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JUNE 2008
SWAMPOODLE REPORT: THE SUPREME COURT
DOES SOMETHING RIGHT
Sam Smith
I don't own a gun. I was never any good
at shooting a gun. I was educated by Quakers and avoid violence
every chance I get. Still, I was delighted by the Supreme Court's
Second Amendment ruling. Not simply because it upheld the Constitution,
but because, in a land whose leaders are increasingly contemptuous
of democracy and its people and where the specter of dictatorship
has loomed as never before, an armed citizenry is one of the
last defenses - both symbolic and practical - left to us.
My view of guns has also been affected
by spending time in Maine, one of the best armed and least violent
places in America, and having had a wonderful hunting father-in-law.
While I never went hunting myself, whenever liberals would rail
against gun ownership, I would think of him sitting in a blind
in northern Wisconsin waiting for the ducks to appear.
It turned out that there was another advantage
for a peace loving progressive to oppose taking away other people's
guns. Once some of these folks found I wasn't after their guns,
they were more willing to listen to my ideas on other subjects.
It was something many liberals have never learned: don't mess
around too much with the other person's culture. Stick to the
big things that can bring us together.
Some people think I'm paranoid for imagining
a time when the people might have to choose between their freedom
and their government. I hope the day never comes but I know it's
happened elsewhere and I know that one of the things that slows
potential dictators down is knowing that the people they are
trying to suppress are also armed.
Besides, I've stopped worrying about worrying.
About a decade and a half ago I began writing about the creeping
coup that was infiltrating American government and thought. When
I go back and read that stuff, the main thing that strikes me
is that I didn't worry enough. For all intents and purposes,
the First American Rrepublic is over. We now live under an adhocracy
in a post constitutional era of uncertain future.
That's why the Supreme Court decision was
so important. Old conservatives would have easily stood up for
the Second Amendment, but the new authoritarians driven by a
political puritanism - and who thrive in both major parties -
could easily have said more control was necessary. For the court,
it was a close call.
There are piles of practical arguments
to support the court's decision - beginning with the fact that
murders soared after the contested DC law was passed - but most
of all it means that guns will not be the sole property of a
government disloyal to its citizens and their rights or of those
individuals who see them as a weapon of personal abuse. Good
guys can own them, too, and keep them in their homes. And that
little fact may make us all a bit saner and safer.
MARCH 2008
RECOVERED HISTORY: EARLY AMERICAN RIGHT TO ARMS
Even if one argues that the Second Amendment
only applies to members of a militia, the very concept of a militia
was quite different in the days of early America, including a
requirement that militia members arm themselves. Note that Merkel
cites a 1806 report that found 250,000 guns in the hands of militia
members "which have, a few instances excepted, been provided
by, and are the property of, the individuals who hold them."
The public arsenals at the same time only had about 120,000 guns.
WILLIAM G. MERKEL, HISTORY COOPERATIVE
On April 2, 1806, Joseph Varnum, then a six-term Republican Congressman
from Massachusetts and major general in the Commonwealth's militia,
presented a report from the "committee instructed to inquire
what measures are necessary to be adopted to complete the arming
of the militia of the United States" to the House of Representatives.
. . In the report itself, Varnum's committee informed Congress
that, by the laws of the United States,
each citizen enrolled in the militia is put under obligations
to provide himself with a good musket or rifle, and all the other
military equipments prescribed by law. From the best estimate
which the committee have been able to form, there is upwards
of 250,000 fire arms and rifles in the hands of the militia,
which have, a few instances excepted, been provided by, and are
the property of, the individuals who hold them. It is highly
probable, that many more of the militia would have provided themselves
with fire arms in the same way, if they had been for sale in
those parts of the United States where the deficiencies have
happened; but the wars in Europe have had a tendency to prevent
the importation of fire arms from thence into the United States,
which, together with the limited establishments for the manufacture
of that implement in the United States, has rendered it impossible
for individuals to procure them.
The committee went on to say that the number
of stands of public arms in the arsenals of the various states
had not been ascertained, that there were about 120,000 fire
arms fit for use and 12,000 in need of repair in the magazines
of the United States. . .
Varnum's report points to the committee's
concerns over a national militia less than fully armed and then
proposes to rectify this problem by Congressional spending on
arms production in federal arsenals for distribution . . . to
unarmed militia members. . .
Varnum suggests that most militia eligible
Americans wanted to comply with the Militia Act's requirement
of arming themselves, but that many were unable to do so because
guns were scarce. . .
DC'S GUN BAN DIDN'T WORK
JOHN R. LOTT, JR. AND MAXIM LOTT,
FOC NEWS - For gun control proponents and opponents a lot is
riding on a former security guard for the Supreme Court Annex.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether the District
of Columbia's ban on handguns and its requirement that any rifles
or shotguns remain locked violates the plaintiff, Dick Heller's,
constitutional rights. . .
Thus far the District of Columbia has spent
a lot of time making a public policy case. Their argument in
their brief to the court is pretty simple : "banning handguns
saves lives." Yet, while it may seem obvious to many people
that banning guns will save lives, that has not been D.C.'s experience.
The ban went into effect in early 1977,
but since it started there is only one year (1985) when D.C.'s
murder rate fell below what it was in 1976. But the murder rate
also rose dramatically relative to other cities. In the 29 years
we have data after the ban, D.C.'s murder rate ranked first or
second among the largest 50 cities for 15 years. In another four
years, it ranked fourth.
For Instance, D.C.'s murder rate fell 3.5
to 3 times more than Maryland and Virginia's during the five
years before the handgun ban went into effect in 1977, but rose
3.8 times more in the five years after it.
Was there something special about D.C.
that kept the ban from working? Probably not, since bans have
been causing crime to increase in other cities as well. D.C.
cites the Chicago ban to support its own. Yet, before Chicago's
ban in 1982, its murder rate, which was falling from 27 to 22
per 100,000 in the five years, suddenly stopped falling and rose
slightly to 23 per 100,000 in the five years afterwards.
Neither have bans worked in other countries.
Gun crime in England and Wales increased 340 percent in the seven
years since their 1998 ban. Ireland banned handguns and center
fire rifles in 1972 and murder rates soared - the post-ban murder
rate average has been 144 percent higher than pre-ban.
How could this be? D.C. officials say that
the ban will disarm criminals. But who follows a ban and turns
their guns in? Criminals who would be facing long prison sentences
anyway if they were caught in a crime, or typically law-abiding
citizens? By disarming normal people, a gun ban actually makes
crime easier to commit.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,336689,00.html
MAY 2007
SOME LIBERAL LAWYERS NOW DEFEND SECOND
AMENDMENT
ADAM LIPTAK, NY TIMES -
In March, for the first time in the nation's history, a federal
appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment
grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been
unimaginable. There used to be an almost complete scholarly and
judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a
collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus
no longer exists - thanks largely to the work over the last 20
years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come
to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual
right to own guns. . .
Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard,
said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected
an individual right. "My conclusion came as something of
a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise," Professor
Tribe said. "I have always supported as a matter of policy
very comprehensive gun control."
Several other leading liberal constitutional
scholars, notably Akhil Reed Amar at Yale and Sanford Levinson
at the University of Texas, are in broad agreement favoring an
individual rights interpretation. Their work has in a remarkably
short time upended the conventional understanding of the Second
Amendment, and it set the stage for the Parker decision.
The earlier consensus, the law professors
said in interviews, reflected received wisdom and political preferences
rather than a serious consideration of the amendment's text,
history and place in the structure of the Constitution. "The
standard liberal position," Professor Levinson said, "is
that the Second Amendment is basically just read out of the Constitution.".
. .
If only as a matter of consistency, Professor
Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations
of other amendments in the Bill of Rights, like those protecting
free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, should also
embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment. And just as
the First Amendment's protection of the right to free speech
is not absolute, the professors say, the Second Amendment's protection
of the right to keep and bear arms may be limited by the government,
though only for good reason. . .
Robert A. Levy, a senior fellow at the
Cato Institute, a libertarian group that supports gun rights,
and a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Parker case, said four
factors accounted for the success of the suit. The first, Mr.
Levy said, was "the shift in scholarship toward an individual
rights view, particularly from liberals."
He also cited empirical research questioning
whether gun control laws cut down on crime; a 2001 decision from
the federal appeals court in New Orleans that embraced the individual
rights view even as it allowed a gun prosecution to go forward;
and the Bush administration's reversal of a longstanding Justice
Department position under administrations of both political parties
favoring the collective rights view.
APRIL 2007
WHY MORE GUN CONTROL WON'T HELP
- Gun prohibition has much the same effect
as drug or alcohol prohibition. It would increase the price but
not limit the availability of guns for those who really want
them. One of the effects, for example, of banning cigarettes
in prisons is to create a booming trade in contraband tobacco.
- Within a few years of DC passing a gun
control law so stringent that it was recently ruled in violation
of the Second Amendment, the war on drugs was launched by Ronald
Reagan. In the years that immediately followed the murder rate
doubled despite the gun law.
- The killer was mentally deranged and
driven enough to have easily obtained a gun even if there were
gun prohibition.
- Since 1993 the U.S. handgun murder rate
has decreased 48 percent while the number of privately owned
handguns in America has increased by more than 20 million
- Culture is a far more important factor
in violence that gun ownership. There are more guns per-capita
in Maine than in any other state save possibly Alaska. About
50,000 Mainers have permits to carry concealed weapons. Yet Maine
has a crime rate one-third below the national average. Maine
has one or two fatal gun accidents a year, lower than the death
rate for snowmobiling or boating. These figures -- which reflect
those of certain high gun-ownership countries such as Sweden,
Norway and Switzerland -- suggest that the culture of a society
affects the problems caused by guns more than the guns themselves.
Introduce guns to an inherently violent community and you'll
get more violence. Introduce guns to an inherently lawful society
and the crime rate drops. In 2004 the South, on the other hand,
had a murder rate 57% higher than the Northeast.
- Forty-six percent of all those dying
of gunshots in 1997 were between the ages of 15 and 34. Presumably
guns work mechanically the same way for this age group as they
do for others, thus something other that safety would appear
to be involved.
- Treating gun laws as a national issue
exacerbates cultural conflict, such as those between rural and
urban, east and west, wealthy and not so well off. Telling rural
Westerners to get rid of their guns is like telling urban blacks
to stop reading African-American books.
- John R. Lott has pointed out that "less
than one out every thousand times people use guns defensively
is the attacker killed. Ninety-eight percent of the time, simply
being able to brandish a gun is sufficient to cause a criminal
to break off an attack and the two percent of the time when guns
are fired, the vast majority of those are warning shots. It's
something like less than one-half-of-one percent of the time
is the gun fired in the direction of the attacker. Even when
they do hit, woundings are much more frequent than times when
the attacker is killed."
- A Justice Department stud, conducted
from 1993-1995 tracked 4,000 boys and girls aged 6 to 15 in Denver,
Pittsburgh, and Rochester, NY. According to the study:
Children who get guns from their parents
don't commit gun crimes (0%), while children who get illegal
guns are very likely to do so (21%).
Children who get guns from parents are
less likely to commit any kind of street crime (14%) than children
who have no gun in the house (24%) and are dramatically less
likely to do so than children who acquire an illegal gun (74%).
Children who get guns from parents are
less likely to use drugs (13%) than children who get illegal
guns (41%).
"Boys who own legal firearms have
much lower rates of delinquency and drug use [than boys who get
illegal guns] and are even slightly less delinquent than non-owners
of guns," the study reported.
- The Columbine killers violated at least
17 existing state and federal weapons control laws.
- In 1997 it was reported that Americans
use guns defensively around 2 million times each year, five times
more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used to commit
crimes that same year. And 98 percent of the time, simply brandishing
the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.
MORE ON GUNS
http://prorev.com./guns.htm
PAPERWORK CONTROL, NOT GUN CONTROL,
WAS THE PROBLEM IN VT KILLINGS
BRIGID SCHULTE, WASHINGTON POST - Virginia is relatively aggressive in reporting
mental health records to the federal system that gun sellers
use for background checks of potential buyers. Virginia was the
first state to develop a system to provide background checks
for firearms purchases -- four years before the 1993 federal
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act set up the national system.
But the Brady system relies on states to
send criminal and mental health records to the FBI database.
As a result of lawsuits, the federal government cannot mandate
that states do so. In 2003, Virginia began voluntarily reporting
mental health records to the FBI's national instant background
check system. Only 22 states provide such records. Since then,
Virginia has reported more than 80,000 mental health records
to the FBI, more than any other state.
But most of those records are generated by involuntary civil
commitments to state hospitals, criminal judgments in which a
person has been found not guilty by reason of insanity, or court
proceedings that have determined a person "legally incompetent"
or "mentally incapacitated" -- that is, unable to function
in society.
In December 2005, Cho was briefly detained
in a mental facility after police had told him to stop bothering
women on campus. The next day, a special judge determined that
Cho presented "an imminent danger to himself as a result
of mental illness." He was released under an order to seek
outpatient treatment. But because Cho was not involuntarily committed
to a mental hospital, his name was not sent to Virginia State
Police and put into the computerized National Instant Criminal
Background Check System.
Thus, when Cho presented his Virginia driver's
license, green card and checkbook with matching address to a
Blacksburg pawnshop owner in February and a Roanoke firearms
dealer in March, his background check came up clean. In both
instances, the computer screen read "PROCEED" with
the sale.
Federal law, however, bars gun sales to
people who have been judged "mentally defective," which
includes someone who has been determined by a court, board, commission
or other legal authority to be a danger to himself or others
as a result of mental illness, as Cho was in 2005. With no mandate
to report that for inclusion in the background check system,
there is no way for the federal government to have enforced its
broader interpretation of the Brady law, experts said. Even in
states that do report mental health information, Cho probably
would not have been flagged, they said.
MAYHEM IN GUN-HAPPY NORWAY: 32
MURDERED IN ONE YEAR
[Gun ownership in Norway is only
slightly less prevalent than in the United States]
AFTENPOSTEN, NORWAY - An examination
of homicide statistics for 2006 reveals the most typical situation
- a man aged 30-40 kills a female acquaintance with a knife.
Over 80 percent of the assailants behind the 32 solved homicides
last year were men, while over half of the victims were women
according to the national statistics compiled by Kripos, Norway's
National Criminal Investigation Service. The killings are most
often triggered by an argument or as the result of a mental disorder.
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1605255.ece
MARCH 2007
Certainly one of the chief guarantees
of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected,
is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.... The right
of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary
government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now
appears remote in America but which historically has proven to
be always possible. - Senator Hubert H. Humphrey
SOME REASONS THE APPEALS COURT GUN DECISION
MAKES SENSE
1. The Second Amendment said so. Arguments
that guns should only be owned by members of a state militia
are not only historically wrong, they ignore the fact that the
powers of state militias aka the National Guard have been unconstitutionally
emasculated by the federal government.
2. The founders said so:
"No free man shall ever be debarred
the use of arms." - Thomas Jefferson, 1776
"Before a standing army can rule,
the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom
of Europe." - Noah Webster, 1787
"What is the militia? It is the whole
people, except for a few public officials." - George Mason,
1788
"The said Constitution shall never
be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the
United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own
arms." - Samuel Adams, 1788
"The militia is our ultimate safety.
We can have no security without it. The great object is that
every man be armed." - Patrick Henry
3. Gun control is an issue like abortion
that needlessly divides the people and distracts them from more
important matters like our loss of democracy and economic inequity.
Neither side is going to win but both sides can agree to let
the other side have a gun or not or TO have an abortion or not,
whether one likes it or not. About 110 million American households
own guns and not many are going to change their mind
4. An armed citizenry is a major defense
against dictatorship and invasion. America would be a lousy place
for anyone to try to take over by force.
5. In a city like Washington, the only
people actually affected by a gun ban are law abiders. The others
get their guns anyway.
6. The statistical evidence clearly shows
that DC's gun ban had no effect on murders. If anything should
have been ban it would have been the war on drugs, the major
cause of murder in DC over the past few decades.
http://prorev.com/dctrendscrime.htm
7. Since 1993 the U.S. handgun murder rate
has decreased 48 percent, while the number of privately owned
handguns in America has increased by more than 20 million
8. Culture is a far more important factor
in violence that gun ownership. There are more guns per-capita
in Maine than in any other state save possibly Alaska. About
50,000 Mainers have permits to carry concealed weapons. Yet Maine
has a crime rate one-third below the national average. Maine
has one or two fatal gun accidents a year, lower than the death
rate for snowmobiling or boating. These figures -- which reflect
those of certain high gun-ownership countries such as Sweden
and Switzerland -- suggest that the culture of a society affects
the problems caused by guns more than the guns themselves. Introduce
guns to an inherently violent community and you'll get more violence.
Introduce guns to an inherently lawful society and the crime
rate drops. In 2004 the South, on the other hand, had a murder
rate 57% higher than the Northeast.
9. Even the Washington Post admitted that
the DC gun ban wasn't working all that well:
- ILLEGAL GUN TRADING is rampant on the
streets of the nation's capital, which has one of the toughest
gun control laws in the country." - Washington Post, March
8, 1981.
- "THE DISTRICT, which bans all guns
except for those used by law enforcement officers, maintains
one of the highest gun violence rates in the country." -
The Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2000.
10. In 2002, Charlie Reese of the Orlando
Sentinel reported: "A new survey involving 34,000 people
in 17 industrialized countries published by the Dutch Ministry
of Justice shows [that] the nations that report the highest percentage
of crime victims are those that have virtually banned private
gun ownership. In descending order they are Australia, England
and Wales, Scotland, Finland, Northern Ireland, France and the
Netherlands. The United States ranks eighth out of 17."
11. The evidence has been around for a
long time. For example, HL Mencken wrote many years ago:
"The hard facts are publicly on display
in New York State, where a law of exactly the same tenor is already
on the books, the so-called Sullivan Law. In order to get it
there, of course, the Second Amendment had to be severely strained.
. . It is now a dreadful felony in New York to "have or
possess" a pistol. Even if one keeps it locked in a bureau
drawer at home, one may be sent to the hoosegow for ten years.
More, men who have done no more are frequently bumped off. The
cops, suspecting a man, say, of political heresy, raid his house
and look for copies of the Nation. They find none, and are thus
baffled but at the bottom of a trunk they do find a rusted and
battered revolver. So he goes to trial for violating the Sullivan
Law. . . With what result? With the general result that New York,
even more than Chicago, is the heaven of footpads, hijackers,
gunmen and all other such armed thugs. Their hands upon their
pistols, they know they are safe. Not one citizen out of a hundred
that they tackle is armed for getting a license to keep a revolver
is a difficult business, and carrying one without it is more
dangerous than submitting to robbery. So the gunmen flourish
and give humble thanks to God. Like the bootleggers, they are
hot and unanimous for Law Enforcement.
12. Forty-six percent of all those dying
of gunshots in 1997 were between the ages of 15 and 34. Presumably
guns work mechanically the same way for this age group as they
do for others, thus something other that safety would appear
to be involved.
13. There are already thousands of gun
control laws, too many of which don't work. Every ineffective
law brings government into disrepute.
14. Prohibition of something that large
numbers of citizens want always fail, witness the war on the
drugs. It merely increases the value of the prohibited item and
changes the distributors from honest people to crooks.
15. Treating gun laws as a national issue
exacerbates cultural conflict, such as those between rural and
urban, east and west, wealthy and not so well off. Telling rural
Westerners to get rid of their guns is like telling an urban
blacks to stop reading African-American books.
16. The push for gun restrictions and prohibition
is interwoven with the drive to restrict other citizen liberties
and erode democracy. Liberals once opposed such moves, but in
recent years have become supporters of repression. They need
to became civil libertarians again.
17. People who drive around cities in four-wheel
drive SUVs with noisy alarm systems shouldn't lecture others
on what safety precautions are permissible.
18. In DC, home of the gun ban in dispute,
the school system spent a lot of money for metal detectors, cameras
and security officers. But between 197 and 2001, according to
the Washington Times:
- Assaults with deadly weapons shot up
from 66 to 127.
- Simple assaults in the school system
rose from 384 to 475.
- The number of children caught bringing
concealed weapons to schools swelled from 329 to 423.
- Robberies rose from 18 to 35.
- Threats against students and staff increased
from 156 to 225.
The number of incidents reported to the
school system are as bad or worse than those of school systems
with twice the number of students all in a city with a handgun
ban.
AN ARMED CITIZENRY & THE NAZIS
Excerpts from remarks made in 1998 by author
Stephen Halbrook on the publication of his book, Target Switzerland:
In 1940, after the rest of central Europe
collapsed before the German army, Swiss Commander in Chief Henri
Guisan assembled his officers at the Rotli meadow near the Lake
of Lucerne. He reminded them that, at this sacred spot, in the
year 1291, the Swiss Confederation was born as an alliance against
despotism. Guisan admonished that the Swiss would always stand
up to any invader. One has only to recall the medieval battle
of Morgarten, where 1400 Swiss peasants ambushed and defeated
20,000 Austrian knights.
In World War II, the Swiss had defenses
no other country had. Let's begin with the rifle in every home
combined with the Alpine terrain. When the German Kaiser asked
in 1912 what the quarter of a million Swiss militiamen would
do if invaded by a half million German soldiers, a Swiss replied:
"Shoot twice and go home." Switzerland also had a decentralized,
direct democracy which could not be surrendered to a foreign
enemy by a political elite. Some governments surrendered to Hitler
without resistance based on the decision of a king or dictator;
this was institutionally impossible in Switzerland. If an ordinary
Swiss citizen was told that the Federal President--a relatively
powerless official--had surrendered the country, the citizen
might not even know the president's name, and would have held
any "surrender" order in contempt.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the
Swiss feared an invasion and began military preparations like
no other European nation. On Hitler's 1938 "Anchluss"
or annexation of Austria, the Swiss Parliament declared that
the Swiss were prepared to defend themselves "to the last
drop of their blood."
When the Fuehrer attacked Poland in 1939,
General Guisan ordered the citizen army to resist any attack
to the last cartridge. After Denmark and Norway fell in 1940,
Guisan and the Federal Council gave the order to the populace:
aggressively attack invaders; act on your own initiative; regard
any surrender broadcast or announcement as enemy propaganda;
resist to the end. This was published as a message to the Swiss
and a warning to the Germans; surrender was impossible, even
if ordered by the government, for the prior order mandated that
it be treated as an enemy lie.
When the Germany army, the Wehrmacht, attacked
Belgium and Holland, it feigned preparations for attack through
Switzerland. Like a giant movie set, divisions moved toward the
Swiss border by day, only to sneak back again by night and repeat
the ruse the next day. Both the Swiss and the French were tricked
into thinking that concentrations of troops were massing to attack
through Switzerland and into France. Swiss border troops nervously
awaited an assault each time the clock approached the hour, for
the Germans were punctual in lauching attacks on the hour.
When France collapsed, detailed Nazi invasion
plans with names like "Case Switzerland" and "Operation
Tannenbaum" were prepared for the German General Staff.
They only awaited the Fuehrer's nod.
Threatened with attack from German and
Italian forces from all sides, General Guisan devised the strategy
of a delaying stand at the border, and a concentration of Swiss
forces in the rugged and impassable Alps. . . A fifth of the
Swiss people, 850,000 out of the 4.2 million population, was
under arms and mobilized. Most men were in the citizens army,
and boys and old men with rifles constituted the Home Guard.
Many women served in the civil defense and the anti-aircraft
defense.
Nazi invasion plans for 1941 were postponed
to devote all forces to Operation Barbarossa, the attack on Russia.
The Swiss would have their turn in due time. Hitler banned the
play William Tell. He called the Swiss "the most despicable
and wretched people, mortal enemies of the new Germany";
in the same breath he fumed that all Jews must be expelled from
Europe. His plan to annihilate the Jews would have faced a special
obstacle in Switzerland, where every Swiss Jew (like every other
citizen) had a rifle in his home. In the heroic Warsaw ghetto
uprising of 1943, Jews demonstrated how genocide could be resisted
with only a few pistols and rifles. Hitler boasted that he would
liquidate "the rubbish of small nations" and would
be "the Butcher of the Swiss." But the dictator was
more comfortable with liquidating unarmed peoples and was dissuaded
from invading Switzerland. There was no Holocaust on Swiss soil.
As a neutral, the Swiss represented American
interests before the Axis powers, such as by inspecting German
prison camps holding American POWs. When Vichy France was occupied,
German soldiers with sub-machine guns took over the American
embassy. The Swiss minister, brandishing his Swiss army knife,
drove them out.
A Nazi SS invasion plan, recommended for
execution in 1944, warned the German general staff that the Swiss
fighting spirit was high and shooting instruction good; German
loses would be heavy, and a conquered Switzerland would require
a strong occupation force. D-Day put the plan on hold, but new
dangers threatened Switzerland as the Allies pushed the Nazis
back. In 1944, the Wehrmacht's counter-offensive in the Ardennes,
leading to the Battle of the Bulge, proved that the Nazi Beast
was still strong and full of suprises. The Swiss prepared for
an attack from Germans retreating from Italy. The Swiss resolve
remained high, for, as the US State Dept. declared, "no
people in Europe are more profoundly attached to democratic principles
than the Swiss.". . .
MORE THOUGHTS OF EARLY AMERICANS
"And that the said Constitution be
never construed to authorize Congress...to prevent the people
of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping
their own arms..." - Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer,
August 20, l789
"A militia, when properly formed are
in fact the people themselves...and include all men capable of
bearing arms." - RICHARD HENRY (LIGHT HORSE HARRY) LEE,
Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) at 169.
"A free people ought...to be armed...."
- GEORGE WASHINGTON. Speech of January 7, l790 in the Boston
Independent Chronicle, January 14, l790
"Laws that forbid the carrying of
arms. . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined
to commit crimes. . . 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." - THOMAS JEFFERSON,
Thomas Jefferson's "Commonplace Book," 1774-1776, quoting
from On Crimes and Punishment, by criminologist Cesare Beccaria,
1764
"The right of the people to keep and
bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but
the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit,
that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished
the free citizens of these States. . . Such men form the best
barrier to the liberties of America." - Gazette of the United
States, October 14, l789
"The said Constitution [shall] be
never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty
of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the
people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from
keeping their own arms." - SAMUEL ADAMS of Massachusetts,
Massachusetts' U.S. Constitution ratification convention, 1788
"As civil rulers, not having their
duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize,
and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised
to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury
of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article
in their right to keep and bear their private arms." - Tench
Cox in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the
Federal Constitution." Under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian"
in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789. at 2 col.1
"Who are the militia? Are they not
ourselves? Congress have no power to disarm the militia. - Tench
Cox of Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788
"Are we at last brought to such a
humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted
with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between
having our arms in our possession and under our own direction,
and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense
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, 3 Elliot Debates 168-169.
"When the resolution of enslaving
America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was
advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to
disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way
to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken
them, and let them sink gradually." - George Mason - Virginia's
U.S. Constitution ratification convention, 1788
SEPTEMBER 2006
"No free man shall ever
be debarred the use of arms." ~Thomas Jefferson, 1776
"Before a standing army
can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost
every kingdom of Europe." ~Noah Webster, 1787
"What is the militia? It
is the whole people, except for a few public officials."
~George Mason, 1788
"The said Constitution shall
never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people
of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping
their own arms." ~Samuel Adams, 1788
"The militia is our ultimate
safety. We can have no security without it. The great object
is that every man be armed." ~Patrick Henry
JUNE 2006
STATS SHOOT HOLE IN GUN MYTH
WASHINGTON TIMES - Figures released
by the Treasury Department show that retail sales of firearms
and ammunition rose almost 3 percent in 2005. All told, 4.7 million
new guns were sold during this past year. Yet government figures
and independent statistics reveal that firearms crimes, suicides
and accidental fatalities, including among youth, all trend downward.
According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the estimated
number of privately owned firearms in the U.S. now stands at
more than 290 million, while American households with at least
one firearm is estimated at nearly 110 million.
http://insider.washingtontimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060605-111139-8659r
JANUARY 2006
COUNTER INTUITIVE NEWS
CHRIS COX, NATIONAL RIFLE ASSN, LETTER
TO WASH POST - Since
1993 the U.S. handgun murder rate has decreased 48 percent, even
as the number of privately owned handguns in America has increased
by more than 20 million. Today, murder rates are at a 39-year
low and the rate for total violent crime is at a 30-year low.
Handguns are statistically the most effective means of self-defense
against a criminal attack, and handguns are used for self-defense
approximately three times more often than they are used in victimizations.
It's arrogant and elitist to advocate depriving Americans of
the right to decide how to best protect themselves and their
families.
NOVEMBER 2005
GUNS DON'T KILL; LIVING IN THE
SOUTH DOES
MURDER RATE PER 100,000 IN 2004
DEATH
PENALTY INFO
JAN 2003
RECOVERED HISTORY
"And that the said Constitution
be never construed to authorize Congress...to prevent the people
of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping
their own arms..." - Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer,
August 20, l789
"A militia, when properly
formed are in fact the people themselves...and include all men
capable of bearing arms." - RICHARD HENRY (LIGHT HORSE
HARRY) LEE, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788)
at 169.
"A free people ought...to
be armed...." - GEORGE WASHINGTON. Speech of January
7, l790 in the Boston Independent Chronicle, January 14, l790
"Laws that forbid the carrying
of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined
to commit crimes... 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." - THOMAS
JEFFERSON, Thomas Jefferson's "Commonplace Book," 1774-1776,
quoting from On Crimes and Punishment, by criminologist Cesare
Beccaria, 1764
"The right of the people
to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government;
but the best security of that right after all is, the military
spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished
the free citizens of these States...Such men form the best barrier
to the liberties of America." - Gazette of the United
States, October 14, l789
"The Constitution shall
never be construed...to prevent the people of the United States
who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
- SAMUEL ADAMS, Debates & Proceedings in the Convention
of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1786-87
"The said Constitution [shall]
be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just
liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent
the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens,
from keeping their own arms." - SAMUEL ADAMS of Massachusetts,
Massachusetts' U.S. Constitution ratification convention, 1788
"As civil rulers, not having
their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize,
and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised
to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury
of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article
in their right to keep and bear their private arms." - TENCH
COXE in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to
the Federal Constitution." Under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian"
in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789. at 2 col.1
"Who are the militia? Are
they not ourselves? Congress have no power to disarm the militia.
- TENCH COXE of Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb.
20, 1788
"Are we at last brought
to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot
be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference
between having our arms in our possession and under our own direction,
and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense
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, 3 Elliot Debates 168-169.
"When the resolution of
enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament
was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania,
to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual
way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but
weaken them, and let them sink gradually." - GEORGE MASON
- Virginia's U.S. Constitution ratification convention, 1788
SEP 2002
PROGRESSIVE REVIEW,
1998 - There are more guns per-capita in Maine than in any other
state save possibly Alaska. About 50,000 Mainers have permits
to carry concealed weapons. Last year over ten percent of the
state's population bought deer-hunting licenses. Yet Maine has
a crime rate one-third below the national average. Maine has
one or two fatal gun accidents a year, lower than the death rate
for snowmobiling or boating. These figures from Down East Magazine
-- which reflect those of certain high gun-ownership countries
such as Sweden and Switzerland -- suggest that the culture of
a society affects the problems caused by guns more than the guns
themselves. Introduce guns to an inherently violent community
and you'll get more violence. Introduce guns to an inherently
lawful society and the crime rate drops. The figures also reflect
strikingly different attitudes towards the use and handling of
firearms in rural compared to urban communities.
JUN 2002
WILD SHOTS
[The capital's gun laws, now
headed for court review, are - like Samuel Johnson's description
of second marriages - the triumph of hope over experience. In
honor of the new notoriety of DC's remarkably ineffective gun
laws, we have assembled some of our previous material on the
issue]
"ILLEGAL GUN TRADING is
rampant on the streets of the nation's capital, which has one
of the toughest gun control laws in the country." - Washington
Post, March 8, 1981.
"THE DISTRICT, which bans
all guns except for those used by law enforcement officers, maintains
one of the highest gun violence rates in the country." -
The Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2000.
WHILE 69 MEN PER 100,000 die
of gun shots in DC every year, the number of female fatalities
is so small that it's not even listed in the latest Kaiser health
statistics report. Obviously, something more than guns are involved
in these deaths.
CHARLIE REESE, ORLANDO SENTINEL:
A new survey involving 34,000 people in 17 industrialized countries
published by the Dutch Ministry of Justice shows [that] the nations
that report the highest percentage of crime victims are those
that have virtually banned private gun ownership. In descending
order they are Australia, England and Wales, Scotland, Finland,
Northern Ireland, France and the Netherlands. The United States
ranks eighth out of 17. As legitimate scholars have shown time
and again, there is no correlation between gun ownership and
crime except often an inverse one - the fewer private guns, the
more crime.
Arrest of Washington DC police
officers: 19 per 1000
Arrest rate of New York City police officers: 3 per 1000
Arrest rate of Florida concealed handgun permit holders: 1 per
1000
[Political Digest]
BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS: The crime
rate in Kennesaw Georgia, near Atlanta, is 89 percent lower than
it was 19 years ago according to the Marietta Daily Journal.
What's the news in that? Well it seems that 19 years ago the
city council passed an ordinance requiring the head of every
household to own at least one firearm with ammunition. The ACLU
challenged the law in court unsuccessfully and there were predictions
of shootings in the streets and violence in people's homes. What
happened instead was that the crime rate plunged. Said Robert
Jones, president of the city historical society, quote: 'It did
drop after it was initially passed and it has stayed the same
low level for the past 16 years.'
HL MENCKEN: The new law that
[the Nation] advocated, indeed, is one of the most absurd specimens
of jackass legislation ever heard of, even in this paradise of
legislative donkeyism. Its single and sole effect would be to
exaggerate enormously all of the evils it proposes to put down.
It would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools;
it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men. The
gunman today has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery
in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at
least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But
if the proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced,
he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.
Here I do not indulge in theory.
The hard facts are publicly on display in New York State, where
a law of exactly the same tenor is already on the books the so-called
Sullivan Law. In order to get it there, of course, the Second
Amendment had to be severely strained, but the uplifters advocated
the straining unanimously, and to the tune of loud hosannas,
and the courts, as usual, were willing to sign on the dotted
line. It is now a dreadful felony in New York to "have or
possess" a pistol. Even if one keeps it locked in a bureau
drawer at home, one may be sent to the hoosegow for ten years.
More, men who have done no more are frequently bumped off. The
cops, suspecting a man, say, of political heresy, raid his house
and look for copies of the Nation. They find none, and are thus
baffled but at the bottom of a trunk they do find a rusted and
battered revolver. So he goes to trial for violating the Sullivan
Law, and is presently being psycho-analyzed by the uplifters
at Sing Sing.
With what result? With the general
result that New York, even more than Chicago, is the heaven of
footpads, hijackers, gunmen and all other such armed thugs. Their
hands upon their pistols, they know they are safe. Not one citizen
out of a hundred that they tackle is armed for getting a license
to keep a revolver is a difficult business, and carrying one
without it is more dangerous than submitting to robbery. So the
gunmen flourish and give humble thanks to God. Like the bootleggers,
they are hot and unanimous for Law Enforcement.
JOHN R. LOTT, YALE LAW SCHOOL
- [Women] who behave passively when they are confronted by a
criminal are 2.5 times more likely to end up being seriously
injured than a woman who has a gun. And the reason is pretty
straightforward. You're talking about a female victim. The attackers
are virtually always male. There's a large strength differential
on average between a male attacker and a female victim. Other
types of resistance -- using your fists, for example -- is very
likely to lead to tragedy, because a female who uses her fist
has a high probability of a physical response back from the attacker
and a high probability of serious injury or death. While men
also benefit from having a gun, the benefit isn't as large .
. .
There are 31 states now that
have so-called right-to-carry laws. These are laws that set certain
objective criteria. Once you meet those, you can apply for a
permit and then it's automatically granted. You have to be a
certain age; you have to pay a fee; half the states require some
type of training; and there are criminal background checks. What
you find is that the states that issue the most permits, have
the biggest drops in violent crime. For each additional year
that these right-to-carry laws are in effect, you'll see an additional
1.5 percent drop in murder rates and about a three percent additional
drop in rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults . . .
There are lots of reasons why
crime has been falling . . . We've seen a huge drop in drug prices
in the United States since 1991. There have been big changes
in drug interdiction and most people, I think, don't appreciate
how many murders, in urban areas in particular, are due to drug
gangs fighting against each other in order to try and control
drug turf. As the amount of drug interdiction has gone down,
we have seen more drugs coming into the country from more sources
-- and the profits that have been associated with the gangs controlling
drug turf have gone down . . .
Less than one out every thousand
times people use guns defensively is the attacker killed. Ninety-eight
percent of the time, simply being able to brandish a gun is sufficient
to cause a criminal to break off an attack and the two percent
of the time when guns are fired, the vast majority of those are
warning shots. It's something like less than one-half-of-one
percent of the time is the gun fired in the direction of the
attacker. Even when they do hit, woundings are much more frequent
than times when the attacker is killed.
INCREASE IN SUPPLY of guns since
1945: more than double
Decrease in fatal gun accidents: two-thirds
Number of non-fatal toy injuries annually: 140,000
Number of non-fatal gun injuries annually: 2,000
BETWEEN 1985 AND 1988, in the
wake of the revived drug war, murders in Washington, DC soared
from 145 a year to 369. During this period, the city's office
of criminal justice planning did an unusually detailed analysis
of homicides. The report illustrates dramatically the complexity
of crime and shows why simple or over-arching solutions rarely
work. For example, here are various factors and the percent of
murders involved.
Victim under 18 (8%)
Victim 18-25(30%)
Victim a white female (1%)
Victim a black male (75%)
Murders in richest ward (1%)
Murders in poorest ward (20%)
No drugs or alcohol in body (37%)
Drugs or alcohol in body (63%)
July (5%)
January or June (12%)
Thursday (11%)
Saturday (17%)
6-9 am (7%)
9 pm -midnight (25%)
In short, it was virtually impossible
to be killed in Washington if you were a young white girl living
in upscale Georgetown on an early Thursday morning in July. If,
on the other hand, you were a young black 20-year-old male living
in low-income Anacostia, dealing drugs on a Saturday night in
June, your chances of being killed were far greater than the
overall statistics would suggest. And if you were not buying
or selling drugs at all, your chances of being killed in DC were
about the same as in Copenhagen. Other differences showed up,
most strikingly in motive. The murder rate resulting from altercations
or robberies actually dropped substantially during this period
and those that stemmed from domestic violence stayed about the
same. But those involving drugs leaped over 300%. Were it not
for the drug trade, DC would have had a murder rate roughly that
of Copenhagen. Death in DC is about drugs, not guns.
A JUSTICE DEPARTMENT study, "Urban
Delinquency and Substance Abuse," which was conducted from
1993-1995 tracked 4,000 boys and girls aged 6 to 15 in Denver,
Pittsburgh, and Rochester, NY. According to the study:
- Children who get guns from
their parents don't commit gun crimes (0%), while children who
get illegal guns are very likely to do so (21%).
- Children who get guns from
parents are less likely to commit any kind of street crime (14%)
than children who have no gun in the house (24%) -- and are dramatically
less likely to do so than children who acquire an illegal gun
(74%).
- Children who get guns from
parents are less likely to use drugs (13%) than children who
get illegal guns (41%).
- "Boys who own legal firearms
have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use [than boys
who get illegal guns] and are even slightly less delinquent than
non-owners of guns," the study reported.
FORTY-SIX PERCENT of all those
dying of gunshots in 1997 were between the ages of 15 and 34.
Presumably guns work mechanically the same way for this age group
as they do for others, thus something other that safety would
appear to be involved. Clue: these are also the major crime years.
THE COLUMBINE MURDERERS violated
at least 17 state and federal weapons control laws, and none
of the proposals for trigger locks, waiting periods or gun show
restrictions would have stopped Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
from obtaining either their guns or bomb-making materials.
ACCIDENTAL GUN DEATHS among children
are much rarer than most people believe. Consider New York, with
more than 2.6 million children under the age of 10. From 1993
to 1997, the Centers for Disease Control report that there were
only six accidental gun deaths in that age range an annual rate
of 1.2 deaths. Yet, with over 3.3 million adult New Yorkers owning
at least one gun in 1996, the overwhelming majority of gun owners
must be extremely careful or such gun accidents would be much
more frequent.
GUNS CLEARLY DETER criminals:
Americans use guns defensively around 2 million times each year
five times more frequently than the 430,000 times guns were used
to commit crimes in 1997. And 98 percent of the time, simply
brandishing the weapon is sufficient to stop an attack.
YOUTH HOMICIDE ARRESTS dropped
56 percent from 1993 to 1998, but two-thirds of 1,000 people
polled by The Washington Post said they believed children were
getting more violent.
DC FACTS
-- Since 1995, 88% of DC homicides
have been gun-related.
-- In 1985, only 65% of the homicides involved guns.
-- There has been no significant change in the number of guns
reported in the city between 1985 and 1995.
-- During this time, however, the number of homicides went from
148 in 1985 to a high of 454 in 1993, then down to 260 in 1998.
Clearly the number of guns in the city was not the controlling
factor.
THERE ARE MORE GUNS per-capita
in Maine than in any other state save possibly Alaska. About
50,000 Mainers have permits to carry concealed weapons. Over
ten percent of the state's population buys deer-hunting licenses.
Yet Maine has a crime rate one-third below the national average.
Maine has one or two fatal gun accidents a year, lower than the
death rate for snowmobiling or boating. These figures from Down
East Magazine -- are similar to those of certain high gun-ownership
countries such as Sweden and Switzerland.
WHY PROGRESSIVES SHOULD
STOP PUSHING FOR MORE
GUN CONTROL LAWS
-- There are already thousands
of them, too many of which don't work. Every ineffective law
brings government into disrepute.
-- Prohibition of something that
large numbers of citizens want always fail, witness the war on
the drugs. It merely increases the value of the prohibited item
and changes the distributors from honest people to crooks.
-- Gun control laws are highly
divisive to no good end. Since they don't work well, why get
everyone so mad about them? Progressives should instead start
finding issues that make people happy.
-- Treating gun laws as a national
issue exacerbates cultural conflict, such as those between rural
and urban, east and west, wealthy and not so well off. Telling
rural Westerners to get rid of their guns is like telling an
urban blacks to stop reading African-American books.
-- There is no evidence that
members of the NRA murder people at a higher rate than non-members.
It is insulting to gun owners to speak as though they did.
-- The push for gun restrictions
and prohibition is interwoven with the drive to restrict other
citizen liberties and erode democracy. Liberals once opposed
such moves, but in recent years have become supporters of repression.
They need to became civil libertarians again.
-- America no longer has a strong,
reliable democracy. It has been deeply corrupted and is being
brutally manipulated. We are also losing our major defense against
tyranny: the spirit and will of the people. An armed citizenry
is a reasonable back-up plan.
-- One of the things authoritarian
governments do is to disarm their citizens.
-- People who drive around cities
in four-wheel drive SUVs shouldn't lecture others on what safety
precautions are permissible.
-- The strongest reason for the
people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last
resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. We
didn't say that. Thomas Jefferson did.
-- Progressives should stop treating
average Americans as though they were alien creatures. Progressives
haven't just lost elections because of their issues but because
of their attitudes as well.
JAN 2002
[Another case study in attempting
to deal with social problems in a technocratic fashion]
||| VAISHALI HONAWAR, WASHINGTON
TIMES - The number of assaults with deadly weapons in D.C. schools
has doubled in the past four years, even though the system has
spent $8 million on metal detectors, cameras and security officers
trying to keep students safe. Information obtained after The
Washington Times filed an open-records request shows that between
the 1997-98 and the 2000-01 school years:
- Assaults with deadly weapons
shot up from 66 to 127.
- Simple assaults in the school system rose from 384 to 475.
- The number of children caught bringing concealed weapons to
schools swelled from 329 to 423.
- Robberies rose from 18 to 35.
- Threats against students and staff increased from 156 to 225.
The number of incidents reported
to the school system are as bad or worse than those of school
systems with twice the number of students. MORE
JUNE 2001
POLITICAL
DIGEST:
"Illegal gun trading is rampant on the streets of the nation's
capital, which has one of the toughest gun control laws in the
country." - Washington Post, March 8, 1981.
"The District,
which bans all guns except for those used by law enforcement
officers, maintains one of the highest gun violence rates in
the country." - The Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2000.
WHILE 69 MEN
PER 100,000 die of gun shots in DC every year, the number of
female fatalities is so small that it's not even listed in the
latest Kaiser health statistics report. Obviously, something
more than guns are involved in these deaths.
MORE ON KNIFE
CONTROL
JESSE
WALKER, REASON,
October 1999: Supporters of the Second Amendment have often suggested
that gun control boosters will not rest until the private possession
of guns is completely banned. They may be wrong: If recent events
in Australia are any guide, the government won't stop there.
Last year, the state of New South Wales made it illegal to sell
knives or knife blades to anyone under 16. Plastic knives are
still acceptable. Everything else, though - from cake slicers
to cutlery - is off-limits. In Queensland, a new law prohibits
carrying a knife in public without a "reasonable" excuse
- a loophole that, the police minister stressed, did not include
self-defense. With those two models in place, other states and
territories have adopted, or at least considered, similar anti-knife
rules of their own. On the federal level, the Australian government
announced earlier this year that it will crack down harder on
illegal knives, thanks to a report by the Australian Institute
of Criminology that revealed a rise in the percentage of murders
committed with knives and-ominously - other "sharp object[s]."
KNIFE CONTROL
WE MISSED THIS
PART of the AP
story
on the Japanese man who killed eight children with a knife: "Police
said the attacker, identified as Mamoru Takuma, carried a 6-inch
kitchen knife. He was arrested at the scene, but was taken to
a hospital - reportedly with self-inflicted injuries. He was
turned over to police about an hour later. It was not immediately
clear what motivated the attack, although police in Ikeda said
the man told them he had taken 10 times his daily dose of an
unspecified anti-depressant."
BRASS
CHECK,
MARCH 2000: On page B5 of today's New York Times there's a story
about a ten year from Tom's River, NJ, a woodsy New York suburb,
who stabbed his father to death with a five inch knife. A terrible,
terrible story. The circumstances leading to the assault were
as follows: The father accused the boy of eating a container
of chocolate frosting. The boy denied it. At one point, no doubt
as the argument reached a fevered pitch, the father handed his
son the knife and told him: "If you hate me so much, why
don't you stab me." The boy did. Right in the chest. It
only took one thrust . . . So what do we do to prevent things
like this from happening in the future? Ban chocolate frosting,
the obvious "cause" of the argument? No. That would
be ridiculous. Ban knife possession instead. The fact is if there
hadn't been a long, sharp knife in that home this man would still
be alive. Ban knives now. I have a five point plan to accomplish
this: First, make it illegal for an adult to hand a child a knife,
bare his chest, and say "stab me." Second, make possession
or handling of knives illegal by anyone under 21. Third, require
that all knives have lock guards on them that can only be opened
by their owners. Fourth, cities should sue all knife manufacturers
for all police calls, ambulance trips and emergency room visits
related to people suffering from stab wounds. Five, require that
all knife owners be registered and that certain kinds of especially
sharp or long knives be banned.
JEWS
FOR THE PRESERVATION OF FIREARMS OWNERSHIP: In 1938, five years after taking power,
the Nazis enhanced the 1928 [gun] law. The Nazi Weapons Law introduced
handgun control. Firearms ownership was restricted to Nazi party
members and other "reliable" people. The 1938 Nazi
law barred Jews from businesses involving firearms. On November
10, 1938 -- one day after the Nazi party terror squads savaged
thousands of Jews, synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout
Germany -- new regulations under the Weapons Law specifically
barred Jews from owning any weapons, even clubs or knives."
TIME TO BAN KITCHEN
KNIVES?
ASSOCIATED PRESS:
A man armed with a kitchen knife forced his way into an elementary
school in western Japan and stabbed at least 29 people, killing
eight children, authorities said. Most of the victims were first-
or second-grade students.MORE
FEBURARY 2001
AN ARMED CITIZENRY &
THE NAZIS
Excerpts from
remarks made in 1998 by author Stephen Halbrook on the publication
of his book, Target
Switzerland:
In 1940, after
the rest of central Europe collapsed before the German army,
Swiss Commander in Chief Henri Guisan assembled his officers
at the Rotli meadow near the Lake of Lucerne. He reminded them
that, at this sacred spot, in the year 1291, the Swiss Confederation
was born as an alliance against despotism. Guisan admonished
that the Swiss would always stand up to any invader. One has
only to recall the medieval battle of Morgarten, where 1400 Swiss
peasants ambushed and defeated 20,000 Austrian knights.
In World War
II, the Swiss had defenses no other country had. Let's begin
with the rifle in every home combined with the Alpine terrain.
When the German Kaiser asked in 1912 what the quarter of a million
Swiss militiamen would do if invaded by a half million German
soldiers, a Swiss replied: "Shoot twice and go home."
Switzerland also had a decentralized, direct democracy which
could not be surrendered to a foreign enemy by a political elite.
Some governments surrendered to Hitler without resistance based
on the decision of a king or dictator; this was institutionally
impossible in Switzerland. If an ordinary Swiss citizen was told
that the Federal President--a relatively powerless official--had
surrendered the country, the citizen might not even know the
president's name, and would have held any "surrender"
order in contempt.
When Hitler came
to power in 1933, the Swiss feared an invasion and began military
preparations like no other European nation. On Hitler's 1938
"Anchluss" or annexation of Austria, the Swiss Parliament
declared that the Swiss were prepared to defend themselves "to
the last drop of their blood."
When the Fuehrer
attacked Poland in 1939, General Guisan ordered the citizen army
to resist any attack to the last cartridge. After Denmark and
Norway fell in 1940, Guisan and the Federal Council gave the
order to the populace: aggressively attack invaders; act on your
own initiative; regard any surrender broadcast or announcement
as enemy propaganda; resist to the end. This was published as
a message to the Swiss and a warning to the Germans; surrender
was impossible, even if ordered by the government, for the prior
order mandated that it be treated as an enemy lie.
When the Germany
army, the Wehrmacht, attacked Belgium and Holland, it feigned
preparations for attack through Switzerland. Like a giant movie
set, divisions moved toward the Swiss border by day, only to
sneak back again by night and repeat the ruse the next day. Both
the Swiss and the French were tricked into thinking that concentrations
of troops were massing to attack through Switzerland and into
France. Swiss border troops nervously awaited an assault each
time the clock approached the hour, for the Germans were punctual
in lauching attacks on the hour.
When France collapsed,
detailed Nazi invasion plans with names like "Case Switzerland"
and "Operation Tannenbaum" were prepared for the German
General Staff. They only awaited the Fuehrer's nod.
Threatened with
attack from German and Italian forces from all sides, General
Guisan devised the strategy of a delaying stand at the border,
and a concentration of Swiss forces in the rugged and impassable
Alps. . . A fifth of the Swiss people, 850,000 out of the 4.2
million population, was under arms and mobilized. Most men were
in the citizens army, and boys and old men with rifles constituted
the Home Guard. Many women served in the civil defense and the
anti-aircraft defense.
Nazi invasion
plans for 1941 were postponed to devote all forces to Operation
Barbarossa, the attack on Russia. The Swiss would have their
turn in due time. Hitler banned the play William Tell. He called
the Swiss "the most despicable and wretched people, mortal
enemies of the new Germany"; in the same breath he fumed
that all Jews must be expelled from Europe. His plan to annihilate
the Jews would have faced a special obstacle in Switzerland,
where every Swiss Jew (like every other citizen) had a rifle
in his home. In the heroic Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, Jews
demonstrated how genocide could be resisted with only a few pistols
and rifles. Hitler boasted that he would liquidate "the
rubbish of small nations" and would be "the Butcher
of the Swiss." But the dictator was more comfortable with
liquidating unarmed peoples and was dissuaded from invading Switzerland.
There was no Holocaust on Swiss soil.
As a neutral,
the Swiss represented American interests before the Axis powers,
such as by inspecting German prison camps holding American POWs.
When Vichy France was occupied, German soldiers with submachineguns
took over the American embassy. The Swiss minister, brandishing
his Swiss army knife, drove them out.
A Nazi SS invasion
plan, recommended for execution in 1944, warned the German general
staff that the Swiss fighting spirit was high and shooting instruction
good; German loses would be heavy, and a conquered Switzerland
would require a strong occupation force. D-Day put the plan on
hold, but new dangers threatened Switzerland as the Allies pushed
the Nazis back. In 1944, the Wehrmacht's counter-offensive in
the Ardennes, leading to the Battle of the Bulge, proved that
the Nazi Beast was still strong and full of suprises. The Swiss
prepared for an attack from Germans retreating from Italy. The
Swiss resolve remained high, for, as the US State Dept. declared,
"no people in Europe are more profoundly attached to democratic
principles than the Swiss."
Switzerland saved
a half million refugees who came there in the war. Restrictive
policies by government officials, often secret, were ignored
by Swiss who helped refugees. Let it be remembered that Switzerland
took in more Jewish refugees than the United States took in refugees
of all kinds. . .
In the American
Revolution, a Swiss leader wrote to Benjamin Franklin calling
America and Switzerland the "Sister Republics." After
two centuries of mutual respect, today a media frenzy falsely
depicts the Swiss as Nazi collaborators. It was the opposite.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels called Switzerland "this
stinking little state" and ranted that the Swiss press was
"either bought or Jewish." The Swiss bashing seen in
the New York Times today could use a reality check by reference
to the Times issues of the war period--such as a 1939 issue with
a map showing Switzerland as a possible invasion route, or a
1942 issue calling Switzerland an "Oasis of Democracy."
Our new "Ugly Americanism" will never have the credibility
of Winston Churchill, who observed near the end of the war: "Of
all the neutrals Switzerland has the greatest right to distinction."
OCTOBER 2000
MAYBE WE NEED
LOCKS
FOR THE GUN LOCKS
ASSOCIATED PRESS: A nationwide program to distribute
free gun locks to protect children has been suspended after the
police discovered that the devices could spring open. The program,
by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, distributed 400,000
cable locks through more than 600 law enforcement agencies before
the police in Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tenn., reported the
problems last week. The foundation, a trade group based in Newtown,
Conn., said today that no more locks would be given out until
after extensive testing.
JAMES GORDON MEEK, APB NEWS: Injuries and deaths
caused by firearms declined by 40 percent in the mid-1990s, the
Department of Justice reported in a new study, but at least one
expert says the reasons for the reduction are still unclear .
. . The [Bureau of Justice Statistics]study showed that gunshot
wounds from assault treated in hospital emergency rooms fell
to 39,400 cases in 1997 . . . The number of homicides with a
gun also dropped, by 27 percent, to 13,300 for 1997, the most
recent year for which national information is available. Out
of 19.2 million incidents of non-fatal violent crime examined,
excluding simple assault, less than 1 percent resulted in gunshot
wounds, the report said.
Jon Vernick,
a professor and associate director of the Johns Hopkins Center
for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore, said it's too early
to credit one of any number of credible reasons for the downward
trend. Besides a good economy and the waning of the crack cocaine
epidemic, possible factors include tougher sentencing, aggressive
policing, the Brady gun control law and various concealed weapons
laws, Vernick said . . . "As far as I've seen in the science
literature, no one has adequately explained the decline,"
Vernick said. "No one has yet produced the grand, unifying
theory."
Harry Browne, the Libertarian candidate
for president points out that during the past five yeas the number
of guns in America has surged 25 million. By the standards of
the SUV liberal set, that should have brought a commensurate
surge in crime. In fact, crime dropped during the period by 40%.
SEPTEMBER 2000
HOW ABOUT COVER
LOCKS FOR BIBLES?
ASSOCIATED PRESS,
DELHI CA: Deputies found Aurelia Lange lying on the bathroom
floor, her decapitated head by her side. Her teenage son was
nearby, naked, covered in blood and reading a Bible. Investigators
believe David Lange cut off his mother's head with a kitchen
knife, but they don't know why. "This is really weird because
there's no history [of violence] on this guy at all," Assistant
Merced County Sheriff Henry Strength said.NEWSMAX: Just over a year ago,
Australia followed in the footsteps of mother country Great Britain
and made law a total ban on hand guns. The gun ban and confiscation
program cost the Australian government more than $500 million.
Sometimes using deadly force, authorities there collected 640,381
personal firearms. And now the results are in: Australia-wide,
homicides are up 3.2 percent (in a country that has a low homicide
rate). Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent. Australia-wide,
armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent) . . . Figures
over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in armed robbery
with firearms - since the gun ban this has changed for the worse.
AUGUST 2000
[John R. Lott,
a Yale Law School senior research fellow, conducted one of the
most comprehensive firearms research projects ever undertaken.
The conclusion he reached -- that more guns in the hands of private
citizens results in less crime -- predictably has sparked heated
debate. Lott was interviewed by radio talk host Zoh
Hieronimus,
whose talk show can be heard daily on the Net as well as syndicated
stations. A few excerpts of Lott's remarks]
[Women] who behave
passively when they are confronted by a criminal are 2.5 times
more likely to end up being seriously injured than a woman who
has a gun. And the reason is pretty straightforward. You're talking
about a female victim. The attackers are virtually always male.
There's a large strength differential on average between a male
attacker and a female victim. Other types of resistance -- using
your fists, for example -- is very likely to lead to tragedy,
because a female who uses her fist has a high probability of
a physical response back from the attacker and a high probability
of serious injury or death. While men also benefit from having
a gun, the benefit isn't as large . . .
There are 31
states now that have so-called right-to-carry laws. These are
laws that set certain objective criteria. Once you meet those,
you can apply for a permit and then it's automatically granted.
You have to be a certain age; you have to pay a fee; half the
states require some type of training; and there are criminal
background checks. What you find is that the states that issue
the most permits, have the biggest drops in violent crime. For
each additional year that these right-to-carry laws are in effect,
you'll see an additional 1.5 percent drop in murder rates and
about a three percent additional drop in rapes, robberies and
aggravated assaults . . .
There are lots
of reasons why crime has been falling . . . We've seen a huge
drop in drug prices in the United States since 1991. There have
been big changes in drug interdiction and most people, I think,
don't appreciate how many murders, in urban areas in particular,
are due to drug gangs fighting against each other in order to
try and control drug turf. As the amount of drug interdiction
has gone down, we have seen more drugs coming into the country
from more sources -- and the profits that have been associated
with the gangs controlling drug turf have gone down . . .
Less than one
out every thousand times people use guns defensively is the attacker
killed. Ninety-eight percent of the time, simply being able to
brandish a gun is sufficient to cause a criminal to break off
an attack and the two percent of the time when guns are fired,
the vast majority of those are warning shots. It's something
like less than one-half-of-one percent of the time is the gun
fired in the direction of the attacker. Even when they do hit,
woundings are much more frequent than times when the attacker
is killed.
REUTERS: Saying
it did not want to open a "Pandora's box" for lawsuits
against other industries, an appeals court has upheld a judge's
decision to throw out a suit by the city of Cincinnati seeking
to recover millions of dollars from gun manufacturers. In its
unanimous decision, the Ohio First District Court of Appeals
likened the city suit to the "absurdity" of suing the
makers of matches because of losses from arson
JULY 2000
JENS LUDWIG & PHILIP COOK, JOURNAL
OF THE AMA:
Based on the assumption that the greatest reductions in fatal
violence would be within states that were required to institute
waiting periods and background checks, implementation of the
Brady Act appears to have been associated with reductions in
the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or older but
not with reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates.
OOPS
NEWSMAX: Just over a year ago,
Australia followed in the footsteps of mother country Great Britain
and made law a total ban on hand guns. The gun ban and confiscation
program cost the Australian government more than $500 million.
Sometimes using deadly force, authorities there collected 640,381
personal firearms. And now the results are in: Australia-wide,
homicides are up 3.2 percent (in a country that has a low homicide
rate). Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent. Australia-wide,
armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent). In the state
of Victoria, homicides with firearms are up 300 percent. Figures
over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in armed robbery
with firearms - since the gun ban this has changed for the worse.
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