Second Amendment Project Newsletter. Mar. 9, 2000.
The Second Amendment Project is based at the Independence
Institute, a free-market think tank in Golden, Colorado.

http://i2i.org

=========================================================
Table of Contents for this issue
1. New on the Web: Commentary on murder of Michigan first-grader.
Self-defense in San Francisco.

2. “Registry can’t stop school shootings.”
By Lorne Gunter. Edmonton Journal. Feb, 17 2000.
Canada already has all the anti-gun laws that President Clinton
demands, and more. So why did Toronto just experience a
horrible school murder?

3. Nicholas Owen. One of the great heroes of religious freedom.
By Dave Kopel.

4. Alamo tribute.

=========================================================
1. New on the Web:
“But What About the Parents? By Chuck Green, Denver Post, Mar. 1.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/green0301.htm

“Shame on liberal hypocrites!
By exploiting a 6-year-old’s tragic murder, liberals
reveal the moral idiocy of their ideology.”
By David Horowitz, on the Salon website. Mar. 6, 2000.

http://www.salon.com/news/col/horo/2000/03/06/killing/index.html

“Presidential detectives solve case of missing trigger locks
Hercule Clinton et al. tell us why 6-year-olds are killing classmates.”
Mark Steyn. National Post (Canadian national paper.) Mar. 6, 2000

http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary.asp?s2=columnists&s3=steyn&f=0003

06/2
245
42.html

“Old, neglected gun kills armed intruder.”
Jim Herron Zamora, San Francisco Examiner.
Tuesday, February 22, 2000.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/hotnews/stories

/22/
intruder.dtl

=========================================================
“Registry can’t stop school shootings.”
By Lorne Gunter. Edmonton Journal. Feb, 17 2000.

Three hundred dollars and a week’s wait; that’s all it takes for any
Toronto
high school student to get a handgun according to police there.

“You have to be connected to a degree,” Detective Sergeant Harvey
WIlliams
conceded to the National Post the other day. But anyone with a real
desire
to buy one will find a dealer, often a classmate. The dealer will place
the
student’s order with a smuggler, who the very next weekend will drive to
Buffalo or Detroit, pick up a half dozen handguns and bring them back to
Toronto stashed away in the spare or inside the door panels or under the
seat.

Or the dealer will call a contact on the giant Mohawk reserves that
straddle
the borders of southeast Ontario, southwest Quebec and upstate New York.
Since federal politicians are politically afraid to permit customs
officers
to search Indians crossing from the US, these reserves have become the
principal point-of-entry for smuggled smokes, guns and booze (up to 50
per
cent of the national total), and for illegal refugees. (Would you like a
carton of Lucky Strikes, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a Chinese garment
worker with your pistol?)

One way of the other, the high schooler has his gun, and is only out
about
the price of a pair of hightops and a weekend’s worth of pizza and
movies.

And, not one of these guns can be traced by police. There has been a
federal
registry of handguns for 66 years, and all of these guns – every single
one
- will bypass it completely.

There have been 10 shootings at Toronto-area schools in the past seven
years. Most were sparked by drug deals gone sour or ethnic gang wars,
or both. And nearly all of them involved unregistered and
untraceable weapons.

Are the Liberals attempting to stop drug enforcers, end inter-ethnic
turf
battles or stem the flow of illegal handguns? Yes. But they are devoting
a
mere fraction of the effort and resources to those fights they are
expending
to have skeet enthusiasts in Peace River send them lists of their guns.

Gun registries don’t stop crimes and they don’t create cultures of
safety,
because criminals don’t register guns. Indeed the notion that a registry
could stunt even domestic violence by promoting a culture of safety is
as
naive as “visualizing world piece;” a nice idea, which is entirely
impractical beyond the salons of the middle-class, eat-your-peas serial
meddlers who perpetually think up such fluff.

A 1995 study of guns used in crimes, conducted by the federal government
to
justify its current registry for all guns, concluded over half of the
handguns used had been smuggled.

This percentage seems laughable, and probably is. Remember, this is a
government that badly and deliberately adulterated RCMP figures on the
use
of guns in crime to sell its 1995 Firearms Act to Parliament and the
public.
And, it was revealed last month, this is a government that deliberately
withheld a detailed accounting of the cost of its registry during the
time
the Alberta Court of Appeal was considering a constitutional challenge
to
the Act because “announcing the costs before a decision may add a bad
‘orbiter’ in (the judges’) decision.”

To this day, the Liberals hide behind “cabinet secrecy” to conceal the
true
costs of the registry, even though they will admit it has cost well over
four times their original estimate, and counting.

What’s more, the government continues to claim the registry is not
taking
resources away from other police duties. It made that argument last
summer
when the association representing rank-and-file police officers
threatened
to withdraw its support. Indeed, Justice Minister Anne McLellan enthused
then how the registry would save police $30 million annually, as
registration duties previously performed at the local level were taken
over
by federal agencies.

McLellan continues to cling to and purvey this canard, even though
Saskatchewan MP Garry Breitkreuz recently discovered, through access to
information requests, that the RCMP will spend over $22 million
assisting
with the registry this year and has devoted over 300 officers full-time
to
registry functions in B.C. alone. Before the Liberals’ registry, the
Mounties had 30 staff nationwide enforcing gun control laws at an annual
cost of $2.5 million.

But, we are assured, the registry has not diverted money and manpower
from
crime fighting. No, no, no.

The Ontario Provincial Police, who have to deal with much of the violent
gun
crime in the country, peg the share of handguns used in crime that
originated in the United States at between 85 and 90 per cent in their
province.

But if the registry will not, cannot work, why do the Liberals continue
to
defend it? Who knows. But it should surprise no one that government
which
thinks nothing of throwing away $1 billion on useless make-work schemes
would think nothing of throwing away another billion on a useless
make-work
registry.

=========================================================
3. “Nicholas Owen” By Dave Kopel.
This essay was originally published in The Partisan
in the Summer of 1999. It’s more about the First
Amendment than the Second Amendment, but it’s an inspiring tale of
courage and faith for freedom-lovers everywhere.

In some parts of the United States, as in most of the rest of the
world, persons who wish to exercise the fundamental human right to keep
and bear arms must sometimes resort to hiding their guns or knives. In
China, as in many other countries, people must hide illegal Bibles. But
suppose that instead of hiding a handgun or a Bible, you had to hide
your religious leaders?

Several hundred years ago, a small man named Nicholas Owen made himself
an expert in constructing hiding places for clergymen. Owens’ story is
the story of the great things that even the most wretched person can
accomplish–with courage and faith.

In the late 1500s and early 1600s in England, during the reigns of
Queen Elizabeth I and then King James I, everyone was legally required
to attend and participate in the church services of the Church of
England. The head of the Church of England was the monarch.

Even the possession of Catholic religious objects, such as rosaries,
was illegal, and smuggling a Catholic priest into the country was
punishable by death by public torture.

The vast majority of the English people sheepishly followed the
government’s religious laws, and practiced the Anglican religion, just
as their parents had sheepishly followed the government’s requirement
to practice the Catholic religion, when Catholicism had been the
state’s monopoly religion a few decades earlier.

But history is made by determined minorities, rather than by docile
majorities, and England was blessed with a good number of people for
whom following God was more important than keeping out of trouble with
the government.

During the reign of Queen Mary I (1553-58) England was officially
Catholic, and Protestants were viciously suppressed. The great deeds of
the Protestant English martyrs resisting “Bloody Mary” are recounted
in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs which was, next to the Bible, the most
influential book in the development of the Protestant religion in the
English-speaking world. (A full text of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is
available at http://www.myhomepage.net/~jhdearmore/foxeindex.htm.)

Mary was succeeded by her Protestant half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth convinced Parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy and the Act
of Uniformity in 1559, which turned England into an exclusively
Anglican religious nation, by law.

Most English people went along with the change. Elizabeth, for her
part, asked only for external shows of conformity, and rejected advice
to persecute persons who remained secret Catholics. She had no desire
to make “a window into men’s souls,” she explained.

Unfortunately, the Catholic powers of continental Europe, led by Spain
and encouraged by the Pope, plotted to assassinate Elizabeth, and
attempted to overthrow her by force. The defeat of the Spanish Armada
in 1588 removed the military threat, but the Protestant majority turned
intensely suspicious of the small Catholic minority. Persecution of the
Catholics grew severe.

In 1603, King James I succeeded Elizabeth. In the years before taking
power, he had dropped hints that he might tolerate Catholics. Indeed,
his Danish wife, Queen Anne, was a quiet Catholic. But upon becoming
King of England, James made it clear that there would be no relaxation
of the stringent anti-Catholic laws or their enforcement.

And this is where the hero Nicholas Owen enters the story.

Owen was born in approximately 1550 to a fervently Catholic family.
When Anglicanism was established as the state religion, the Owen family
became “recusants”–meaning that they paid hefty fines rather than
attend Anglican church services.

Two of Owen’s brothers became Jesuit priests. The third, Henry Owen,
ran a covert Catholic printing press. When he was sent to prison for
his continued recusancy, he managed a secret press from prison.

Nicholas Owen was only a little taller than a dwarf. But this was only
one of his medical problems; because of a hernia, his stomach had to be
held together by an metal plate. After a packhorse fell on him in 1599,
he was further disfigured, and walked with a limp for the rest of his
life.

Most Englishmen of Owens’ time thought that a twisted body was an outer
sign of a twisted character. But as Antonia Fraser observes in her book
Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot, Owen’s “great soul
and measureless courage” offered “the strongest possible refutation of
the contemporary prejudice.”

Trained as a carpenter and a mason, Owens became perhaps the greatest
builder of hiding places in man’s history.

The English Catholic community needed priests, both for spiritual
leadership, and for administration of the sacraments. But harboring a
priest was a capital offense.

So in the large country mansions owned by England’s crypto-Catholics,
Owens constructed ingenious hideouts for priests.

Mansions were built of stone in those days, so Owen’s task was
especially difficult. The English government’s priest-catchers
(“poursuivants”) would carefully tap on walls, and a hollow sound
would immediately betray a room that was hidden through mere use of an
empty space.

So Owen’s hiding place were much more sophisticated. For example, at
the Baddesley Clinton mansion, Owen contrived secret trapdoors in the
turrets and stairways, connecting them with the mansion’s sewer system.
During a 1591 search, several priests stood up to their waists in
water, hidden from searchers for four hours. In some cases, priests
survived several searches of the same house.

Owen ran feeding tubes into the rooms, so that priests hidden therein
could receive food for the days or weeks they might spend inside.
Sometimes he built an easily-discovered outer hiding place which
concealed an inner hiding place.

While Owen completed scores of hiding places, the exact number is
unknown; some remained undiscovered until the twentieth century, and
others still remain hidden. (Perhaps some of the ones that are still
secret are being used to conceal handguns these days.)

So that the mansion’s servants would not know about the hidden
chambers, Owen would do ordinary house carpentry work during the
daytime. But at night, Owen would build his secret spaces, always
working alone–thus minimizing the number of persons who would know
about a given hiding place, and be susceptible to revealing it under
torture. Breaking through heavy stone walls to build complex rooms
would have been difficult for any construction crew, but it was
difficult in the extreme for a small man working alone. He always
worked for free, and received communion before starting a new project.

Nicholas Owen used a variety of names to conceal his identity as he
traveled around England–Little John, Little Michael, Andrewes, and
Draper.

Owen was chosen as one of the first laypersons to be inducted in the
Jesuit Order. When his fellow Jesuit Edward Campion was arrested, Owen
spoke openly about Campion’s innocence, so Owen himself was then
arrested. He was arrested again in 1594, tortured on the infamous
Topcliffe rack, and hung for three hours from iron rings, with heavy
weights on his feet. But he revealed nothing, and was released after a
wealthy Catholic paid a ransom. The English jailers who took the bribe
to let Owen go thought he just an insignificant friend of a priest–
rather than the master builder of England’s underground railroad for
priests.

Three years later, Owen masterminded Father John Gerard’s escape from
Tower of London.

In November 1605, Guy Fawkes and a small band of Catholic conspirators
made plans to blow up Parliament, kill King James, and place James’
Catholic daughter on the throne. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot
led to a massive crackdown on all suspected Catholics, which led to
Owens’ arrest in early 1606.

Owens had been secreted in one of his hiding places for two weeks,
while poursuivants searched a Catholic home. But when he came out of
hiding and attempted to sneak off the premises, he was captured.
Immediately he claimed to be a priest–a claim which amounted to
condemning himself to death, but which he hoped would throw the
poursuivants off the trail of the priests who remained hidden in the
building.

But this time, the English authorities knew that they had captured the
one person who knew enough to bring down the entire network of covert
Catholics in England.

At first, Owen was held under light confinement, with visitors allowed,
in the hope that some secret priests would reveal themselves by coming
to visit him. Owen, however, was too cautious to be tricked, and spent
his time in solitary prayer.

Soon, Owen was transferred to the infamous Tower of London, so that he
could be tortured. Yet he remained calm and fearless.

The English law of the time forbade torturing anyone to death. For this
reason, any person who was already maimed (as Owen had been since the
horse fell on him) was not supposed to be tortured at all, due to the
risk of death. Nevertheless, Owen was tortured in a particularly
gruesome manner, in light of his already-ruptured hernia.

Nicholas Owen was racked for day after day; six hours at a time. And an
iron band was tightened around his hernia.

While the reliability of confessions obtained under torture was
dubious, England’s law enforcement authorities never had a problem
getting some kind of confession from a torture victim. Except for
Nicholas Owen.

He refused to answer the interrogators’ questions about anything
important, and never revealed a single fact about any of his hiding
places. Instead, he constantly invoked aid of Jesus and Mary.

Perhaps all the physical suffering which Owens had endured since the
birth of his deformed body had helped him cope with tremendous levels
of pain.

Owen died from the torture on March 2. Since Owen’s treatment had been
unconscionable even by the standards of the time, the government
claimed that Owen had committed suicide by stabbing himself twice with
a dinner knife. Actually, Owen’s hands had been so disfigured by the
torture that he could not even hold a pen or a knife, or feed himself.

In 1970, Nicholas Owen as canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.
His feast day is March 22, and he is counted as one of the Forty
Martyrs of England and Wales, from the time of the anti-Catholic
persecutions.

Father John Gerard, one of England’s leading secret priests, wrote that
no-one had accomplished more than Owen: “I verily think that no man
can be said to have done more good for all those who laboured in the
English vineyard. For, first, he was the immediate occasion of saving
the lives of many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular,
and of the estates also of these seculars, which had been lost and
forfeited many times over if the priests had been taken in their
houses.” (A hidden priest then, like illegal drugs or guns today, was
cause for forfeiture of an entire home.) The modern edition of Butler’s
Lives of the Saints states, “Perhaps no single person contributed more
to the preservation of the Catholic religion in England during penal
times.”

Regardless of whether one is a Catholic, a Protestant, or anything
else, the decision of England’s Catholics to maintain their faith, no
matter how great the threats from the government, was highly admirable.
The Catholic who illegally received communion, or otherwise resisted
the government’s effort to stamp out their religion, affirmed that the
God and the individual were more important than the government. The
survival of Catholicism in England, and the failure of the Church of
England to establish a complete monopoly of faith, helped sow the seeds
for the long-run development of religious toleration in England, and in
the rest of the Western world.

Whatever merits belong to other persons who, when offered the
opportunity to partake of an illegal communion, or otherwise to defy an
illegitimate suppression of religious freedom, flow from Owen’s making
it possible for the priests to exist in England.

Nicholas Owen was one of the pivotal figures of English history, and,
indirectly, one of the fathers of modern religious freedom. He was not
born to wealth or nobility or normality, and few people who stared at
his small and twisted body would have predicted that he would be
remembered as one of the greatest Englishmen of his time.

Further reading: Owen’s biography is Blessed Nicholas Owen: Jesuit
Brother and Maker of Hiding Holes, by Margaret Waugh. Published in
1959, the book is out of print and difficult to find in the United
States. Owen is one of the major characters in Antonia Fraser’s superb
book Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot.

=========================================================
4. Remember the Alamo!

>From Feb. 23 to Mar. 6, 1836, the brave Texan defenders of the Alamo
fort
and
church in San Antonio held off the siege of the Mexican dictator Santa
Ana.
When the Alamo fell, every person inside was killed. But the men, women,
children who had defended the Alamo had not died in vain. By delaying
Santa
Ana’s army, the Texans at the Alamo gave Sam Houston time to rally the
forces
that would defeat Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto, winning the
republic
of Texas independence from the dictatorship of Mexico.

At the bottom of this page are links to the web’s best Alamo sites. But
before
your try the links, read the lyrics for the Texas War Cry, an inspiring
patriotic song from the 1830s. Then, read a short excerpt from the
Constitution
of the Republic of Texas.

In today’s current atmosphere of anti-patriotism, and America-bashing,
it is
all the more important to celebrate the brave men and women who led
Texas in
freeing itself from Mexico’s dictatorship. Remember the Alamo!

——————————–
The Texas War Cry
[to the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner]

Oh Texans rouse hill and dale with your cry.
No longer delay, for the bold foe advances.
The banners of Mexico tauntingly fly,
And the valleys are lit with the gleam of their lances.
With justice our shield, rush forth to the field.
And stand with your posts, till our foes fly or yield.
For the bright star of Texas shall never grow dim,
While her soil boasts a son to raise rifle or limb.

Rush forth to the lines, these hirelings to meet.
Our lives and our homes, we will yield unto no man.
But death on our freesoil we’ll willingly meet,
Ere our free-temple soil, by the feet of the foe men.
Grasp rifle and blade with hearts undismayed,
And swear by the temple brave Houston has made,
That the bright star of Texas shall never be dim
While her soil boasts a son to raise rifle or limb.
—————
This wonderful song is available on compact disc or audio cassette in
Moving
West Songs, which you can buy from Amazon.com.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1878360108/independenceinstA/

—————————————
Texas Declaration of Rights

This declaration of rights is declared to be a part of this
constitution,
and
shall never be violated on any pretence whatever. And in order to guard
against
the transgression of the high powers which we have delegated, we declare

that
everything in this bill of rights contained, and every other right not
hereby
delegated, is reserved to the people.
1st. All men, when they form a social compact, have equal rights; and no
men
or
set of men are entitled to exclusive public privileges or emoluments
from
the
community.
2nd. All political power is inherent in the people, and all free
governments
are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and
they
have
at all times an inalienable right to alter their government in such
manner
as
they may think proper.
….
14th. Every citizen shall have the right to bear arms in defence of
himself
and
the republic.
The military shall at all times and in all cases be subordinate to the
civil
power.
15th. The sure and certain defence of a free people is a well-regulated
militia; and it shall be the duty of the legislature to enact such laws
as
may
be necessary to the organizing of the militia of this republic.

———————————————-
Alamo Links
The Alamo: 13 Days of Glory. Article explains the background of the
Alamo,
and
modern controversies about the battle.

http://www.thehistorynet.com/WildWest/articles/02962_text.htm

Remember the Alamo! Small but well-designed site.

http://members.tripod.com/aries46/alamo.htm

Alamo de Parras. Superb collection of historical documents. A wonderful
resource for studying the Alamo in depth. Contains the original
Texas Constitution, and much more.

http://home.flash.net/~alamo3/

===========================================================
As always, the Independence Institute website contains
extensive information on:

Criminal Justice and the Second Amendment:

http://i2i.org/crimjust.htm

The Columbine High School murders:
http://i2i.org/suptdocs/crime/columbine.htm and
The Waco murders: http://i2i.org/Waco.htm
The Independence Institute’s on-line bookstore. Start your
browsing at the Second Amendment section:

http://i2i.org/book.htm#Second

That’s all folks!