From dstine@cisco.com Tue Nov 22 20:33:54 1994 Received: from nova.unix.portal.com (nova.unix.portal.com [156.151.1.101]) by jobe.shell.portal.com (8.6.9/8.6.5) with ESMTP id UAA08549 for ; Tue, 22 Nov 1994 20:33:54 -0800 Received: from hubbub.cisco.com (hubbub.cisco.com [198.92.30.32]) by nova.unix.portal.com (8.6.9/8.6.5) with ESMTP id UAA17645 for ; Tue, 22 Nov 1994 20:33:53 -0800 Received: from feta.cisco.com (feta.cisco.com [171.69.1.158]) by hubbub.cisco.com (8.6.8+c/CISCO.GATE.1.1) with SMTP id UAA03090 for chan@shell.portal.com; Tue, 22 Nov 1994 20:32:52 -0800 Message-Id: <199411230432.UAA03090@hubbub.cisco.com> To: chan@shell.portal.com Subject: II editorials Date: Tue, 22 Nov 94 20:32:52 PST From: "David S.A. Stine" Status: RO Jeff, The BAYPROFS box received a bunch of Independence Institute editorial sheets; I'm going to type 'em in here and hand them over to you to archive. Files are seperated by form-feeds. Spelling errors are mine... 1. "You Can't Beat an (Armed) Woman" By Paxton Quigley & Dave Kopel Should Nicole Simpson or Ronald Goldman have carried a gun? There's no guarantee that a handgun would have stopped their knife-wielding attacker. But a pistol in the hands of a trained woman may sometimes offer the only realistic way for a relatively small woman to stop a murderous assault by a man who may outweigh her by a hundred pounds or more. Handgun Control, Inc. however, believes that the Simpson case is proof of the need for more gun control. Since Mrs. Simpson and Mr. Goldman were murdered witha knife, the gun control lesson is not immediately apparent. But HCI argues that since domestic violence is a major public concern right now, Congress should attach to the pending crime bill a law to bar anyone who is the subject of a Restraining Order from ever owning a gun. Restraining Orders, though, are not criminal convictions. A Restraining Order involves no proof of guilt; accordingly, indigent persons have no right to have an attorney appointed in Restraining Order hearings. A Restraining Order does not require any finding that violence has occurred in the past. Rather, a Restraining Order may be issued on the basis that violence might occur in the future. Quite often, a judge in a divorce case will find that the ex-husband and ex-wife now loathe each other. With the consent of both parties, the judge will enter a restraining order for each ex-spouse to stay away from the other. In many cases, these oders stay in effect forever. Under current law, a judge who believes that a person in a domestic dispute might misuse a firearm has the authority to order the person to surrender his guns, and not acquire any more. The gun prohibitionists, however, want to treat a Restraining Order as the equivalent of a violent felony conviction, making the order a lifetime bar to the possession of any firearm -- even when a judge has found no reason to put a permanent gun ban in the Restraining Order. In the short run, turning Restraining Orders into gun confiscation orders will harm domestic violence enforcement. While many men today voluntarily do not contest proposed Restraining Orders, they would use every legal resource to fight a proposed order if the order meant not only staying away from someone they don't like anyway, but also surrendering their guns to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobaco and Firearms. The resultant legal delays would further clog an already overburdened judiicial system. Second, there really are some men who love their guns more than their ex-wives. After the guns are confiscated, some of these men may become so angry that they seek out and beat up their former spouses. Law enforcement will also be hampered by an increasing number of false domestic violence claims. Just as false calims of child abuse are now routine in custody battles, false claims of domestic violence will be used against gun collectors by vindictive ex-spouses. In the long run, more women will be killed. Even after men have been convicted of domestic violence, many women continue to live with them, as Nicole Simpson did after O.J. Simpson's misdemeanor conviction. If the gun prohibition lobby succeeds in taking guns out of such homes, the result will benefit abusive males. Quite often, abused women end up using their abuser's gun to shoot him in lawful self-defense. Tulane University sociologist James D. Wright explains that in domestic violence shootings, "the more common pattern is for wives to shoot their husbands. Proportionately, men kill their women by other means, more brutal means, more degrading means. To deny the [abused] woman the right to own the firearm is in some sense to guarantee in perpetuity to her husband the right to beat her at will." When an abused wife grabs her husband's revolver from the bedside table, and, as he is about to inflict another beating that will send her to the hospital, shoots him dead, the gun prohibitionist lobby calls it "tragic domestic homicide" that was "caused" by a gun. A more accurate description would be legitimate self-defense against a violator predator. In the last 15 years, the number of women choosing to own guns for self-defense has surged. Men and women are now equally likely to own firearms for protection. Perhaps that is one reason why the domestic homicide rate in the last 15 years has fallen by one-third, from 1.7 per 100,000 population to 1.1. The gun prohibitionist lobbies advise crime victims to give the criminals what they want, and rely on the police for protecion, or to get a dog. Reliance on such advice is one of the reasons that Nicole Simpson an Ronald Goldman are dead. (Nicole Simpson's big Akita did nothing except lead a neighbor to her dead body.) California law already admits that the police cannot protect every domestic violence victim. According, the California Penal Code specifies that any person who "reasonably believes" that he or she is "in grave danger because of circumstances forming the basis of a current restraining order issued by a court" may carry a handgun for protection -- without need to obtain a special permit from the government. While the gun prohibition lobbies insist the women should trust the government to protect them, every day more and more women are taking the responsibility for protecting themselves. Without delay, every state in the nation should modify its handgun carry laws so that, in a world where the government fails to protect victims, the victims can choose to legally carry their own means of self-protection. --30-- Paxton Quigley is the author of Armed and Female; Dave Kopel is Research Director of the Independence Institute, a think-tank in Denver. Authors speak for themselves and their opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Independences Institute. Nothing herein should be construed as an attempt to influence any pending legislation. "Ice Cream Machine" by Dave Kopel Imagine yourself in a dark alley surrounded by three gangsters. The gangsters want you wallet, and you want to keep it. Hand it over, the gangsters insist. We just took a poll, and 75% of the people in this alley thing you should share your money. Are the gangsters nuts? Not really. They're just following the same policies as our President. If a large majority of the population wants to do something to a minority, then the majority should have its way. If, for instance, 77% of the population wants to prohibit their fellow citizens from owning so-called assault weapons, then the majority should get its way, President Clinton insists. Which brings us to health care. Polls consistently show that a huge fraction of the population likes the central feature of the Clinton plan: requiring employers to pay for the health care for their employees. So does this prove that employer mandates are the way to go? A recent poll conducted by Spy magazine may help us find the answer. Spy conducted a poll of NewYorkers. Seventy-three percent favored employer-mandated health care. Spy then asked a follow-up question: "A New York Congressman wants to introduce legislation that will stimulate New York dairy production by requiring employers to provide their full-time employees with a daily serving of ice cream. Would you support such a bill?" Sixty-eight percent of New Yorkers polled said that they would support employer-mandated ice cream. Most of the objections to employer-mandated ice cream focussed on ice cream's high fat content, not on the morality of government ordering employers to buy treats for employees. As one employee put it "I would support anything that my boss would have to pay for." The short response to employer mandates is that ultimately, employees pay for them, through lower salaries or more unemployment. But the more fundamental point is that a large majority of the American public doesn't understand basic economics. And that large majority just loves the idea of the government giving them free things by taking money from somebody else. Last year, when ordering Congress to vote for the Clinton tax increase, House Speaker Tom Foley said that it was time to "stand and deliver" for President Clinton. In 17th century England, "stand and deliver" was what highway robbers said, as opposed to the American version, "stick 'e up." Does highway robbery become legitimate when employers are the victims, and the government does the robbing? That's as much as I can type in tonight -- I'll type in the others late on this coming weekend. dsa