playboy_published the "quote" in December 1995 as part of an article entitled "Once and for All: What the Founding Fathers Said About Guns". After consulting with an assistant editor of the George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia,_Playboy_published a lengthy correction in March 1996.) The "Hitler" Quote That Wouldn't Die: "1935 Will Go Down In History!" -- "This year* will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!" --falsely attributed to Adolf Hitler, "Abschied vom Hessenland!" ["Farewell to Hessia!"], ['Berlin Daily' (Loose English Translation)], April 15th, 1935, Page 3 Article 2, Einleitung Von Eberhard Beckmann [Introduction by Eberhard Beckmann] This quotation, often seen without any date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the most significant of which is that the date given (*in alternate versions, the words "This year..." are replaced by "1935...") has no correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun registration, nor would there have been a need for the Nazis to pass such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government were already in effect. The Nazi Weapons Law (or_Waffengesetz_) which further restricted the possession of militarily useful weapons and forbade trade in weapons without a government-issued license was passed on March 18, 1938. The citation usually given for this quote is a jumbled mess, and has only three major clues from which to work. The first is the date, which does not correspond (even approximately) to a date on which Hitler made a public speech, and a check of the texts of Hitler's speeches does not reveal a quotation resembling this (which is easily understandable when you realize that "Hitler" is commenting on a non-existent law). The second clue is the newspaper reference, which if translated into German resembles the title of a newspaper called _Berliner Tageblatt,_ and a check of the issue for that date reveals that the page and column references given are to the arts and culture page! No Hitler speech appears in the pages of _Berliner Tageblatt_ on that date, or dates close to it, because there was no such speech to report. Finally, the citation includes a proper name "Eberhard Beckmann," which is sometimes cited as "by Einleitung Von Eberhard Beckmann," which is an important clue itself, because it reveals that the citation was fabricated by someone who had so little knowledge of the German language that they were unaware that "Einleitung" isn't the fellow's first name! The only "Eberhard Beckmann" which has been uncovered thus far did indeed write introductions, but he was a journalist for a German broadcasting company after WWII, and he wrote several introductions to_photography books,_ one of which was photos of the German state of Hesse (or Hessia), which may be the source of the curious phrase "Abschied vom Hessenland!" which appears in the citation. This quotation, however effective it may be as propaganda, is a fraud. The "B'nai B'rith" speech by "Janet Reno" -- "The most effective means of fighting crime in the United States is to outlaw the possession of any type of firearm by the civilian populace." --falsely attributed to Janet Reno, then-state attorney for Dade County, speech to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida B'nai B'rith gathering, ca.1991 This supposed "quote" first got national attention when it appeared in the April 1995 issue of _Soldier of Fortune,_ as part of an article by Mike Williams entitled "Citizen Militias: '...Necessary to the Security of a Free State...'" and was picked up by the New York Times Syndicate as part of their coverage of the militia movement in the wake of the bombing in Oklahoma City. According to editorials by Martin Dyckman, published in the _St. Petersburg Times_ May 2 and May 28, 1995, the "quote" appears to have originated with an affidavit written by Fred Diamond of Miami, FL who claimed to have heard Reno speak in Coral Gables (not Fort Lauderdale) "on or about November 1, 1984". According to Diamond's affidavit, "Janet Reno told the members of our group assembled, that waiting periods were only a step, that registration was only a step, and further that the prohibition of the private ownership of firearms was the only ultimate solution to controlling crime. I was shocked and appalled to hear her, an elected public official sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, espouse and advocate a position that would effectively repeal the guarantees of the Second Amendment." Early in 1991, after Reno was nominated to be Attorney General, Diamond talked to Marion Hammer, then the National Rifle Association's Florida lobbyist, and NRA sent him affidavits to sign. Diamond says he rejected their first draft. Subsequently, Hammer's newsletter, _Florida Firing Line,_ published an article on Reno in March 1991, including almost word for word the key passage from Diamond's affidavit about what Reno allegedly said, but the newsletter put the speech in 1991, not 1984. (Reno would thus had to have made the comments in January or February of that same year!) Diamond didn't sign the affidavit (with the correct year) until June 17, 1991, after Reno had already been confirmed. Reno has been questioned about the "quote" and denies having said it, either in 1991 or 1984. A spokesman for the Justice Department, Bert Brandenburg, told the New York Times syndicate: "The assertion is untrue and the attorney general has never made such a statement" (Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 2, 1995). The Reno "quote" has appeared in print elsewhere, including_National Review_ on May 29, 1995 as part of an article by Alan W. Bock about the militia movement; and was reprinted in a_Guns and Ammo_editorial by Ed Moats on concealed carry in October of 1996. The "Socialist America" quote from "Sarah Brady" -- "Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us are totally disarmed." --falsely (hilariously?) attributed to Sarah Brady of Handgun Control, Inc. supposedly in _The American Educator,_ published by the American Federation of Teachers (or alternatively, attributed to a speech to AARP, late 1991) This bit of dialogue is reminiscent of a bad movie, and even if Sarah Brady really were bent on fighting for international socialism, she's not quite stupid enough to say so out loud! Even Lyndon LaRouche couldn't believe_this_conspiracy... "Jim 'the Bear' Brady has (or had) a Class III FFL!" -- This falls more into the category of an "urban legend" than an actual quote, and most likely resulted from a case of mistaken identity. If Sarah, who's a conservative Republican in most other respects (aside from her fetish for gun control), can have a secret double life as a closet Communist, can we then suppose that poor "gun victim" Jim can "rock-and-roll" with his machinegun habit? Can we imagine him at Jay Rockefeller's range wearing a "Happiness Is a Belt-Fed Weapon" T-shirt, as the Norinco brass mounds up in the spokes of his wheelchair? Not bloody likely. Republican senatorial candidate Al Salvi of Illinois found out the hard way in October of 1996 how not checking one's facts before opening one's mouth can cost you. In an interview with WBBM news radio in Chicago during the last week of the campaign, Salvi clumsily attempted to refute the claim that machineguns were already illegal in the United States: "In fact Jim Brady himself used to deal --there are people with-- machine guns. There are people with licenses to sell machineguns and automatic weapons." Worse yet, Salvi stepped in it again at a fundraiser soon afterwards: "Jim Brady was a licensed machinegun dealer before he was shot." Salvi apologized publicly and retracted the statements, but it couldn't save his shredded credibility. There's obviously more than one James Brady in the world, and in BATF's record books. --- "Pious Frauds" adapted in part from "Firing Back" by Clayton Cramer (clayton_cramer@RKBAdlcc.com), pp.48-52. Used by permission of the author, who has a homepage at http://cs.sonoma.edu/~cramerc .] --- INDEX AND GLOSSARY Adams, John (U.S. President, Vice-President to President Washington) 2.0.a Afghanistan Soviet occupation of (1979-1989), 4.0 "Air Taser" -- see stun "guns" "Assault Weapons" -- see Guns Amar, Akhil (law professor, Yale University), 2.1 American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), Appendix VI. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [U.S.], 1.1.a, Appendix I. American Federation of Teachers, Appendix VI. American Indian nations [U.S.] genocide of, 4.0 American Revolution, 4.0 American Society for Criminology (ASC) Hindelang Award for_Point Blank_by Gary Kleck, 1.1 Comparative Criminology award for_The Samurai, The Mountie And The Cowboy,_by David Kopel, Appendix III. American Sports Shooting Council (business group, U.S.), 1.3 Ammunition armor-piercing, 3.4, 3.4.a, Appendix I. Black Talon, 3.4.a "Black Rhino," 3.4.a, 3.6 pre-fragmented, 3.4.a Glaser Safety Slug, 3.4.a hollowpoint, 3.4.a, 4.0 "Razor Ammo" (formerly "Rhino Ammo"), 3.4.a "Rhino," 3.4.a Anderson, Jack (journalist, author), 3.6 AP [armor piercing, also Associated Press] Asprey, Robert (author), 4.0 Atlanta, GA Centennial Olympic Park bombing, 3.0.c AW ["assault weapon(s)"] Australia Sport Shooters Association of Australia, Appendix III. automatic [in common use this can mean either semi-automatic or full(y)-auto(matic), i.e. a machinegun. Fully automatic weapons continue to fire as long as the trigger is held down, until the magazine is empty. Full-auto weapons have been taxed and restricted in the U.S. since 1934 by the National Firearms Act.] Ayoob, Massad (firearms instructor), 1.0, 1.1.a Barnes, Ken (author of this FAQ) Email: kebarnes@cc.memphis.edu [Mr. Barnes is also the author of the 'Hit' List music FAQ on alt.fan.rush-limbaugh. He is a microbiologist.] BATF -- see Treasury Dept. Beccaria, Cesare (Italian criminologist, nobleman), 3.8 Beckmann, Eberhard (German broadcaster), Appendix VI. Bill of Rights [U.S.] -- see Law Biocode, Inc., 3.0.c Black, Phillip (Florida highway patrolman), 3.4 Blackmun, Harry (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), Appendix V. "Black Rhino" -- see ammunition Blackstone, Sir William (English jurist, author), 2.0, 2.0.a Blair, Tony (British prime minister), Appendix III. B'nai B'rith (Jewish fraternal organization), Appendix VI. Bock, Alan W. (), Appendix VI. BoR ["Bill of Rights"] Bordua, David (sociologist, University of Illinois), 1.0 Bovard, James (journalist, author), 2.3, 3.0 Brady Act, 3.2, 3.2.a, Appendix I. Brady, Jim (press secretary to President Reagan), 3.2, Appendix VI. Brady, Sarah (chairwoman, Handgun Control, Inc.), Appendix VI. Brandenburg, Bert (U.S. Justice Department Spokesman), Appendix VI. Brown, Ron (Commerce Secretary for President Clinton), 3.3 Bullet [the part of a round of ammunition which is expelled out the muzzle in the direction of the target when the gun is fired. Not the same thing as a cartridge or round.] "Bulletproof" vests -- see bullet-resistant vests Bullet-resistant vests, 3.4, 3.4.a C3I [Command, Control, Communications, (and) Intelligence], 4.0 Caliber [the diameter of the bullet in inches (or millimeters) which a gun is designed for. In shotguns, the caliber is expressed as "gauge," or the number of lead spheres of that diameter which would make up a pound of lead.] California Highway Patrol (CHP), 3.2 Cambodia (Kampuchea) Khmer Rouge genocide in, 4.0 "carjacking," [armed robbery/theft of a motor vehicle], 1.1 Carter, Hodding (journalist, author), 2.3 Cartridge [a unit of ammunition, also called a round, or (primarily among shotgunners --and artillerymen) a shell] Case [the part of a round of ammunition which remains in the gun (at least until ejected) when the gun is fired. The case is usually a brass cup containing the propellant powder and a form of primer. Spent cases are often called "brass".] CCW ["concealed carry weapon"] Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [U.S.], 3.6 Chapman, Mark (assassin), 3.2 Chemical defense sprays, 1.1.a, 3.8.a and animals, 1.1.a and effectiveness, 1.1.a and toxicity, 1.1.a use of oven cleaner as, 1.1.a weapons substitution and, 1.1.a China Communist (People's "Republic" of China), 4.0 China Jiang An (trading company), 3.3 China Northern Industries Corporation a.k.a. Norinco (arms manufacturer), 3.3 CITIC (China Trust and Investment Corporation), 3.3 genocide in, 4.0 "People's Liberation Army," 3.3, 4.0 Poly Technologies (arms manufacturer), 3.3 pro-liberty movement in (1989), 4.0 Tien an men Square massacre (1989), 4.0 Chinard, Gilbert (professor, Princeton University), 3.8 Children and guns -- see Guns Churchill, Winston (British prime minister), Section IV opening quote Civil rights movement [U.S.], 2.0, 2.3 Civil War [U.S.], 2.0, 2.2, 2.3, Appendix V. CLEO ["chief law enforcement officer"] Clark, Ramsey (Attorney General to President Johnson), Appendix I. Clarke, Arthur C. (author, inventor of communications satellite), 4.0 Clinton, Bill (U.S. President), Section III opening quote, 3.2.a, 3.3, 3.4, Appendix I. Clip -- see Magazine Colfax, (Louisiana) Massacre [U.S.], 2.3 "collective rights," 2.1 Concealed-carry reform -- see Law Constitution, U.S. -- see Law commerce, interstate -- see law Commerce, U.S. Department of Bureau of the Census _Statistical Abstract of the United States,_ 3.0.a, 3.0.b Cook, Phillip (criminologist, Duke University), 1.1.c "Cop-killer" bullet -- see Police Cottey, Talbert J. (), 3.0.b Cottrol, Robert (law professor, Rutgers University-Camden), 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 2.3, 3.3 Cramer, Clayton (author), 1.0, 2.0, Appendix VI. Crime and urban settings, 1.1 and victim selection, 3.1 "carjacking," 1.1 criminals as homicide victims, 1.1 Cruikshank, William (), 2.3 CS [orthochlorobenzal malononitrile, a tear gas, sometimes called "chemical mace" (after "Mace," a tradename for an older, less effective tear gas formula made by Smith and Wesson which actually contained CN, or alphachloroacetophenone). Tear gas is generally believed to be less effective than OC pepper spray.] Curtis, Michael Kent (lawyer, author), 2.3 Daly, Kathleen (author), 3.5 Dawes, William (tanner, patriot), 4.0 Day, Dan (contributing author to FAQ), 2.2 Declaration of Independence (U.S.), 2.0.a Dees, Morris (executive director, Southern Poverty Law Center), 4.0 Defense, Department of [U.S.] Advanced Research Projects Agency, 3.6.a Department of Justice [U.S.] -- see Justice, Department of [U.S.] DGU ["defensive gun use"] Diamond, Fred (insurance and pension consultant), Appendix VI. Diamond, Raymond (law professor, Tulane University), 2.0, 2.1 2.3, 3.3 "dishonest respondent" hypothesis, 1.1.b, 1.1.c Dodd, Thomas (U.S. Senator, D-CT), Appendix I. Dole, Robert (former Senate majority leader, presidential candidate, R-KS), 3.3 Dowlut, Robert (deputy general counsel, NRA), 2.3 Duckett, Lowell K. (Washington, DC police lieutenant), 3.0.b Dunblane, Scotland mass murder, Appendix III. Dunlap, Jr., Col. Charles J. (U.S.A.F.), 4.0 Dvorchak, Robert (AP reporter), 3.4.a Dyckman, Martin (journalist), Appendix VI. Eastwood, Clint (actor, director), 3.6, Appendix I. Elliot, Jonathan (author), Section II opening quote Federal Firearms License (FFL), 3.0.a, Appendix I. Feinstein, Dianne (U.S. Senator, D-CA), Section III opening quote Ferguson, Colin (mass murderer), 3.2 "fifth auxiliary right," 2.0.a Fischer, David H. (historian), 4.0 Fletcher, Andrew (Scottish Whig political theorist), 2.0.a "for the common defence" voted down by U.S. Senate, 2.1 "43:1" ratio, 1.1 Franklin, Benjamin (scientist, U.S. Ambassador to France), 2.2 Gallup Poll, 1.1.b Gauge -- see Caliber GCA '68 [Gun Control Act of 1968, see Appendix I.] General Accounting Office (GAO) [U.S.] Gun Control -- Implementation of the Brady Act (report), 3.2.a General Services Administration [U.S.] National Archives, 2.0.a Germany (Federal Republic) Deutsche Shutzenbund, Appendix III. Germany (Third Reich) genocide in, 4.0 occupation of Poland (1939-1945), 4.0 Gertz, Marc (criminologist, Florida State University), 1.1, 1.1.b Gibson, James William (author), 4.0 Girardet, Edward (journalist, author), 4.0 Gorbachev, Mikhail (Soviet dictator), 4.0 Grant, Ulysses S. (Union general, U.S. President), 2.3 Gray, William (contributing author to FAQ), 3.0.a Green, Ernest G. (investment banker), 3.3 Great Britain and U.S. Revolutionary War, 4.0 Gulag -- see Soviet Union "Gun Control" ammunition registration, 3.0 and censorship, 2.1 and children, 1.3 and "collective" rights, 2.1 and crime rates, 1.1.a, 3.8, Appendix II. and effectiveness, 1.1.a, 3.0, 3.0.b, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2.a, 3.3, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.8.a, Appendix II, Appendix IV. and elitism, 2.1 and genocide, 3.0, 3.3, 4.0 and non-lethal defense, 1.1.a, 3.8.a and racism, 2.0, 2.3 and U.S. Revolutionary War, 4.0 as "public health" measure, 1.1 background checks, 3.0, 3.2, 3.2.a, Appendix I. bans, 2.3, 3.0.a, 3.3, 3.4, 3.4.a, 3.5, 3.6, Appendix I. buy-backs, 3.7 concealed carry, 3.0.a, 3.8, 3.8.a, 3.8.b, Appendix I., Appendix II. gun confiscation, 3.0, 3.5, 3.7, Appendix III. gun registration, 3.0, 3.0.b, 3.5, Appendix IV. licensing gun owners, 3.0, 3.0.a waiting periods, 3.0.a, 3.2, 3.2.a, Appendix I. weapons substitution and, 1.1.a, 3.5 Gun Owners of America [U.S.] addresses and phone numbers, 4.0 Gunpowder -- see Powder Guns assault rifles, 3.0, 3.3, 4.0 AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikov model 1947), 4.0\ Colt M16A2, 1.2.a lethality of, 3.3 "assault weapons," 3.3, 3.5, 3.6, Appendix I. and accidents, 1.1, 1.3, 3.0.a and cars, 1.3, 3.0.a and children, 1.3 and crime deterrence, 1.1, 1.1.a, 1.2, 3.8 and crime rates, 1.1, 3.0.b, 3.8, 3.8.a, Appendix II, Appendix IV. and defensive effectiveness, 1.1, 1.1.a, 1.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4.a, 3.8 and disabled, 1.2, 3.1 and drugs, 3.2, 3.5 and elderly, 1.2, 3.1 and lethality, 1.2, 3.1, 3.3, 3.5 and mentally ill, 3.2, Appendix I. and multiple attackers, 1.1.a, 1.2, 3.1, 3.3 and physical strength, 1.2, 3.1, 3.8.a and poor, 3.5 and safety education, 1.1, 1.3 and suicides, 1.1, 3.0.a and women, 1.2.a, 3.8.b as medium of exchange in illicit economy, 3.5, 3.6 concealed carry of, 1.2, 3.0.a, 3.5, 3.8, 3.8.a, Appendix I., Appendix II. criminal acquisition of, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2.a, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8.a criminal preferences in, 3.5 frequency of use, generally, 1.1, 3.0, 3.0.a frequency of use in violent crime, 1.1 frequency of use in self-defense, 1.1, 1.1.b, 1.1.c, 1.2 handguns, Colt Government Model M1911A1 (.45 semi-auto), 3.5 Glock 17 (9mm semi-auto), 3.6, Appendix I. Norinco "Model of the 1911A1" (.45 semi-auto), 3.3 Ruger P-89 (9mm semi-auto), 3.2 Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, 3.0.b, 3.5 "Saturday Nite Specials," 1.1.a, 3.5, 3.6 hunting rifles, 3.0.b, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, Appendix I. machineguns, 1.1.a, 3.3, Appendix I. number of in U.S., 3.0, Appendix I. "plastic," 3.6, Appendix I. retention of, 1.2 shotguns, 1.1.a, 3.0.b, 3.4, 3.5, Appendix I. Halbrook, Stephen (lawyer, author), 2.0, 2.1, 2.3, 3.3 Hamilton, Alexander (Treasury Secretary to President Washington), 2.0, 2.0.a, 3.3, quotation 4.0 Hamilton, Peter J. (), 2.3 Hammer, Marion (first female president of NRA, first CCW license holder under Florida's reformed 1987 CCW law), 1.3, Appendix VI. Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI) [U.S.], 3.4.a handguns [concealable firearms designed to be held with only one hand, they are more often used with two hands, for accuracy, and to help minimize recoil. There are many basic designs, but the most common are the semi-automatic pistol, the revolver, and the derringer. Handguns are generally less deadly than long guns, though in heavier calibers (and especially when used with hollowpoint ammunition) they can be effective personal defense weapons. That's why police have them.] Harris, David A. (), 3.6.a Harriston, Deborah (journalist), 3.0.c Hawkins, Gordon (professor, University of California, Berkeley), 3.1 Heaviside pulse gun detector, 3.6.a Henry, Patrick (orator, governor of Virginia), Section II opening quote Herbert, Hilary A. (), 2.3 "Hijacker special," 3.6 Hileman, Lawrence (police informant), Appendix I. Hinckley, Jr., John (attempted assassin), 3.2, Appendix I. Hitler, Adolf (dictator, mass murderer, German Third Reich), Appendix VI. Holocaust, 3.0 hollowpoint(s) [a type of ammunition utilizing a bullet with a hollow tip, often precut or scored so as to expand to a larger diameter within a target, and transfer more energy to the target, rather than passing through and possibly hitting whatever is behind the target. Hollowpoints help increase the effectiveness of smaller calibers. Hollowpoints do not "explode," nor are they in any way "armor-piercing," contrary to erroneous reports by uninformed members of the press.] homicides, justifiable, 1.1 House of Representatives, U.S. _Gun Laws and the Need for Self-Defense_(1995 hearings), 1.0 Howard, John (Australian prime minister), Appendix III. Hughes, William J. (D-NJ), Appendix I. International Association of Chiefs of Police, 1.1.a "instant-check" system, 3.2, 3.2.a, Appendix I. "interstate commerce" clause -- see law "In The Line Of Fire" (motion picture), 3.6, Appendix I. Iraq, 1.2.a Irwin, Donald (Canadian provincial constable), 3.4 Isotag, LLC; 3.0.c Israel, 1.2.a Japan Nihon Raifuru Shageki Kyokai (NRA), Appendix III. Japanese-Americans, internment of 4.0 Jay, John (first Chief Justice of U.S. Supreme Court), 3.3 Jefferson, Thomas (U.S. President), 3.8, Section IV opening quote Jewell, Richard (security guard, 1996 Atlanta Olympics), 3.0.c Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB, or Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) defense of Warsaw Ghetto, 4.0 Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) [U.S.] address and phone numbers, 1.0 "Dial 911 and Die!", 1.0 "'Gun Control' Gateway to Tyranny", see Appendix I. "Lethal Laws", 3.0, 3.3, 4.0 Johnson, Lyndon (U.S. President), Appendix I. Justice, Department of [U.S.] Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, 1.1, 1.1.b, 1.1.c National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, 1.1.c Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1.1.b Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) [U.S.] and background checks, 3.0.a, 3.2.a, 3.3, Appendix I. Uniform Crime Reports, 3.2.a, 3.8, 3.8.a, Appendix II., Appendix IV. Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, 1.2, 3.4 National Institute of Justice The Armed Criminal in America: A Survey of Incarcerated Felons, 3.5 Karadzic, Radovan (Bosnian Serb leader), 1.2.a Karl, Jonathan (journalist, author), 4.0 Kates, Jr., Donald (lawyer, criminologist), 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 Keen, David (chemist), 3.4.a Kellerman, Arthur (physician), 1.1 Kellogg, William P. (governor of Louisiana), 2.3 Kemp, Jack (former vice-presidential candidate, R-NY), 3.3 Keneally, Thomas (author), 4.0 Kennedy, Robert (U.S. presidential candidate - 1968), Appendix I. Kleck, Gary (criminologist, Florida State University), 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 3.0, 3.3, 3.5, 3.6, 3.8, 3.8.a, Appendix II., Appendix III. King County, WA (U.S.), 1.1 King, Jr., Martin Luther (U.S. civil rights leader), Appendix I. King, Rodney, (drunk driver) 1.1.a Knox, Neil (board member, NRA), Appendix VI Kopel, David B. (author), 2.0, Appendix III. Korea North ("Democratic" People's "Republic" of Korea), 4.0 Kotell, Peter (writer), 3.4.a Ku Klux Klan (U.S.), 2.3, Appendix V. Kurzman, Dan (author), 4.0 LaPierre, Wayne (NRA spokesman and chief executive officer) 1.3, 2.1, 3.0, 3.0.a, 3.2, 3.3, 3.5, 3.7, 3.8 Law Case law, U.S., 1.0, 2.0, 2.3, 3.2.a, 3.3, Appendix I. Appendix V. Concealed-carry reform, 3.0.a, 3.8, 3.8.a, 3.8.b, Appendix II. Constitution, of U.S. states and RKBA, 2.3 Virginia, 2.0, 2.0.a, 2.3 Constitution, U.S. Article I, 2.0 "interstate commerce" clause, Appendix I. "militia clauses," 2.0.a Article II, 2.0 Article V, 2.2 Amendment I, 2.1, 2.2 Amendment II, 2.0, 2.0.a, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.3, 4.0, Appendix I. and military weapons, 3.3 and nuclear weapons, 2.2 application to state and local governments, 2.3 as deterrent to tyranny, 4.0 meaning of "well regulated", 2.0.a punctuation in, 2.0.a text of, 2.0 Amendment IV, 2.1, 3.6.a Amendment IX, 2.1 Amendment X, 2.1, 3.2.a, Appendix I. Amendment XIV, 2.3 and "incorporation" doctrine, 2.3 Constitution, German (Federal Republic), Appendix III. Constitution, Soviet Union (CCCP), 2.1 Statutes, Australian "gun control," Appendix III. Statutes, Canadian "gun control," Appendix III. and OC pepper spray, 1.1.a Statutes, German (Third Reich) Waffengesetz [Law on Weapons] of March 18, 1938, 3.0, Appendix I. Appendix VI. Statutes, German (Federal Republic) "gun control," Appendix III. and OC pepper spray, 1.1.a, Appendix III. Statutes, Japanese "gun control," Appendix III. Statutes, Switzerland "gun control," Appendix III. Statutes, United Kingdom common law RKBA, 2.0 English Bill of Rights, 2.0.a "gun control," Appendix III. Statutes, U.S. federal "gun control" laws, Appendix I. Militia Act (1792), 2.0, 2.1 Enforcement Act (1870), 2.3 Title 10, 2.0 Title 32, 2.0 Statutes, U.S. state and local "Jim Crow", 2.3 Morton Grove, IL, handgun ban, 2.3 New York City, NY "Assault rifle" ban, 3.0 Pasadena, CA ammunition registration law, 3.0 Statutes, Florida Title 46, 3.8, 3.8.a, Appendix II. Statutes, Vermont, 3.0 Washington, D.C. and OC pepper spray, 1.1.a Firearms Control Regulations Act (1976), 3.0.b, Appendix IV. Layton, Frank (), Appendix V. Law Enforcement - see Police LEO [law enforcement officer] Lee, Bruce (founder of Jeet Kune Do martial art, actor), 1.2.a Lennon, John (entertainer), 3.2 Levinson, Sanford (law professor, University of Texas), 2.1 Lexington and Concord (Mass.) battles of (U.S. Revolutionary War), 4.0 Library of Congress [U.S.] _The Constitution of the United States,_2.0.a Libya, 1.2.a Litvak, Lilya (Soviet WWII flying ace), 1.2.a Loftin, Colin (criminologist, University of Maryland), 3.0.b, 3.8.a, Appendix IV. long guns [firearms like rifles and shotguns, as distinguished from handguns - these are generally more accurate and deadlier weapons than handguns, but less concealable] Longstreet, James A. (Confederate general, corps commander to Gen. Robert E. Lee, cotton-broker, adjutant general of LA militia), 2.3 Lott, John R. (economist, University of Chicago Law School), 3.8.b Ludwig, Jens (criminologist, Georgetown University), 1.1.c Machine guns -- see Guns Magazine [the part of a firearm, often detachable, which holds ammunition and feeds it into the gun via a spring mechanism. Sometimes (incorrectly) called a clip. Clips are pieces of metal which can be used to load a non-detachable magazine.] Madison, James (U.S. President), 2.1, 3.3 Malcolm, Joyce (historian, Harvard University), 1.0, 2.0 McDowall, David (criminologist, University of Maryland), 3.0.b, 3.8.a McEnery, John D. (LA gubenatorial candidate - 1872), 2.3 (Mc)Kinney, Jesse (farmer, father of five, Grant Parish, LA), 2.3 McReynolds, James C. (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), Appendix V. Media reports ABC-TV, 3.4.a American Educator, Appendix VI. American Firearms Industry, 3.4.a Associated Press, 3.4.a, 3.8.a, 3.8.b CBS-TV, "Meet the Press," 3.3 "60 Minutes," Section III opening quote CNN, "Larry King Live," 3.3 generally, 1.1.c Guns and Ammo, Appendix VI. Houston Post, 3.2.a Los Angeles Times, 3.0 MTV (Music Television), "Enough is Enough," Section III opening quote National Review, Appendix VI. NBC-TV, 3.4 New England Journal of Medicine, 1.1, 3.0.b Newsweek, 3.4.a New York Times, 3.4.a Playboy, Appendix VI. Soldier of Fortune, Appendix VI. Wall Street Journal, 3.4.a Washington Post, 3.0.b, 3.6 Metaksa, Tanya (lobbyist for NRA), 3.4.a "militia clauses" -- see Law Militia, [U.S.], 2.0, 2.1, 4.0 militia, negro, 2.3 Miller, Jack (), Appendix V. Millimeter-wave imaging (MMWI), 3.6.a Millitech, Inc., 3.6.a Minutemen (U.S. Revolutionary War), 4.0 MNNM [from the phrase "murder/non-negligent manslaughter" as used in the FBI's_Uniform Crime Reports_] "more gun dealers than gas stations," 3.0.a Morton Grove, IL, 2.3 Morton, Chris (contributing author to FAQ), 1.2.a Moynihan, Daniel (U.S. Senator, D-NY), 3.4.a Muhlenberg, Frederick (Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in the First Congress, U.S. Representative, Federalist-PA), 2.0.a Mui Ng, (according to tradition, founder of Wing Chun Kung Fu), 1.2.a Mujahedeen ["fighters of God"] militia (Afghanistan), 4.0 Mustard, David (economist, University of Chicago), 3.8.b NFA [National Firearms Act of 1934, see Appendix I., also weapons restricted by the act, such as machineguns, short-barreled shotguns and rifles, and silencers] Nash, Christopher C. (candidate for sheriff, Grant Parish, LA), 2.3 National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) National Research Council Marking, Rendering Inert and Licensing of Explosive Materials, 3.0.c National Guard [U.S.] as organized militia, 2.0 National Rifle Association (NRA) [U.S.], 1.3, 3.2.a, 3.4, 3.4.a, 3.6, Appendix I. addresses and phone numbers, 1.3 and gun safety, 1.3 "Eddie Eagle" program (K-6), 1.3 and legislation, 3.4, 3.6, Appendix I. National Safety Council [U.S.], 1.3, 3.0.a Nelson, Levi (Allen?) (), 2.3 Nuclear weapons, 2.2, 4.0 Nurnberg War Crimes Trials, Appendix I. OC [oleoresin capsicum, the active ingredient in hot peppers] Office of Technology Assessment (U.S.) Taggants in Explosives, 3.0.c Oklahoma City, OK bombing, 3.0.c Okleberry, Kevin (contributing author to FAQ), 3.0.b Olin Foundation, 3.8.b Oven cleaner, 1.1.a Oxford English Dictionary, 2.0 Paine, Thomas (author, revolutionary), Section I opening quote Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 1.2.a Patriot air defense missile, 1.2.a Pepper spray, 1.1.a Perpich, Rudy (governor of MN), Appendix V. Personal alarms, 1.1.a Pinchback, Pinckney B. S. (lieutenant governor of Louisiana), 2.3 "Pious frauds," Appendix VI. Poland Solidarity [Solidarnosc] movement, 4.0 Warsaw Ghetto uprising (1943), 4.0 Police and armor-piercing ammunition, 3.4 and chemical defense sprays, 1.1.a and effectiveness, 1.1 and Glock 17, 3.6 and stun guns, 1.1.a disarmed by attacker, 1.2 killed with armor-piercing bullet, 3.4 killed with service weapon, 1.2, 3.4 responsibilities of, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 3.2, 3.7, 3.8 transition to semi-automatics as sidearm, 3.5 use of guns by, 1.1 Police Foundation (U.S.), 1.1.c Polsby, Daniel (law professor, Northwestern University), 1.0, 3.8.a Port Arthur, Tasmania (Australia), mass murder, Appendix III. Powder, propellant [Commonly called "gunpowder," or simply "powder". In modern firearms, the traditional recipe of the ancient Chinese (potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur) is replaced by a faster cleaner-burning explosive, termed "smokeless powder," usually containing nitrocellulose (also known as "guncotton"), which is prepared by treating cellulose fibers with nitric acid. Curiously, the Chinese used their explosive invention primarily for artistic, ceremonial, and signaling purposes, in fireworks; but its application by the Europeans as a weapon is generally credited by military historians as the beginning of the end of castles and armed knights (eventually, the end of feudalism and royalty itself). The heavy sulfurous smoke of those battlefields is still with us each summer in the U.S. as we celebrate our Independence Day, the 4th of July.] Prescott, Dr. Samuel (physician, patriot), 4.0 Pratt, Larry (executive director, Gun Owners of America), 4.0 Primer [In modern firearms, a shock-sensitive chemical mixture which when struck ignites the propellant powder in a round of ammunition, also the small deformable metal cup containing the priming mixture. Rimfire cartridges, such as the popular .22 cal. long rifle, do not contain a separate primer, but have the priming mixture cast into the deformable rim of the brass case. Priming mixtures once commonly contained mercury fulminate, which causes corrosion to exposed metal surfaces, such as those inside the barrel. Modern primers typically substitute lead salts like lead styphnate and/or lead azide, along with an oxidizing agent like potassium chlorate, plus other agents such as lead thiocyanate, antimony sulfide, and ground glass or carborundum, to act as stabilizers, fuels, sensitizers, binders, etc. There is some concern that the lead compounds produced by the burning of the priming mixture can result in health problems for shooters, particularly in poorly ventilated indoor ranges, much as lead anti-"knock" compounds in gasoline/petrol were once a source of environmental lead exposure in air pollution. There are lead-free primers specifically designed to minimize these problems, and which are becoming more popular with those shooters, like police agencies, who operate indoor ranges. As responsible gun owners know, all the lead_should_be sent downrange!] Prohibition (of alcohol), [U.S.], Appendix I. Public Health Service (U.S.) National Center for Health Statistics _Vital Statistics of the United States,_ 3.0.b, Appendix IV. Quadaffi, Muammar (Libyan dictator), 1.2.a, 3.6 Quakers -- see Society of Friends Quigley, Paxton (firearms instructor, author), 1.0 Rable, George C. (), 2.3 Rafsanjani, Hashemi (Iranian executive vice-president), 1.2.a Rand, Kristen (federal policy director, Violence Policy Center), 3.8.b Rangell, Charles (U.S. Representative, D-NY), Appendix I. Reay, Donald T. (chief medical examiner, King County, WA), 1.1 Reagan, Ronald (U.S. President), 3.2, Appendix I. Reconstruction Era [U.S.], 2.3 Register, R. C. (judge, Grant Parish, LA), 2.3 Rehnquist, William (U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice), Appendix III. Reloading, 3.0 Reno, Janet (Attorney General to President Clinton), Appendix VI. Revere, Paul (silversmith, patriot), 4.0 Reynolds, Glenn H. (law professor, U. of Tennessee), 2.2 Rice, Alan (writer, board member JPFO), 3.0, 3.3 RKBA ["right to keep and bear arms," from the phrase in Amendment II of the United States federal Constitution] Rixham, Jr., John (Woodlawn, MD police officer), 3.4 Roberts, Sandra (journalist), 3.0.6 Rockefeller, Jay (U.S. Senator, D-WV), 3.3 Roper Center (polling organization, U.S.), 1.1.b Rossi, Peter (author), 3.5 Rotem, Simha [a.k.a. Simcha Rathajzer, or "Kazik"] (ZOB fighter), 4.0 Russert, Tim (television journalist), 3.3 Safety rules, Appendix III. Salvi, Al (U.S. Senate candidate, R-IL), Appendix VI. Seldes, George (author, journalist), 2.1 select fire [capable of single shot, multi-shot burst, or full automatic (machinegun) rate of fire] semi-auto(matic) [fires one shot per pull of trigger, ejects case, loads another round into chamber] Senate, U.S. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms (report), 2.1 Federal Firearms Legislation (1968 hearings), Appendix I. Schindler, Oskar (German war profiteer and industrialist), 4.0 "Schindler's List" (motion picture), 4.0 Schulman, J. Neil (author, screenwriter), 1.0 Schumer, Charles (U.S. Rep., D-NY), 3.4.a Schwartz, Bernard (law professor, New York University), 2.0 Schwizer, Peter (author, journalist), 4.0 Second Amendment -- see Law Shalhope, Robert (historian, University of Oklahoma), 2.1 Shanley, Agnes (editor,_Chemical Engineering_), 3.0.c Shaw, Daniel (sheriff, Grant Parish, LA), 2.3 SHU [Scoville Heat Units, a pharmacological measure of the "heat" in hot peppers. Formerly conducted by a panel of human tasters, the SHU scale has now been calibrated with instrumental methods, and is measured via HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography). Bell peppers are assigned a zero, jalapenos rate about 5,000 SHU, and the hottest edible peppers, habaneros (_Capsicum chinense_), about 200-300,000 SHU. By contrast, the pepper extracts used in chemical defensive sprays have an effective dose of between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 SHU.] Simkin, Jay (research director, JPFO), 3.0, 3.3, Appendix I. Singletary, Otis (), 2.3 Slavery [U.S.], 2.0, 2.3 small arms [handheld firearms such as rifles, pistols, and shotguns as distinguished from crew-served artillery] (Society of) Friends ["Quakers", pacifist Christian denomination], 2.1 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Enginers (SPIE), 3.6.a Solomon, Gerald (U.S. Representative, R-NY), 3.3 Solzhenitsyn, Alexsandr (author, Soviet political prisoner), 4.0 Soviet Union [CCCP, Soyuz Sovetskykh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublic] constitution of -- see Law, Constitution, Soviet Union genocide in, 4.0 Gulag, 2.1 occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989), 4.0 tyranny in, 2.1, 4.0 Spielberg, Steven (producer, director), 4.0 "sporting purposes," 2.1, Appendix I. Sprays, chemical defense -- see Chemical defense sprays Squirt gun "Super Soaker," 3.6 Stalin, Josef (a.k.a. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Soviet dictator, mass murderer), 2.1 "Star Trek" (television series, U.S.), 1.1.a "states' rights," 2.1, 2.2 Stevens, John Paul (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), Appendix V. Stinger anti-aircraft missile (U.S.), 4.0 Story, Joseph (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), Appendix V. Strong, Sanford (former San Diego police officer, author), 1.0 Stun "guns," 1.1.a, 3.8.a Sugarmann, Josh (executive director, Violence Policy Center), 3.6, 3.8.b Supreme Court [U.S.], 1.0, 2.0, 2.3, 3.3, Appendix V. SWAT [Special Weapons and Tactics, or paramilitary police] Switzerland ProTell [gun owners association], Appendix III. "Taggants," 3.0.c TASER [Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle, a whimsical name given to the police stun gun by its inventor. Taken from the 'Tom Swift' children's book adventure series.] Taser, Air -- see stun "guns" Tear gas, 1.1.a Telecommunications, 2.2 "telescoping," 1.1.b, 1.1.c Thomas, Andrew (author), 3.3 Thomas, Clarence (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), Appendix V. Tillman, Alexander (), 2.3 Trail, Jeffrey (), 3.2 Trie, Yah Lin "Charlie" (restauranteur), 3.3 Trigger locks, 1.3 Treasury Department [U.S.] Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (BATF), 3.0, 3.0.a, 3.2.a, 3.4, 3.4.a, 3.5, Appendix I. University of Maryland study, 3.0.b, 3.8, Appendix II, Appendix IV. Urban, Mark (journalist, author), 4.0 van Alstyne, William (law professor, Duke University), 2.1 Van Atta, Dale (journalist), 3.6 Versace, Gianni (designer), 3.2 Waffengesetz - see Law, German Statutes (Third Reich) Waffen-SS [Shutzstaffel, armed elite guard], (German Third Reich), 4.0 Waite, Morrison R. (U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice), Appendix V. Walker, Bob (lobbyist for HCI), 3.4.a Waller, Roger (Dayton, OH police officer, murderer), Appendix I. Wang Jun (financier, arms dealer), 3.3 Wang Zhen (Communist Chinese general), 3.3 Ward, William (captain of Grant Parish, LA negro militia, LA state legislator), 2.3 Warfare guerilla, 4.0 telecommunications and, 4.0 Warmoth, Henry C. (governor of Louisiana), 2.3 Warsaw Ghetto uprising -- see Poland Washington, D.C., 1.1.a, 3.0.b, Appendix IV. Washington, George (U.S. President) "liberty teeth" quote, Appendix VI. Weapon substitution, 1.1.a, 3.5 Webster, Noah (lexicographer, patriot), 2.0 "well regulated" -- see Law, Amendment II White League [racist organization, U.S.], Appendix V. Wiersema, Brian (criminologist, University of Maryland), 3.0.b Williams, Mike (journalist), Appendix VI. Wintemute, Garen (physician, University of California, Davis), 1.1.b Woods, William (U.S. Supreme Court Justice), Appendix V. Women, 1.2.a, 3.8.b World Trade Center (NY) bombing, 3.0.c World War II, 2.2, 4.0 Wright, James (sociologist, Tulane University), 3.5 Wu, Corinna, 3.0.c Zelman, Aaron (executive director, JPFO), 3.0, 3.3, Appendix I. Zimring, Franklin E. (criminologist, law professor, University of California at Berkeley), 3.1 ZOB -- see Jewish Fighting Organization --End of FAQ--