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Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, misc.legal,
alt.politics.clinton, alt.rush-
limbaugh,talk.politics.misc
Subject: J. Neil Schulman Refutes ACLU Lies
Date: 19 Feb 1994 16:33:20 -0800
Organization: University of California, Riverside
Forwarded from t.p.g
In article <CLEC7w.Gnp@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>,
<lvc@cbvox1.att.com> wrote:
REPLY TO THE EXECUTIVES OF
THE ACLU OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
ON THE MEANING OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT
By J. Neil Schulman
Member, ACLU of Southern California
Includes the complete Prefaces to the U.S. Senate Report
"The Right to Keep and Bear Arms"
by Senator Orrin Hatch (R., Utah)
and Senator Dennis DeConcini (D. Arizona)
Original materials Copyright (c) 1994 by J. Neil
Schulman. Permission to reproduce on computer networks,
echos, and bulletin boards granted so long as unedited.
All other rights reserved.
ACLU materials are shown in [BRACKETS].
***
[ACLU NEWS
of Southern California
1616 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026
Public Affairs Department
(213) 977-9500 Ext 260
After Hours: (213) 303-3178
For Immediate Use Contact: ACLU Public Affairs, x260
Wednesday, Feb. 9, 1994 Mary Tokita, X209
ACLU OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LAUNCHES
EDUCATIONAL CAMPAIGN
ON GUN CONTROL AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT
As the nation's oldest and most prominent defender
of Constitutional Rights, the ACLU of Southern
California today launched an educational campaign to
eliminate popular myths about the Second Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution.
"Governor Wilson's crime summit and other
political posturing to 'get tough on crime' are not
focusing on ways to limit violence in our communities,"
said Ramona Ripston, ACLU executive director. "We want
to support one positive and obvious tool that will have
a direct impact on thousands of lives. And, as an
advocate of our freedoms under the U.S. Constitution,
the ACLU wants to set the record straight on what our
forefathers truly intended about our right to bear
arms."
The Second Amendment was written shortly after the
Revolutionary War when Bill of Rights author James
Madison and other leaders were still suspicious of any
centralized government. In that context, the phrase "a
well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security
of a free State" reflected a vital concern of that
time: the ability of states to defend themselves
against a possibly tyrannical federal government or
outside threats to the Union. Equipment and ammunition
were kept in the house of private citizens because the
militia of 1792 consisted of part-time citizen-
soldiers.]
Correct as far as it goes, however it should be
noted that the threat of abuse of power by the national
government became significant during the Civil War, and
has become incrementally greater ever since. The
usurpations and abuses of government at all levels in
this country has never been greater.
["In four cases in which the Supreme Court
addressed the issue, it has consistently held that the
Second Amendment does not grant a blanket right of
individual gun ownership," said ACLU attorney Alan
Friel. "Despite what is commonly believed, the
Amendment does not prohibit rational and effective gun
control."]
Both statements are technically true, but
misleading. First, the Second Amendment does not grant
the right of individual gun ownership, because that
right precedes the Bill of Rights; all the Second
Amendment does is protect that preexisting right.
Second, constitutional law has never been interpreted
as granting a "blanket" right to do \anything\ -- and
that applies to the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments
as much as it applies to the Second. However, the ACLU
has historically fought for the most extreme
protections -- and the harshest limitations on
exceptions -- to constitutional rights, and it is
especially pernicious that the ACLU of Southern
California is arguing against ACLU's traditional role
of expanding, rather than contracting, the "blanket"
protections of the Bill of Rights. As far as whether
the Second Amendment prohibits rational and effective
gun control, when some is proposed, we'll see. No gun
control law has ever proven to be effective at
producing the effects for which it was passed: the
reduction of crimes committed with guns, or even the
denial of guns to those who most misuse them.
[As part of the campaign, the civil liberties
group has published a new public education brochure and
has placed a full-page advertisement in the West Coast
edition of today's New York Times. Public speaking and
other educational activities are also planned.]
This is entirely contrary to the purposes of the
ACLU, which is an organization devoted to the
protection of individual civil liberties and rights.
In effect, the ACLU of Southern California is becoming
an advocate of greater restrictions on individuals and
greater police authority in its place.
***
[Brochure:
When the
FOUNDERS
of the
United States
of America
wrote the
SECOND
AMENDMENT ... ->
__________________________
.. this | |
is | Illustration of |
not | a handgun |
what | being pointed |
they | at the |
had | reader |
in | |
mind. | |
_________________________|]
This is grandstanding, an attempt to recruit the
Framers of the Constitution to a point of view held by
the modern authoritarians of the ACLU of Southern
California, and entirely antithetical to the actual
documented reasons and thoughts of those who wrote the
Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Second
Amendment in particular.
["A well-regulated Militia, being necessary
to the security of a free State, the right
of the people to keep and bear Arms
shall not be infringed."
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
HAVE YOU ever heard someone say gun control is a
fine idea -- except that the Second Amendment prohibits
it?
It's a popular sentiment. Fortunately, it's not
true.]
Get that? \"Fortunately"\ indeed. The ACLU
executives' agenda is exposed here: they wish greater
gun control on the basis of personal opinions which
have no grounds in ACLU doctrine, and are subverting
the organization to their own personal ends. The
fabrication of history begins here.
[The Second Amendment was never intended as a gun
license for the entire American populace. As original
drafted -- and as consistently interpreted by the
courts for more than a century --the Amendment does not
grant any blanket right to own a gun nor does it stand
in the way of rational, effective gun control.]
The executives of the ACLU of Southern California
betray their anti-libertarian, authoritarian stance
when they equate the Second Amendment to a "license":
they evidently cannot conceive of the Framers' premise
that rights originate with the individual, instead of
beginning as grants of privilege or immunity from the
government, reducing us all again to subjects of a
ruler. That was the purpose of the American
Revolution: to free us from that view of the tyrannical
relationship between the State and the individual.
Again, the Second Amendment does not grant the right to
keep and bear arms, nor does it claim to: it merely
states that "the right of the people to keep and bear
arms \shall not be infringed\." The phrasing itself
belies the possible interpretation that the Second
Amendment is a \grant\ of rights. The Framers
understood that what they were doing was a limitation
on the powers of the government they were forging. The
ACLU executives are confounded by this thought.
[The idea of gun ownership as an American
birthright is nothing more than a popular myth.]
Throwing the right to keep and bear arms into the
memory hole portrayed in Orwell's \Nineteen-eighty-
four\ is worthy of the anti-Semites who claim that the
Holocaust never happened. Seventy million Americans own
firearms today. The sentiments to restrict the
people's arms were as common at the time of the
American Revolution as they are today, by those seeking
a monopoly of force for the State. As James Madison,
the chief author of the Bill of Rights put it in
\Federalist Paper No. 26\, "The advantage of being
armed . . . the Americans possess over the people of
all other nations . . . Notwithstanding the military
establishments in the several Kingdoms of Europe, which
are carried as far as the public resources will bear,
the governments are afraid to trust the people with
arms."
The author of the Bill of Rights was aware that
the American people being armed was an exception to the
practice everywhere else on Earth (except Switzerland),
and that the tendency would be for Americans to revert
to the common condition of the rest of mankind if the
right to keep and bear arms was not explicitly
enshrined in our founding document. If the right to
keep and bear arms is nothing more than a popular myth,
with no basis in the history of our country, how is it
that this right has survived for two centuries so that
our civilian population is the best armed in the world?
This should be the first proof to the innocent
that the executives of the ACLU of Southern California
are attempting to deceive them about the actual history
of the right to keep and bear arms, and the Second
Amendment in particular.
[Yet the controversy over gun control and the
Second Amendment rages on.]
Why, yes. Depriving an entire people of the right
which is the practical defense of all their other
rights is bound to cause controversy.
[AS THE NATION'S oldest and most prominent
defender of individual rights, the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) holds the U.S. Constitution and
its Bill of Rights in the highest regard.]
Indeed. I seriously doubt you could get ACLU's
national executive director, Ira Glasser, or its
president, Nadine Strossen, to dismiss the Second
Amendment from the Bill of rights so cavalierly. They
are more likely to understand that the weakening of any
of the Bill of Rights is bound to weaken all the
others.
[To clear up many misconceptions, here are some
questions and answers about the Second Amendment and
gun control.
ACLU of Southern California
Questions and Answers
on the Second Amendment
Q Does the Second Amendment in any way guarantee
gun rights to individuals?
A No. The weight of historical and legal
scholarship clearly shows that the Second Amendment was
intended to guarantee that states could maintain armed
forces to resist the federal government.]
According to Constitutional attorney Don B. Kates,
Jr., you will not be able to find this position
supported in \any\ major law- review article, while the
legal and historical scholarship regarding the Second
Amendment's protection of an individual right to keep
and bear private arms is so weighty as to be
indisputable.
The historical and legal scholarship is most
authoritative in a February, 1982 report issued by the
United States Senate's Subcommittee on the
Constitution, Committee on the Judiciary, titled "The
Right to Keep and Bear Arms." To prove that, here are
the two prefaces from that report, the first by the
Committee Chairman, Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R., Utah)
and the second by the Ranking Minority Member, Senator
Dennis DeConcini (D., Arizona):
Senator Hatch:
In my studies as an attorney and as a United
States Senator, I have constantly been amazed by the
indifference or even hostility shown the Second
Amendment by courts, legislatures, and commentators.
James Madison would be startled to hear that his
recognition of a right to keep and bear arms, which
passed the House by a voice vote without objection and
hardly a debate, has since been construed in but a
single, and most ambiguous, Supreme Court decision,
whereas his proposals for freedom of religion, which he
made reluctantly out of fear that they would be
rejected or narrowed beyond use, and those for freedom
of assembly, which passed only after a lengthy and
bitter debate, are the subject of scores of detailed
and favorable decisions. Thomas Jefferson, who kept a
veritable armory of pistols, rifles and shotguns at
Monticello, and advised his nephew to forsake other
sports in favor of hunting, would be astounded to hear
supposed civil libertarians claim firearm ownership
should be restricted. Samuel Adams, a handgun owner who
pressed for an amendment stating that the "Constitution
shall never be construed . . . to prevent the people of
the United States who are peaceable citizens from
keeping their own arms," would be shocked to hear that
his native state today imposes a year's sentence,
without probation or parole, for carrying a firearm
without a police permit.
This is not to imply that courts have totally
ignored the impact of the Second Amendment in the Bill
of Rights. No fewer than twenty-one decisions by the
courts of our states have recognized an individual
right to keep and bear arms, and a majority of these
have not only recognized the right but invalidated laws
or regulations which abridged it. Yet in all too many
instances, courts or commentators have sought, for
reasons only tangentially related to constitutional
history, to construe this right out of existence. They
argue that the Second Amendment's words "right of the
people" mean "a right of the state"--apparently
overlooking the impact of those same words when used in
the First and Fourth Amendments. The "right of the
people" to assemble or to be free from unreasonable
searches and seizures is not contested as an individual
guarantee. Still they ignore consistency and claim that
the right to "bear arms" relates only to military uses.
This not only violates a consistent constitutional
reading of "right of the people" but also ignores that
the second amendment protects a right to "keep" arms.
These commentators contend instead that the amendment's
preamble regarding the necessity of a "well regulated
militia . . . to a free state" means that the right to
keep and bear arms applies only to a National Guard.
Such a reading fails to note that the Framers used the
term "militia" to relate to every citizen capable of
bearing arms, and that Congress has established the
present National Guard under its power to raise armies,
expressly stating that it was not doing so under its
power to organize and arm the militia.
When the first Congress convened for the purpose
of drafting a Bill of Rights, it delegated the task to
James Madison. Madison did not write upon a blank
tablet. Instead, he obtained a pamphlet listing the
State proposals for a bill of rights and sought to
produce a briefer version incorporating all the vital
proposals of these. His purpose was to incorporate, not
distinguish by technical changes, proposals such as
that of the Pennsylvania minority, Sam Adams, or the
New Hampshire delegates. Madison proposed among other
rights that "That right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well
regulated militia being the best security of a free
country; but no person religiously scrupulous of
bearing arms shall be compelled to render military
service in person." In the House, this was initially
modified so that the militia clause came before the
proposal recognizing the right. The proposals for the
Bill of Rights were then trimmed in the interests of
brevity. The conscientious objector clause was removed
following objections by Elbridge Gerry, who complained
that future Congresses might abuse the exemption to
excuse everyone from military service.
The proposal finally passed the House in its
present form: "A well regulated militia, being
necessary to the security of a free state, the right of
the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be
infringed." In this form it was submitted into the
Senate, which passed it the following day. The Senate
in the process indicated its intent that the right be
an individual one, for private purposes, by rejecting
an amendment which would have limited the keeping and
bearing of arms to bearing "For the common defense".
The earliest American constitutional commentators
concurred in giving this broad reading to the
amendment. When St. George Tucker, later Chief Justice
of the Virginia Supreme Court, in 1803 published an
edition of Blackstone annotated to American law, he
followed Blackstone's citation of the right of the
subject "of having arms suitable to their condition and
degree, and such as are allowed by law" with a citation
to the Second Amendment, "And this without any
qualification as to their condition or degree, as is
the case in the British government." William Rawle's
"View of the Constitution" published in Philadelphia in
1825 noted that under the Second Amendment: "The
prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution
could by a rule of construction be conceived to give to
Congress a power to disarm the people. Such a
flagitious attempt could only be made under some
general pretense by a state legislature. But if in
blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should
attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a
restraint on both." The Jefferson papers in the Library
of Congress show that both Tucker and Rawle were
friends of, and corresponded with, Thomas Jefferson.
Their views are those of contemporaries of Jefferson,
Madison and others, and are entitled to special weight.
A few years later, Joseph Story in his "Commentaries on
the Constitution" considered the right to keep and bear
arms as "the palladium of the liberties of the
republic", which deterred tyranny and enabled the
citizenry at large to overthrow it should it come to
pass.
Subsequent legislation in the second Congress
likewise supports the interpretation of the Second
Amendment that creates an individual right. In the
Militia Act of 1792, the second Congress defined
"militia of the United States" to include almost every
free adult male in the United States. These persons
were obligated by law to possess a firearm and a
minimum supply of ammunition and military equipment.
This statute, incidentally, remained in effect into the
early years of the present century as a legal
requirement of gun ownership for most of the population
of the United States. There can be little doubt from
this that when the Congress and the people spoke of a
"militia", they had reference to the traditional
concept of the entire populace capable of bearing arms,
and not to any formal group such as what is today
called the National Guard. The purpose was to create an
armed citizenry, which the political theorists at the
time considered essential to ward off tyranny. From
this militia, appropriate measures might create a "well
regulated militia" of individuals trained in their
duties and responsibilities as citizens and owners of
firearms.
If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this
type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing
upon long lists of examples of crime rates reduced by
such legislation. That they cannot do so after a
century and a half of trying--that they must sweep
under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in
the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the
1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and
State levels in 1965-1976--establishes the repeated,
complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control
serious crime.
Immediately upon assuming chairmanship of the
Subcommittee on the Constitution, I sponsored the
report which follows as an effort to study, rather than
ignore, the history of the controversy over the right
to keep and bear arms. Utilizing the research
capabilities of the Subcommittee on the Constitution,
the resources of the Library of Congress, and the
assistance of constitutional scholars such as Mary
Kaaren Jolly, Steven {\sic\} Halbrook, and David T.
Hardy, the subcommittee has managed to uncover
information on the right to keep and bear arms which
documents quite clearly its status as a major
individual right of American citizens. We did not guess
at the purpose of the British 1689 Declaration of
Rights; we located the Journals of the House of Commons
and private notes of the Declaration's sponsors, now
dead for two centuries. We did not make suppositions as
to colonial interpretations of that Declaration's right
to keep and bear arms; we examined colonial newspapers
which discussed it. We did not speculate as to the
intent of the framers of the second amendment; we
examined James Madison's drafts for it, his handwritten
outlines of speeches upon the Bill of Rights, and
discussions of the second amendment by early scholars
who were personal friends of Madison, Jefferson, and
Washington and wrote while these still lived. What the
Subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear--
and long-lost--proof that the second amendment to our
Constitution was intended as an individual right of the
American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful
manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his
freedoms. The summary of our research and findings
forms the first portion of this report.
In the interest of fairness and the presentation
of a complete picture, we also invited groups which
were likely to oppose this recognition of freedoms to
submit their views. The statements of two associations
who replied are reproduced here following the report
of the Subcommittee. The Subcommittee also invited
statements by Messr. Halbrook and Hardy, and by the
National Rifle Association, whose statements likewise
follow our report.
When I became chairman of the Subcommittee on the
Constitution, I hoped that I would be able to assist in
the protection of the constitutional rights of American
citizens, rights which have too often been eroded in
the belief that government could be relied upon for
quick solutions to difficult problems.
Both as an American citizen and as a United States
Senator I repudiate this view. I likewise repudiate the
approach of those who believe to solve American
problems you simple become something other than
American. To my mind, the uniqueness of our free
institutions, the fact that an American citizen can
boast freedoms unknown in any other land, is all the
more reason to resist any erosion of our individual
rights. When our ancestors forged a land "conceived in
liberty", they did so with musket and rifle. When they
reacted to attempts to dissolve their free
institutions, and established their identity as a free
nation, they did so as a nation of armed freemen. When
they sought to record forever a guarantee of their
rights, they devoted one full amendment out of ten to
nothing but the protection of their right to keep and
bear arms against government interference. Under my
chairmanship the Subcommittee on the Constitution will
concern itself with a proper recognition of, and
respect for, this right most valued by free men.
Orrin G. Hatch,
Chairman,
Subcommittee on the Constitution.
January 20, 1982.
Senator DeConcini:
The right to bear arms is a tradition with deep
roots in American society. Thomas Jefferson proposed
that "no free man shall ever be debarred the use of
arms," and Samuel Adams called for an amendment banning
any law "to prevent the people of the United States who
are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
The Constitution of the State of Arizona, for example,
recognized the "right of an individual citizen to bear
arms in defense of himself or the State."
Even though the tradition has deep roots, its
application to modern America is the subject of intense
controversy. Indeed, it is a controversy into which the
Congress is beginning, once again, to immerse itself. I
have personally been disappointed that so important an
issue should have generally been so thinly researched
and so minimally debated both in Congress and the
courts. Our Supreme Court has but once touched on its
meaning at the Federal level and that decision, now
nearly a half-century old, is so ambiguous that any
school of thought can find some support in it. All
Supreme Court decisions on the second amendment's
application to the States came in the last century,
when constitutional law was far different that it is
today. As ranking minority member of the Subcommittee
on the Constitution, I, therefore, welcome the effort
which led to this report--a report based not only upon
the independent research of the subcommittee staff, but
also upon full and fair presentation of the cases by
all interested groups and individual scholars.
I personally believe that it is necessary for the
Congress to amend the Gun Control Act of 1968. I
welcome the opportunity to introduce this discussion of
how best these amendments might be made.
The Constitution subcommittee staff has prepared
this monograph bringing together proponents of both
sides of the debate over the 1968 Act. I believe that
the statements contained herein present the arguments
fairly and thoroughly. I commend Senator Hatch,
chairman of the subcommittee, for having this excellent
reference work prepared. I am sure that it will be of
great assistance to the Congress as it debates the
second amendment and considers legislation to amend the
Gun Control Act.
Dennis DeConcini,
Ranking Minority Member,
Subcommittee on the Constitution.
January 20, 1982.
[Most scholars overwhelmingly concur that the
Second Amendment was never intended to guarantee gun
ownership rights for individual personal use. Small
arms ownership was common when the Bill of Rights was
adopted, with many people owning single-shot firearms
for hunting in what was then an overwhelmingly rural
nation.]
What "scholars" concur that the Second Amendment
was not intended to make such a guarantee would still
have a hard time explaining away the clauses
guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms in 45 of
the 50 state constitutions today. Why would state
constitutions need to guarantee the right to keep and
bear arms, if the only meaning of that phrase is to
protect state governments from the federal government?
And given that the right to keep and bear arms was --
as the ACLU executives themselves admit -- common at
the time of the Bill of Rights' ratification, the
individual right to keep and bear arms would be
otherwise guaranteed by the \Ninth\ amendment to the
U.S. Constitution, which states, "The enumeration in
the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the
people."
It should also be noted that the ACLU executives,
in attempting to portray the right to keep and bear
arms as something antiquated and outdated, focus on the
fact that the technology of the time had only reached
the stage of single-shot firearms.
Are they willing to apply that reasoning to the
rest of the U.S. Constitution?
The first amendment's guarantee of free exercise
of religion wouldn't apply to the Mormons or the
Christian Scientists; there were no Mormons or
Christian Scientists in the 1790's when the Bill of
Rights was added to the Constitution.
The first amendment's guarantee of freedom of the
press wouldn't apply to anything printed using
photography, or computer typesetting or offset
printing, nor would the guarantees of freedom of speech
apply to the broadcast media, or anything using
telephones or telegraphs -- none of which existed in
the 1790's.
The fourth amendment's guarantees of freedom from
unreasonable searches wouldn't apply to electronic
wiretapping or the use of laser listening devices; nor
satellite or infrared observation -- the framers
couldn't have possibly conceived of any of them.
Nor, I suppose, could the United States have an
Air Force or spy satellites, since there is no
authorization anywhere in the Constitution for anything
other than land or naval armed forces.
Why is it that arguments such as this are never
brought up with respect to any constitutional issue
relating to progress, except when it is to destroy the
people's right to keep and bear arms?
And how can it be that the American Civil
Liberties Union of Southern California is controlled by
persons who are so quick to divide the Bill of Rights
so to allow authoritarians to conquer it?
[Q Does the Second Amendment authorize Americans
to possess and own any firearm they feel they may need?
A Clearly, no. The original intent of the Second
Amendment was to protect the right of states to
maintain state militias.]
And who were the militia? According to George
Mason, who refused to sign the U.S. Constitution
because it did not yet have a Bill of Rights, the
militia "consist now of the whole people."
[Private gun ownership that is not necessary to
the maintenance of militias is not protected by the
Second Amendment.]
That is just backwards. The arms that individual
militia members own \are\, by definition, the militia
arms.
[Q Does the Second Amendment allow government to
limit --even prohibit -- ownership of guns by
individuals?
A Yes. Federal, state and local governments can
all regulate guns without violating the Second
Amendment.]
Repeating this assertion without proof does not
change it from false to true. Such proof is impossible
because of repeated court decisions over the last two
centuries which state just the opposite. While it is
true that the Supreme Court of the United States has
never enforced the Second Amendment as clearly as gun-
rights activists would hope, neither has it ever ruled
against the Second Amendment as protecting an
individual right to keep and bear arms. Specific
citations will follow as the ACLU document brings them
up.
[State authorities have considerable powers to
regulate guns. The federal government can also regulate
firearm ownership, although some scholars believe that
the federal power may not be as extensive as that of an
individual state.]
There is no disputing that the right to keep and
bear arms is under attack both legislatively and in the
courts, and there have, indeed, been some adverse
lower-court decisions, allowing infringements on these
rights of the people. This does not change either the
historical facts of the establishment of the right to
keep and bear arms in protections offered by the U.S.
Constitution and state constitutions, or the
malfeasance of judges who have falsified the precedents
in order to advance their personal anti-firearms
agendas.
[California, for example, has limited the ability
of local governments to regulate firearms. While the
state has kept its broad regulatory power, cities and
counties can only prohibit guns from being carried in
public places.
Q How have the courts -- particularly the U.S.
Supreme Court -- interpreted the Second Amendment?
A The Supreme Court has flatly held that the
individual's right to keep and bear arms "is not a
right granted by the Constitution."]
The decision in which the Supreme Court "flatly
held" this was \U.S. v Cruikshank\, referenced below.
The Court meant that the right to keep and bear arms
preceded the constitution, and therefore was not a
right granted by the constitution, such as, for
example, the right to vote. The Court's reasoning was
that only rights originating in the federal
Constitution could be imposed on the states by federal
courts. That decision by the Reconstruction-era
Supreme Court ignored the intent of the authors of the
Fourteenth Amendment to apply the protections of the
Bill of Rights -- including, explicitly, the Second
Amendment -- to state courts. If the \Cruikshank\
decision were applied today, it would strike down
almost \all\ federal intervention against state and
local governments, because federal courts could not
impose any of the Bill of Rights on state or local
governments, or on private individuals. States could
then revert to segregated schools and restaurants,
there could have been no federal trial of the Los
Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King, and
states could allow the Lord's Prayer in public schools.
In the \Cruikshank\ case, blacks who had been
disarmed and terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan were
arguing that the KKK had violated their rights; the
Court was ruling that the federal courts had no
jurisdiction to prevent the Klansmen from doing so. Is
this what the ACLU of Southern California would like to
see happen today?
Here are the Court's words:
The third and eleventh counts are even more
objectionable. They charge the intent to have been
to deprive the citizens named, they being in
Louisiana, "of their respective several lives and
liberty of person without due process of law." This
is nothing else than alleging a conspiracy to
falsely imprison or murder citizens of the United
States, being within the territorial jurisdiction of
the State of Louisiana.
The rights of life and personal liberty are natural
rights of man. "To secure these rights," says the
Declaration of Independence, "governments are
instituted among men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed." The very highest
duty of the States, when they entered into the Union
under the Constitution, was to protect all persons
within their boundaries in the enjoyment of these
"unalienable rights with which they were endowed by
their Creator."
Sovereignty, for this purpose, rests alone with the
States. It is no more the duty or within the power
of the United States to punish for a conspiracy to
falsely imprison or murder within a State, than it
would be to punish for false imprisonment or murder
itself.
[In the four cases in which the high court has
addressed the issue, it has consistently held that the
Second Amendment does not confer a blanket right of
individual gun ownership.]
As I've demonstrated, in one of the four
decisions, that is because the Court held the right
existed previously and independently.
[The most important Supreme Court Second Amendment
case, \U.S. v. Miller\, was decided in 1939. It
involved two men who illegally shipped a sawed-off
shotgun from Oklahoma to Arkansas, then claimed the
Second Amendment prohibited the federal government from
prosecuting them.
The court emphatically disagreed, ruling that the
Second Amendment has the "obvious intent" of creating
state militias, not of authorizing individual gun
ownership. In two earlier rulings in 1876 and 1886,
the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment
affected only the federal government's power to
regulate gun ownership and had no effect on state gun
control powers. Those cases, \Presser v. U.S.\ and
\U.S. v Cruikshank\, formed the basis for the
continuing legal decisions that the Second Amendment
was not an impediment to rational gun control.]
The \Presser\ case, if anything, destroys the
"militia" premise the ACLU brochure is arguing; the
Court was ruling against Presser that he and other
members of a local self-organized militia didn't have
the right to march armed \as a group\ on city streets
without a permit from local government. The question
of whether the men had the right to carry arms \as
individuals\ was never looked at.
The \Miller\ case is odd in that the Supreme Court
never heard arguments from the defense in overturning
the lower-court ruling to dismiss charges on the basis
of the defendants' Second-amendment rights; only a
prosecution brief -- and one which suffered from the
same lack of historical veracity as the ACLU
brochure's. Defendant Jack Miller had been murdered
before the case reached the Supreme Court and the other
defendant, Frank Layton, was in prison; no attorney
argued their Second-amendment case to the Supreme
Court.
Here is the meat of what the Supreme Court
actually said in \U.S. v Miller\:
The Court can not take judicial notice that a
shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long
has today any reasonable relation to the
preservation or efficiency of a well regulated
militia; and therefore can not say that the Second
Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to
keep and bear such a weapon.
The Supreme Court was stating that a weapon, to be
protected by the Second Amendment, had to have a
military application, specifically one that was useful
to a citizen's militia. Weapons used only by
gangsters, such as brass knuckles, would not, in their
view, be promoting the framers' intent of a well-armed
citizenry. In the absence of counsel for the
defendants to provide evidence to the Court that a
sawed-off shotgun had some military application --
which would have been easy since shortbarreled shotguns
were used in World War One -- the court could "not take
judicial notice" that a sawed-off shotgun was a
"militia" weapon, and reversed the lower court's ruling
on that basis and that basis alone.
In fact, by the Miller court's reasoning, full-
auto M-16 assault rifles, full-auto AK-47's, and Uzis
\would\ be useful to militia, and therefore their
ownership by civilians would be protected by the Second
Amendment. Is this an argument that the ACLU of
Southern California executives are ready to embrace?
[In another case that the Supreme Court declined
to review, a federal appeals court in Illinois ruled in
1983 that the Second Amendment could not prevent a
municipal government from banning handgun possession.
In the case \Quilici v. Village of Morton Grove\, the
appeals court held that contemporary handguns couldn't
be considered as weapons relevant to a collective
militia.]
The Supreme Court simply denied certiorari on the
\Morton Grove\ case, which gives it no precedential
value outside of the federal district in which the case
was resolved by the lower court. If the Supreme Court
had actually wished to endorse the lower court's
decision, and endorse the ACLU of Southern California
executives' view of the irrelevancy of the Second
Amendment, the Supreme Court could simply have issued a
summary affirmation of the lower court's decision. It
did not do so, leaving the question unresolved.
Constitutional attorney Stephen Halbrook (mentioned
earlier in Senator Hatch's preface) expressed to me
privately in 1993 the thought that the Supreme Court
had actually done Second-Amendment advocates a favor in
denying cert on the \Morton Grove\ case, since Quilici
was both plaintiff and his own attorney, and refused to
accept research and advice offered by renowned
constitutional attorneys.
[Q The National Rifle Association (NRA) says that
the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and
bear arms. Has the NRA got it wrong?
A Like any powerful special interest, the NRA
works to secure its financial well-being. It insists
on a view of the Second Amendment that defies virtually
all court decisions and contradicts findings of most
legal scholars. In so doing, the NRA actively
perpetuates a seemingly endless cycle of gun-related
fatalities.]
Trust an ideologue to answer a question with an ad
hominem attack on the motives of those who disagree
with them, not only suggesting that the 3.4 million
members of the National Rifle Association are motivated
by financial well-being in their view of the purpose of
the Second Amendment, but also scapegoating the law-
abiding and well-trained NRA gun owners for the actions
of the criminally insane few. This is a case of the
pot calling the kettle black, since the ACLU of
Southern California is financed by elite Hollywood
jetsetters who undoubtedly feel firearms are a special
privilege which they should enjoy as exclusively as
their limousines and private spas, but also because the
ACLU of Southern California is currently battling the
public perception that its litigation on behalf of
criminal defendants has created a judicial atmosphere
in which no effective means remain for removing
hardened criminals from society.
[NRA intimidates politicians because it is very
well financed and, like any wealthy single-issue
special interest, can muster considerable pressure and
tactics against legislators who oppose it. For
decades, the NRA has aggressively promulgated its
message.]
This is likely envy speaking, since the National
Rifle Association has 3.4 million members, while the
total national membership of ACLU is reported to be
280,000. Which civil liberties organization is more
likely to effectively lobby its views? One with almost
3-1/2 million members, or one slightly over a quarter
million?
[Other voices have begun to be heard, however,
including the public health community, civil rights and
civil liberties organizations, and groups committed to
women's, children's, and family rights.]
These voices are being heard because they play
into the prejudices of the dominant media culture in
this country. Meanwhile, none of the three major
television networks will even \sell\ commercial time to
the NRA, while ostensibly news programs regularly air
anti-gun propaganda as straight news.\
[The NRA implies that the Bill of Rights forces us
to accept unlimited gun ownership and tolerate the
human tragedies that guns cause in our society. That
simply isn't true.]
What isn't true is that unlimited gun ownership
causes human tragedies. Where gun ownership and
carrying is the most legally restricted and entangled
in bureaucratic impediments -- such as Washington D.C.
-- the crime rates are the highest. In places where
gun ownership is free and easy -- such as New
Hampshire, Vermont, and Arizona -- crime is
substantially less. Still, the cause-and-effect
relationship between gun ownership and crime is mutual,
since high crime causes more gun ownership by potential
victims at least as much as the reverse.
[Q What are the Second Amendment positions of the
American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Southern
California?
A For decades, both the national ACLU and its
Southern California affiliate have agreed that the
Second Amendment guarantees only the rights of states
to maintain militias. The national ACLU has urged
caution over gun control laws that, though well-
intended, might infringe on other civil liberties.
The ACLU of Southern California believes effective
gun control -- especially of handguns and assault
weapons -- is essential to curbing the escalating
violence in our society.]
This irrelevant, quasi-religious belief by the
executives of the ACLU of Southern California not only
has nothing whatsoever to do with the purposes of the
American Civil Liberties Union as a civil liberties
organization, but it is also unfounded and contrary to
the latest scientific evidence. The 1993 National Self
Defense Survey conducted by professors Gary Kleck and
Marc Gertz of the Department of Criminology and
Criminal Justice at Florida State University found that
there are 2.45 million genuine defensive civilian uses
of firearms in a year, 1.9 million of them with
handguns alone. That is a defensive use of a firearm
once every 13 seconds.
[Q The Second Amendment says "the right of the
people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Doesn't it mean just that?
A There is more to the Second Amendment than just
the last 14 words.
Most of the debate on the Amendment has focused on
its final phrase and entirely ignores its first phrase:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
Security of a free State ..." And to dissect the
Amendment is to destroy its context.]
Indeed. And that is precisely what the executives
of the ACLU of Southern California are attempting to
do. But if you wish a professional opinion on the
textual meaning of the Second Amendment, there is one
available.
Roy Copperud was a newspaper writer on major
dailies for over three decades before embarking on a
distinguished seventeen-year career teaching journalism
at USC. Copperud spent most of four decades writing a
column dealing with the professional aspects of
journalism for \Editor and Publisher\, a weekly
magazine focusing on the journalism field.
He was on the usage panel of the \American
Heritage Dictionary\, and \Merriam Webster's Usage
Dictionary\ frequently cited him as an expert.
Copperud's fifth book on usage, \American Usage and
Style: The Consensus\, has been in continuous print
from Van Nostrand Reinhold since 1981, and was the
winner of the Association of American Publishers'
Humanities Award.
Here's what Roy Copperud had to say about the
meaning of the Second Amendment when I interviewed him
about it, shortly before his death in 1991:
{Copperud:} The words "A well-regulated militia,
being necessary to the security of a free state"
constitute a present participle, rather than a clause.
It is used as an adjective, modifying "militia," which
is followed by the main clause of the sentence (subject
"the right," verb "shall"). The right to keep and bear
arms is asserted as essential for maintaining a
militia.
In reply to your numbered questions:
{Schulman: (1) Can the sentence be interpreted to
grant the right to keep and bear arms solely to "a
well-regulated militia"?;}
{Copperud:} (1) The sentence does not restrict the
right to keep and bear arms, nor does it state or imply
possession of the right elsewhere or by others than the
people; it simply makes a positive statement with
respect to a right of the people.
{Schulman: (2) Is "the right of the people to keep
and bear arms" granted by the words of the Second
Amendment, or does the Second Amendment assume a
preexisting right of the people to keep and bear arms,
and merely state that such right "shall not be
infringed"?;}
{Copperud:} (2) The right is not granted by the
amendment; its existence is assumed. The thrust of the
sentence is that the right shall be preserved inviolate
for the sake of ensuring a militia.
{Schulman: (3) Is the right of the people to keep
and bear arms conditioned upon whether or not a well-
regulated militia is, in fact, necessary to the
security of a free State, and if that condition is not
existing, is the statement "the right of the people to
keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" null and
void?;}
{Copperud:} (3) No such condition is expressed or
implied. The right to keep and bear arms is not said by
the amendment to depend on the existence of a militia.
No condition is stated or implied as to the relation of
the right to keep and bear arms and to the necessity of
a well-regulated militia as requisite to the security
of a free state. The right to keep and bear arms is
deemed unconditional by the entire sentence.
{Schulman: (4) Does the clause "A well-regulated
Militia, being necessary to the security of a free
State," grant a right to the government to place
conditions on the "right of the people to keep and bear
arms," or is such right deemed unconditional by the
meaning of the entire sentence?;}
{Copperud:} (4) The right is assumed to exist and
to be unconditional, as previously stated. It is
invoked here specifically for the sake of the militia.
{Schulman: (5) Which of the following does the
phrase "well-regulated militia" mean: "well-equipped,"
"well-organized," "well-drilled," "well-educated," or
"subject to regulations of a superior authority"?}
{Copperud:} (5) The phrase means "subject to
regulations of a superior authority"; this accords with
the desire of the writers for civilian control over the
military.
{Schulman: If at all possible, I would ask you to
take into account the changed meanings of words, or
usage, since that sentence was written two-hundred
years ago, but not to take into account historical
interpretations of the intents of the authors, unless
those issues can be clearly separated.}
{Copperud:} To the best of my knowledge, there has
been no change in the meaning of words or in usage that
would affect the meaning of the amendment. If it were
written today, it might be put: "Since a well-regulated
militia is necessary to the security of a free state,
the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not
be abridged."
{Schulman: As a "scientific control" on this
analysis, I would also appreciate it if you could
compare your analysis of the text of the Second
Amendment to the following sentence,
"A well-schooled electorate, being necessary to
the security of a free State, the right of the people
to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed."
My questions for the usage analysis of this
sentence would be,
(1) Is the grammatical structure and usage of this
sentence, and the way the words modify each other,
identical to the Second Amendment's sentence?; and
(2) Could this sentence be interpreted to restrict
"the right of the people to keep and read Books" only
to "a well-educated electorate" -- for example,
registered voters with a high-school diploma?}
{Copperud:} (1) Your "scientific control" sentence
precisely parallels the amendment in grammatical
structure.
(2) There is nothing in your sentence that either
indicates or implies the possibility of a restricted
interpretation.
[While some scholars have suggested that the
Amendment gives individuals the constitutional right to
bear arms, still others have argued for discarding the
Amendment as irrelevant and out of date.]
Yes, and there is popular sentiment for repealing
\all\ of the Bill of Rights. Do the executives of the
ACLU of Southern California wish to make the existence
of all rights inferior to transient public opinion?
[However, the vast majority of constitutional
experts agree that the right to keep and bear arms was
intended to apply only to members of state-run, citizen
militias.]
Yes? Precisely what experts are those? Certainly
not those consulted by the United States Senate, when
it issued its report on the question.
[Q If it doesn't guarantee the right to own a
gun, why was the Second Amendment included in the Bill
of Rights?
A When James Madison (pictured below Thomas
Jefferson on the cover) proposed the Bill of Rights in
the late 1780's, people were still suspicious of any
centralized federal government. Just 10 years earlier,
the British army been an occupying force in Colonial
America -- enforcing arbitrary laws decreed from afar.
After the Revolutionary War, the states insisted on the
constitutional right to defend themselves in case the
fledgling U.S. government became tyrannical like the
British Crown. The states demanded the right to keep an
armed "militia" as a form of insurance.]
The executives of the ACLU of Southern California
are guilty of something akin to blasphemy, by invoking
Jefferson and Madison in support of their Orwellian
reversal of history. In effect, we are hearing the
sort of argument a spokesman for the Crown might have
made to the American colonists that all's well with the
world and there's no reason to keep firearms to prevent
abuse of government power. The authoritarians of the
ACLU of California masquerade as identifying with the
now safely-entombed leaders of the American Revolution,
but they are in fact counterrevolutionary Tories, who
wish to restore this continent to European statism.
I've already quoted Madison about the value of
civilian arms; here are a few choice quotes from Thomas
Jefferson on the value of firearms:
"A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the
species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this
gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness,
enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played
with the ball and others of that nature, are too
violent for the body and stamp no character on the
mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion
of your walk."
- Thomas Jefferson, \Encyclopedia of T. Jefferson\,
318 (Foley, Ed., reissued 1967)
"What country before ever existed a century and a
half without a rebellion? ... The tree of liberty must
be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
-- Thomas Jefferson,
Letter to William Stevens Smith,
November 13, 1787.
"What country can preserve its liberties if their
rulers are not warned from time to time that their
people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them
take arms."
-- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison,
Dec. 20, 1787, quoted from
"Papers of Jefferson" edited by Boyd et al.
And, most importantly, Jefferson writing in the
Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to
institute new Government, laying its foundation on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form, as
to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety
and Happiness."
Does it seem at all likely that Thomas Jefferson
would have endorsed the notion that civilians are to be
armed only after obtaining permission from government
officials?
{Illustration. Caption: "A 1770 Paul Revere etching
depicts British soldiers firing on a Boston Crowd."
What chutzpah.}
[Q What exactly is a "well regulated militia?"
A Militias in 1792 consisted of part-time
citizen-soldiers organized by individual states. Its
members were civilians who kept arms, ammunition and
other military equipment in their houses and barns --
there was no other way to muster a militia with
sufficient speed.
Over time, however, the state militias failed to
develop as originally anticipated. States found it
difficult to organize and finance their militias, and,
by the mid-1800's, they had effectively ceased to
exist. Beginning in 1903, Congress began to pass
legislation that would eventually transform state
militias into what is now the National Guard.
Today, the National Guard -- and Army Reserve --
are scarcely recognizable as descendants of militias in
the 1790's. The National Guard and Reserve forces, in
fact, do not permit personnel to store military weapons
at home. And many of today's weapons -- tanks, armored
personnel carriers, airplanes, and the like -- hardly
lend themselves to use by individuals.]
As Senator Hatch pointed out, the current National
Guards are not "descendants" of the militia at all;
they were \not\ organized under the militia clause of
the constitution but under Congress's power to raise an
army. The Supreme Court decision in \Perpich v.
Department of Defense\ -- in which Governor Rudy
Perpich of Minnesota was seeking to prevent use of the
Minnesota National Guard troops outside of U.S.
territory -- established that as a legal issue.
Today, soldiers in the National Guards are dual-
enlisted in their State Guards, subject to the military
authority of the various state governors, and as
reservists in the Armed Forces of the United States,
subject to call up for active duty. They can be sent
to train or even engage in overseas combat.
On the other hand, current United States law still
defines most male adults in this country as members of
the reserve militia.
Finally, the executives of the ACLU of Southern
California's call for abandoning the Second Amendment
is a prelude toward general restrictions on popular
arms, the sort that might be used against ambitious
politicians who seek to impose their elite policies on
a recalcitrant public against our will. Considering
how little popular support there is for many of the
extremist positions taken by ultraliberal supporters of
the ACLU of Southern California, it is not difficult to
see that a well-armed and likely uncooperative
citizenry is an impediment to utopian social
engineering which requires docile submission by the
public to government officials.
The national office of the ACLU is at least aware
that armed police power in this country is dangerous to
liberty: they have joined with the NRA and the Second
Amendment Foundation in calling for a commission to
investigate abuse of power by authorities in cases such
as:
* The raid on the home of California millionaire
Donald Scott, whose Malibu home was invaded -- and
Scott killed while sleepily trying to defend himself
from what he thought was burglars -- on a trumped up
warrant alleging illegal drugs in an attempt to
confiscate his estate under asset forfeiture laws;
*The entrapment of backwoodsman Randy Weaver of
Ruby Ridge, Idaho by federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms agents attempting to blackmail him into spy
for them on fellow white supremicists; they tricked him
into sawing off a shotgun past the legal limit. His
continued refusal led to an FBI sniper murdering his
wife (while she held their infant child) and Weaver's
older son. Weaver was tried and acquitted for shooting
back in spite of attempts (established by civil-
liberties attorney Gerry Spence in Weaver's trial) by
federal officials to falsify evidence. No charges have
yet been filed against any federal officials;
*The invasion and opening of initial gunfire on
the law-abiding Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas by ATF
agents attempting to draw attention away from a sexual
harassment scandal at the agency, and the subsequent
burning down of the Branch Davidian complex by FBI-
driven tanks collapsing the structure and causing
combustion; 81 men, women, and children died in that
fire.
With government out of control, is this the time
for a civil liberties organization to disempower the
civilian population by disarming them?
***
[Guns in America:
The Statistics:
* Firearms were used to kill more than 60,000
people in the last two years. Handguns kill 22,000 per
year, 60 each day, including 12 children.]
And, according to the National Self Defense
Survey, firearms \saved\ five million people from
criminals in those same two years. That's 6,849 lives
defended by privately owned firearms per day.
[* U.S. civilians own 211 million guns, including
66.7 million handguns.
* A new handgun is produced every 20 seconds and
is used to shoot someone every two minutes.]
Yes, and a handgun prevents a criminal attack
every 16 seconds.
[* Every day, handguns are used in 33 rapes, 575
robberies, and 1,116 assaults.]
According to data from the National Self Defense
Survey, of the 1.9 million handgun defenses in one
year, about 8 percent of the defensive uses involved a
sexual crime such as an attempted sexual assault -- 416
handgun defenses per day, or a dozen handgun defenses
for each time a handgun is used by a rapist. Twenty-two
percent involved robbery -- 1145 handgun defenses per
day, or twice as many handgun defenses for each time a
handgun is used in a robbery. About 29 percent
involved some sort of assault other than sexual assault
--- 1510 per day, or one-and-a-half times as often as
handguns are used in non-sexual assaults. It seems the
executives of the ACLU of Southern California, if they
got their way and succeeded in further restricting
handgun availability to the general public, would be
making it easier for rapists than the perpetrators of
any other crime.
[* In late 1993, a Time Magazine/CNN poll found
that 92% of Americans supported the recently passed
Brady Bill, which requires a five-day waiting period to
buy a handgun.]
And reverts to an NRA-backed instant background
check after five years.
[* The same poll found that 60% favor even
stronger gun-control laws.]
Which is meaningless, since most people polled
have no idea what the \current\ gun control laws are.
If you were to poll most Californians (especially those
who don't own a firearm) whether they favor imposing
the Brady Law's five-day waiting period on California,
you'd probably get an overwhelming "yes" -- from people
who aren't even aware that there has been a fifteen-day
waiting period in California for years.
[* More than 600,000 guns are sold each year in
California alone.]
Obviously being purchased by people who think they
have the right to keep and bear firearms. Or should
only the opinions of elitist executives of the ACLU of
Southern California carry political weight?
[* A Seattle-based study concluded that for each
example of a gun used in self-defense to kill an
intruder, there were 43.9 other gun fatalities. That
includes 2.3 incidents of accidental gun deaths, 4.6
criminal homicides, and 37 suicides.]
If one compares the National Self Defense Survey's
estimated 1,728,000 gun defenses in or around a home in
one year with a conservatively high estimate of gun-
related homicides and fatal gun accidents in the home
in a year -- at most about 8,000 -- one can compute
that a gun kept in the home for protection is about 216
times as likely to be used in a defense against a
criminal than it is to cause the death of an innocent
victim in that household.
[* In 1989, 178 justifiable homicides were
reported nationwide, but 1600 accidental killings
involving guns.]
In fact, the number of justifiable homicides in a
year are, according to Gary Kleck, closer to 2,800,
since FBI crime reports used by statisticians exclude
any justifiable or excusable homicide which isn't
labelled that in the initial police report. But even
this is likely also an underestimate, since police are
reluctant to classify any homicide as "justifiable,"
preferring to classify them as either unsolved or
accidental.
As far as firearms accidents are concerned, they
are down 40% from ten years ago, and down 80% from 50
years ago.
[* Shooting is the leading cause of death among
African-American males ages 15 to 24.]
No one questions that African-Americans are the
worst victims of crime of all kinds -- and even the
Reverends Jesse Jackson or Louis Farrakhan could not
deny that these crimes are being done by young black
males. But is this surprising in a culture whose
family structure was destroyed by utopian government
programs which created a generation of fatherless boys
and inner-city government schools that taught a
philosophy of dependency on big government rather than
self-reliance? Who is historically more responsible
for this state of affairs: the more-conservative NRA or
the more-liberal ACLU?
[* The Los Angeles County Sheriff's department
recovers 30,000 guns a year during routine criminal
investigations of which 6,000 have been legally
purchased then stolen.]
Are we also going to blame automobile owners when
their cars are stolen or carjacked for use in a
robbery? Talk about blaming the innocent for the
actions of the guilty!
[* Gunshot wounds to children nearly doubled
between 1987 and 1990. Firearm murders of young people
age 19 and under went up 125% between 1984 and 1990.]
This is an odd definition of "children," which
includes 18 and 19 year-old individuals who can serve
in the military and on police forces. We must also
seriously doubt whether it is firearms that are at
fault in the deaths of children who are recruited into
criminal gangs even before puberty.
[* Every six hours, a teenager or preteen commits
suicide with a gun.]
And almost all studies of suicide show no
correlation between the availability of any particular
means of suicide and the suicide rate. Japan has few
guns, yet has twice the U.S. suicide rate. \The
American Journal of Psychiatry\ from March, 1990
reported in a study by Rich, Young, Fowler, Wagner, and
Black that all gun-suicides which were statistically
reduced in the five years following Canada's handgun
restrictions beginning 1976 were substituted 100% by
suicides using other methods, mostly jumping off
bridges. Therefore, eliminating firearms does not
eliminate suicide: it merely shifts the suicide to
other causes, and no rational public policy can
conclude that the availability of firearms is a
causative factor.
[* An estimated 1.2 million elementary school-age
latchkey children have access to guns when they are
home alone.]
Parents who leave their children home alone are
morally and legally responsible for what ill befalls
their children, whether it is from firearms, or from
poison under the sink, or from a box of matches.
[* Most Los Angeles high school students say they
could buy a gun on the street in an hour or less if
they needed it.]
Perhaps they need it. School authorities and
police seem singularly unable to protect them from the
well-armed gangsters among them.
[* When firearm suicide and homicide rates in Los
Angeles County are combined, the total rate is higher
than that for motor vehicle crashes.]
And when the suicide and homicide rate in Japan is
compared to the United States, it is higher than the
combined U.S. rate. Yet Japan has few guns.
{ILLUSTRATION of a shadowy figure holding a handgun
menacingly. Are the executives of the ACLU of Southern
California trying to sell civil liberties, or \Argosy
Magazine\?}
[* At least four federal safety standards
regulate the manufacture of teddy bears. No federal
safety standards apply to the manufacture of guns.]
Are they seriously suggesting that guns are
inadequately designed to perform their function
effectively -- which is to fire energy-laden bullets at
those who attack the innocent? Firearms are dangerous
by necessity. The object is to make them dangerous
only to those who need to be, and deserve to be,
stopped by them. That is the purpose of firearms
safety training -- which the NRA was doing fifty years
before the ACLU was even formed. I am constantly
amazed that people who are afraid to be in the same
room with a gun think they know how to tell firearms
designers, instructors, and experienced shooters how to
make guns safe. The elitist arrogance of those who
would run our country seems to be unlimited.
[* In 1993, handguns were used to kill 82 people
in Japan, 76 people in Canada, 33 people in great
Britain, and 40,000 people in the United States.]
{End of ACLU materials}
Yet, we observe that in the absence of firearms,
the Japanese still manage to die at their own hands as
often as Americans. As do the Scots and the Northern
Irish, according to data from Interpol, which show
national homicide rates for these British countries
greater than that of the United States. As for Canada,
its homicide rate compares to that of demographically
similar areas of the United States.
The last paragraph from the ACLU brochure is,
incidentally, plagiarized from the literature of
Handgun Control, Inc. Are liberal pocketbooks getting
so tight that the ACLU of Southern California must
compete for contributions against Sarah Brady? --J.Neil
Schulman
SOURCES AND RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING:
\The Right to Keep and Bear Arms:
Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the
Committee on the Judiciary\,
United States Senate,
Ninety-Seventh Congress
Superintendent of Documents,
U.S. Government Printing Office
\That Every Man Be Armed:
The Evolution of a Constitutional Right\
by Stephen B. Halbrook
University of New Mexico Press, 1984
\Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out\
Edited by Don B. Kates, Jr.
Forward by Senator Frank Church
North River Press, 1979
\Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America\
by Gary Kleck
Aldine de Gruyter, 1991
\The Samurai, The Mountie and The Cowboy: Should America
Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies?\
by David B. Kopel
Prometheus Books, 1992
\Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns\
by J. Neil Schulman
(Forthcoming: Synapse/Centurion Books, 1994)
WHAT CAN WE DO?
by J. Neil Schulman
The first thing that needs to be said for the
record is that the ACLU of Southern California
executives have composed falsehoods and distortions
that are worthy of Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph
Goebbels -- and with the identical result of leaving
the people defenseless against lethal statist
powermongering.
This is one of the most dangerous attacks on the
Second Amendment ever made, because in the minds of
many Americans, the ACLU defines the defense of civil
liberties and the Bill of Rights. To allow an ACLU
affiliate -- which files friend-of-the-court briefs on
many crucial court cases -- to take a position that
distorts the history and court rulings of the Second
Amendment is completely unacceptable, and must be
stopped fully and effectively.
If you are interested in the formation of an
Unabridged Bill of Rights Caucus of the ACLU of
Southern California, made up of current and future ACLU
members who believe the right to keep and bear arms is
a vital and inseparable individual right guaranteed not
only by the Second Amendment but by constitutional
clauses and legislation in most of the 50 state
constitutions and/or statutes, please write me at one
of the addresses provided below.
If you are not already a member of the ACLU of
Southern California, please join immediately, then get
in touch.
Information on joining the ACLU of Southern
California may be obtained from the ACLU of Southern
California by phone at 213-977-9500, or by writing them
at 1616 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90026. Dues can
be as little as $5 per year.
ABOUT J. NEIL SCHULMAN
J. NEIL SCHULMAN is the author of two novels, short
fiction, nonfiction, and screenwritings, as well as
having been the founder of SoftServ Publishing, the
first publishing company to distribute "paperless
books" via personal computers and modems. He now
distributes all his own writings, much of it never
before published, in computer hypertext, on disk and
via modem, and he's lectured on electronic publishing
for the New School for Social Research in New York (via
Connected Education's computer conference program) and
Northwood University in Midland, Michigan. He's
currently at work on a third novel, ESCAPE FROM HEAVEN,
and in Spring, 1994 his book \STOPPING POWER: Why 70
Million Americans Own Guns\ will be published by
Synapse/Centurion Books.
\The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction\'s article
about Schulman calls his books, "very influential in
the LIBERTARIAN-SF movement" and says his books "are
motivated by a combination of moral outrage and a
fascination with the hardware of politics and
economics."
During 1992, he hosted \The J. Neil Schulman
Show\, a program of interviews and music, on the
American Radio Network's Kaleidascope program, and has
been writing frequent articles for the \Los Angeles
Times\ and \Orange County Register\ opinion pages which
have been reprinted in numerous major daily newspapers
across the country.
Schulman's first novel, \Alongside Night\ (Crown
hardcover 1979, Ace paperback 1982, Avon paperback
1987, SoftServ 1990, JNS, 1993), a prophetic story of
an America beset by inflation and revolution, was
endorsed by Anthony Burgess and Nobel laureate Milton
Friedman, and received widely positive reviews,
including the \Los Angeles Times\ and \Publisher's
Weekly\. The novel, published in 1979, anticipated
such 1980's and 1990's problems as increased gang
violence and homelessness, economic chaos such as the
1980's stock market crash and S&L crisis, and political
trends such as the economic and political unification
of Europe. In 1989, \Alongside Night\ was entered into
the "Prometheus Hall of Fame" for classic works of
fiction promoting liberty.
\The Rainbow Cadenza\ (Simon & Schuster hardcover
1983, New English library paperback 1984, Avon
paperback 1986, SoftServ 1989, JNS, 1993) was his
second novel, winning the 1984 Prometheus Award, and
was the basis for an all-classical-music LASERIUM
concert which played for several years in Los Angeles,
San Francisco, and Boston. It's the story of a young
girl in the 22nd Century who must fight the sexual
exploitation of her era to pursue a career as a
performer of "lasegraphy," a classical form of visual
music evolved from the current laser shows. The book
received favorable comments from such diverse authors
as psychologist/bestseller Nathaniel Branden, British
author Colin Wilson, and the late Robert A. Heinlein.
Schulman also wrote the "Profile in Silver"
episode, exploring the JFK assassination, for \The
Twilight Zone\ TV series on CBS, which was run three
times in network prime time in 1986 and 1987, and which
can now be seen in syndication.
In addition to his opinion pieces for the \LA
Times\ and \Orange County Register\ opinion pages, some
of which have been syndicated in major newspapers
nationwide, Schulman's writings have appeared in
magazines and newspapers including \Reader's Digest\,
the \Los Angeles Times Book Review\, \Reason\ Magazine,
\Liberty\, \Gun Week\, \The Lamp-Post\, and \The
Journal of Social and Biological Structures\, and he's
delivered talks at World Science Fiction conventions
and other conferences. Mr. Schulman has been written
about in magazines and newspapers including the \Wall
Street Journal\, \USA Today\, \Shooting Times\,
\Analog\, and \Byte\ Magazine, and has been interviewed
on CNN, ABC's \World News Tonight\, and numerous radio
talk shows coast to coast on subjects ranging from his
novels and screenwriting, to electronic publishing, to
firearms issues.
Reply to:
J. Neil Schulman
Mail: P.O. Box 94, Long Beach, CA 90801-0094
JNS BBS: 1-310-839-7653,,,,25
Internet: softserv@genie.geis.com
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