From @CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU Mon Jun 27 16:52:06 1994 Received: from nova.unix.portal.com (nova.unix.portal.com [156.151.1.101]) by jobe.shell.portal.com (8.6.4/8.6.5) with ESMTP id QAA06697 for ; Mon, 27 Jun 1994 16:52:04 -0700 Received: from CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (cunyvm.cuny.edu [128.228.1.2]) by nova.unix.portal.com (8.6.7/8.6.5) with SMTP id QAA29420 for ; Mon, 27 Jun 1994 16:16:00 -0700 Message-Id: <199406272316.QAA29420@nova.unix.portal.com> Received: from SNYNEWVM.BITNET by CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 6499; Mon, 27 Jun 94 19:14:08 EDT Received: from SNYNEWVM (GROSSBOJ) by SNYNEWVM.BITNET (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 1262; Mon, 27 Jun 94 19:09:40 EDT Date: Mon, 27 Jun 94 19:06:03 EDT From: John Grossbohin Subject: File Transfer To: Jeff Chan Status: R Jeff: Following is the text of one of Don Kates' files. John ************** JOHN [Grossbohlin]: THIS IS A DECLARATION CREATED FOR MY LA CCW CASE. IT IS NOT COPYRIGHTED AND I SEE NO REASON WHY YOU CAN'T USE IT! [Don B. Kates, Jr., 6/13/94] I, Abraham N. Tennenbaum, declare and say: EXPERTISE ALLEGATIONS I am an Israeli attorney practicing as a prosecutor and am a lieutenant in the Israeli national police (Jerusalem). I received my law degree in 1985 from the faculty of law of the University of Jerusalem. In 1986 clerked for Israeli Supreme Court Judge S. Natanyahu. In 1987 I joined the Israeli national police as a criminal investigator and since 1988 have been a prosecutor with the Police Prosecution Department in Jerusalem. Currently I am on leave from the Israeli national police and am studying for my doctorate in criminology from the Institute of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of Maryland (at College Park, Md.). I am the author of: Israeli gun laws and their impact, a paper presented at the 50th anniversary meeting of the American Society of Criminology (1991) which is forthcoming in C. Cozic & C. Wekesser (eds.), Gun Control: Current Controversies (October, 1992); The relationship between police use of deadly force and the homicide rate, Western Criminologist, Fall 1991; and Police officers' need for self- defense causes brutality in B. Leone (ed.) Police Brutality (1991). I have also published popular articles on gun control, police use of deadly force and other criminological subjects in the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Hartford Courant, Cleveland Plain Dealer and USA Today. If called as an expert witness, I would testify as follows: GENERAL REGULATORY SCHEME 1. Like England which once controlled the area and from which much Israeli law is drawn, Israel has no formal written constitution. As in England, Israeli law recognizes certain things as essential human rights either by statute, regulation, practice or judicial decision. But gun ownership is not among them. 2. Firearms possession is not by right, but by permission based on policies which, in effect, promote public safety by assuring that there will in all public places be competent, trained civilians bearing firearms. The philosophy of gun control in Israel is that firearms training is available to the entire loyal, law-abiding citizenry. In addition to the firearms that are privately owned, firearms are freely distributed to trained competent, civilians by the Israeli government (Army or police). And therefore guns are, by comparison to the U.S., very available to the ordinary citizen. 3. Israel has very intensive and extensive gun control -- if that is understood to include not only limitation-regulation of gun ownership but encouragement-requirement of it. To own any kind of firearm, a special permit from the Interior Ministry is required. No one may obtain a permit without showing a legitimate reason for owning a firearm. The permit has to have the approval of the police, and is specific as to the owner, and the specific firearm, whose serial number has to appear on the permit. In addition, it is current policy that permitees qualify on the range with the firearm and they must requalify every other year. 4. It is easy for a law-abiding citizen (with no criminal record) to get a permit for a handgun. The primary reason for a permit to issue is personal protection, including the military function and self-defense against terrorism. People have firearms for other reasons too, such as hunting or target shooting, but the main reason is for self defense. CARRYING CONCEALED HANDGUNS 5. There is no distinction in Israeli law between carrying a handgun and possessing it: A permit to own a handgun is a permit to carry it on the person (concealed or not concealed). Carrying it is recommended, because then the gun is protected from thieves or children. (According to Israeli law, the owner of a firearm is responsible for it. If it is lost or stolen, s/he must inform the police within 24 hours. The owner will generally be prosecuted on a misdemeanor offense which is known as "negligence in keeping a firearm"; the "negligence" is more or less presumed from the mere fact that the firearm has been lost or stolen.) 6. Given the ease of getting handgun permits, and that carrying is both allowed and encouraged, in any large crowd there will be some citizens carrying their personal handguns on them, usually concealed. This is exemplified by the following incident which occurred at a perpetually crowded intersection in Jerusalem some weeks before the MacDonalds massacre [in San Ysidro, California, 1984]: three terrorists who attempted to machine-gun the throng managed to kill only one victim before being shot down by handgun- carrying Israelis. Presented to the press the next day, the surviving terrorist complained that his group had not realized that Israeli civilians were armed. The terrorists had planned to machine-gun a succession of crowd spots, thinking that they would be able to escape before the police or army could arrive to deal with them.[1] GOVERNMENTAL FIREARMS DISTRIBUTIONS 7. While Israeli law limits personal ownership of firearms to those possessing permits, firearms are readily available to law- abiding, responsible civilians for temporary carriage. Most firearms in Israel are not owned by those who use or carry them. They belong to the army, the police, or to other authorities who loan them out. Some examples will explain this huge distribution of firearms. A. There is mandatory service in the army (three years for males, two years for females). In addition, most of the males are recalled into the army for reserve service approximately 30 to 45 days each year. Most of them get firearms which they do not just possess while in service and on active reserve duty. Reservists, like all soldiers are allowed (and those serving in dangerous areas are required) to take their firearm home during each leave period or between stints of reserve duty. The result is that in any major crowd (bus stations, trains, main streets), there are reservists or soldiers armed on the way to or from home. B. Whenever a school project involves a fieldtrip to the countryside, they are required to have companions with firearms. These will usually be parents and/or teachers. In order to obtain enough firearms, one of the parents or teachers will go to the local police station and be assigned some firearms, which s/he will return after the trip. C. The Israeli police operates a civilian volunteer body called the "Civil Guards." One of its functions is to provide voluntary amred civilian patrols during the night in some neighborhoods. The patrollers are equipped with firearms, which are issued at the beginning of, and are returned at the end of, the patrol. Many of the volunteers are high school students (ages 16-18). After a short period of training, they carry firearms like any other volunteer. D. Another example is the way the police handle cases of criminal kidnapping, a phenomenon which is very rare, but which does occur. If a person is missing, volunteer teams are issued arms and go out to search the forests and caves, while the media call on people to be aware of the situation and try to locate the missing person. CRIMINAL POSSESSION AND MISUSE OF GUNS 8. The police and the court take seriously the felony of possessing a firearm without a permit, which almost always means that the gun is stolen. People with previous criminal records who are caught with firearms are generally sentenced to a year or two in prison. There is no parole for this and they serve their full sentence. 9. Criminals can get guns in Israel, but it is not easy. Usually, handguns are stolen from private citizens while rifles, grenades, and explosives are stolen from the army. An unfortunate aspect of this is the greater use of explosives and automatic weapons in murders. 10. To summarize: It is not as easy to get an illegal firearm in Israel as in the U.S.A., but it is possible. However, the phenomenon of drug dealers or other criminals walking around with a firearm on their person is unknown in Israel. INCIDENCE OF HOMICIDE AND SUICIDE 11. The Jewish homicide rate in Israel has always been very low. Indeed, despite the common availability of guns to law abiding civilians, the Israeli homicide rate is comparable to, or lower than, most Western European nations and much lower than the United States. As in the U.S. and most other nations, the Israeli suicide rate is much higher than the homicide rate. Nevertheless, it, too, is lower than the U.S. suicide rate and much lower than European nations whose suicide rates are often several times greater than the U.S. -- or even greater than the U.S. murder and suicide rates combined. The following table of international murder and suicide rates illustrates this: INTERNATIONAL INTENTIONAL HOMICIDE TABLE The Table is based on: 1987 data from The Statistical Abstract of Israel; an article by Killias which gives averages for many countries for the years 1983-6 (Gun ownership and violent crime: The Swiss experience in international perspective, Security Journal 1990; 1: 169-74); and data on other nations from the latest year available in the U.N. Demographic Yearbook-1985 (published, 1987). Figures from Killias are in bold face. Country Suicide Homicide TOTAL RUMANIA 66.2 n.a. 66.2 (1984) HUNGARY 45.9 n.a. 45.9 (1983) DENMARK 28.7 .7 29.4 (1984) AUSTRIA 26.9 1.5 28.4 (1984) FINLAND 24.4 (1983) 2.86 27.2 FRANCE 21.8 (1983) 4.36 26.16 SWITZERLAND 24.45 1.13 25.58 BELGIUM 23.15 1.85 25. W. GERMANY 20.37 1.48 21.85 JAPAN 20.3 .9 21.2 U.S. 12.2 (1982) 7.59 19.79 CANADA 13.94 2.6 16.54 NORWAY 14.5 (1984) 1.16 15.66 N. IRELAND 9.0 6.0 15.0 (Homicide rate does not include "political" homicides) AUSTRALIA 11.58 1.95 13.53 NEW ZEALAND 9.7 1.6 11.3 ENGLAND/WALES 8.61 .67 9.28 (Homicide rate does not include "political" homicides) ISRAEL 8. 1. 9. (Homicide rate does not include "political" homicides) 12. In simple words, the "gun density" in Israel is very high. The laws are designed not to prevent gun ownership and carrying by the law-abiding, but to bring these phenomena under the scrutiny of the public authorities. The philosophy of gun control in Israel is that, subject to police oversight, the public can be trusted with firearms; indeed, we can distribute many weapons to authorized people. And, therefore, guns are, by comparison to the U.S., very available. 13. The fascinating point is the combination of what may seem to other nations contradictory components. On the one hand, owning and carrying guns is strictly licensed. On the other hand, guns are available and used by almost every law- abiding citizen at one time or another. 14. In Israel this combination works very well. The question is whether it could be successfully implemented in other societies. Perhaps the Israeli success is attributable to unique cultural or local conditions. It may not be generalizable to other nations. VERIFICATION I certify and declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing is a true and correct statement of my views and of the information upon which they are based. Executed this _____ day of September, 1992 at the University of Maryland, College Park. ___________________________________ 1 Kates, Firearms and Violent Crime: Old Premises, Current Evidence in T. Gurr, Violence in America (1989), v. 1, p. 209. John A. Grossbohlin SUNY at New Paltz - Business Administrtion Dept GROSSBOJ@NPVM.NEWPALTZ.EDU SUNY at Albany - Organizational Studies Ph.D. Program JG7831@UACSC2.ALBANY.EDU