=========================================================
Second Amendment Project Newsletter, May 2, 2000.
The Second Amendment Project is based at the Independence
Institute, a free-market think tank in Golden, Colorado.

http://i2i.org

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Table of Contents for this issue
1. New on the web.
2. Updates on anti-gun lawsuits.
3. Lorne Gunter compares the Canadian reaction to gun misuse
and car misuse.
4. Linda Gorman: “Prevent Rapes, Support Concealed Carry.”
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1. New on the Web.
a. “A show of force … to show we were in control”
By Vin Suprynowicz, Las Vegas Review Journal. April 30, 2000
Analysis of the gunpoint Elian Gonzalez abduction.

http://www.infomagic.net/liberty/vs000430.htm

b. “Rampage killing facts and fantasies.” By John Lott Jr.
Washington Times, April 26, 2000
Lott debunks a recent New York Times “report” on rampage
killers;
the report was based on false or incomplete data, and was
twisted in order to support gun control.

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/commentary-2000426151235

.htm

c. “Paschall’s School Safety Proposal Rejected.”
by Ari Armstrong, Colorado Freedom Report. April 31, 2000
Arm teachers to protect students? Gun prohibitionists hate
the
idea, but are unable to articulate a reason.

http://www.co-freedom.com/2000/04/paschall.html

See also: “Proven Solution to End School Shootings.”
By Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

http://www.jpfo.org/school.htm

d. Anti-freedom frenzy in Massachusetts. Check out the
website for
GOAL, the Gun Owners Action League, for details on the
repressive
state regulations which are being touted as a national model
to ban
handguns under the guise of consumer safety.

http://www.goal.org/

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2. Updates on anti-gun lawsuits.

a. The Firearms Litigation Clearinghouse has created a new
website, the
www.firearmslitigation.org
The site provides updated information about anti-Second
Amendment
lawsuits all over the United States. The Clearinghouse is a
project
of the Educational Fund to End Handgun Violence, the legal
arm
of the Coalition of Stop Gun Violence (formerly known as the
National Coalition to Ban Handguns).

b. There’s no better analyst of lawsuit abuse than Walter
Olson.
His website has a major section on abusive lawsuits against
the
Second Amendment, with original material, and links to many
other articles:

http://overlawyered.com/topics/guns.html

c. Trigger Locks.
Details on how trigger locks can cause gun accidents.

http://www.donath.org/Rants/OnTriggerLocks/

d. Magazine disconnects.
Smith & Wesson’s Faustian agreement with Bill Clinton
requires the company to install magazine disconnects on
all its self-loading pistols-as S&W has been doing for many
years.
But it turns out that the S&W magazine disconnect sometimes
does not prevent the gun from firing. See

http://www.time.com/time/daily/0,2960,41871-101000327,00.htm

l

e. Kopel materials on anti-gun lawsuits.

http://independenceinstitute.org/crimjust.htm#Lawsuits

f. National Shooting Sports Foundation. With information
about
the countersuit filed against illegal activities by
prohibitionist
ringleaders.

http://www.nssf.org/

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3. Edmonton Journal 24 March 2000. By Lorne Gunter

The Montreal Gazette is one of the most anti-gun newspapers
in the country.

The paper’s editors would likely disagree with such a
styling. We’re not anti- gun they’ve argued in print. We
just believe it is in the best interests of the public to
subject potential gun owners to months of excruciating
bureaucratic harassment if they wish to possess such
potentially dangerous objects.

The Gazetteers have recently argued the only problem with
Ottawa’s Intrusive and Byzantine registry of all owners and
guns is that it does not go far enough. Still, they would
probably prefer to be thought of as supporters of modest
precautions against firearms violence. So be it. They’re
sensible middle-of-the-roaders on guns.

That doesn’t change the fact they’re still logic escape
artists.

Wednesday’s Gazette carried an editorial about a recent
outbreak of road rage in and around Montreal. Last week a
young man riding in a friend’s truck was tragically shot and
killed on a Montreal-area freeway by a motorist whose
driving the young man and his friend had dared criticize.
Monday, another motorist fired shots at a transit bus that
had cut off his car.

The Surete du Quebec reports at least four other incidents
of road rage, three involving firearms, in greater Montreal
in the past 10 months.

Okay, that’s enough incidents of road rage assaults to raise
concerns; not enough to declare a public emergency, but
enough to get people thinking.

So what do the Gazette’s editors propose? They want the
police to target dangerous drivers and those driving without
licenses.

Sounds good. Have police go after those causing the problem.

The Gazette argues “San Francisco, for example, instituted a
program Known as STOP, which impounds the cars of illegal
drivers. Between 1995…and 1998, the city saw an
80-per-cent reduction in drunk-driving fatal crashes, a
20-per-cent reduction in crashes causing injuries and a
44-per-cent reduction in hit-and-runs.

“Quebec should consider implementing a program like this,”
the paper advocates. “Extremely aggressive drivers care for
no one’s safety on the road…The key is to keep them off
the highways.” The Gazette also favours more police patrols
of sections of highways where traffic tensions are likely to
be high. Police would then concentrate on dangerous and
illegal driving along those sections.

Smart.

But aren’t cars like guns? Certainly the advocates of gun
control, the Gazette among them, have told us they are. If
we register cars and drivers, they ask, why not register
guns and gun owners?

Exactly. If road rage is a problem, then why aren’t the
editors of the Gazette proposing as a solution the licensing
of all drivers and the registration of all vehicles? Where
is the paper’s call for a universal registry to foster a
“culture of safety” on local streets and roads?

Oops. You’re right. Drivers and cars are already licensed
and registered. The editors know this and subconsciously
understand it has not done and never will do anything to
stop crime on the roads. So they propose actions that target
the people committing the crimes.

That makes sense, just as it makes much more sense to target
people committing crimes with guns if one’s goal is to
reduce firearms violence.

The Gazette knows drivers without licenses are still going
to buy cars and drive. Yet it seemingly escapes the editors
that criminals without Firearms licenses are still going to
buy guns and use them in hold-ups and murders.

That paper is all for impounding the cars of illegal
drivers, and knows It would be useless in reducing road
crimes to compel all drivers to put steering-wheel locks on
their cars and lock their cars and gasoline in separate
vaults. Yet it favours impounding the guns of law-abiding
gun owners who fail to register them, or lock them and
their ammunition in separate vaults.

So why the logic on road rage and the pathological illogic
on guns?

For one thing, there the almost total ignorance of Canada’s
political And cultural establishment towards responsible
firearms ownership and responsible owners. Then there’s the
powerful symbolic challenge to the state posed by private
ownership of firearms, which on some level seems to grate
those who (most journalists among them) favour the expansive
welfare state.

And, finally, there’s the fact most reporters and editors
don’t own guns. It’s easy for them to support subjecting
someone else to hours and hours of highly personal paperwork
and months of wrangling with incompetent clerks to get a
license. If journalists had to go through the same
demeaning, useless, expensive and time-consuming hoops to
renew their driver’s licenses or license plates, papers
would be full of commentary on the injustice and futility of
it all.
____________________
Lorne Gunter, Columnist
The Edmonton Journal
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4. PREVENT RAPES, SUPPORT CONCEALED CARRY
by Linda Gorman. Colorado Daily.

[This article discusses a recent series of rapes in Boulder,
Colorado.]

An animal rapes women, and the powers that be hold another
community meeting at which they dole out the same old advice
about not walking alone at night. No matter that the most
recent victim was driving a paper route. The advocationally
concerned write Letters-to-the-Editor gushing about the
rewards of volunteering for the Boulder Rape Crisis Team.
According to one man’s testimonial in The Daily Camera, men
who volunteer make a decision to “help a community in
crisis” and gain experience “offering information and
assistance to survivors of sexual assault” as a part of a
“wonderfully diverse and compassionate team” that can
“demonstrate that men are a necessary part of the healing
process.”

When ghouls like this have finished making themselves feel
better by telling everyone how much they benefit from their
interactions with those who have been raped, perhaps we can
dispense with the canned compassion and the silly advice and
move on to discussing what can be done to put rapists
permanently out of business.

In the seventies, rape avoidance programs encouraged victims
to play along with their attacker. Sympathize with him,
women were told, get him to relax and lower his guard so you
can escape. Do not fight back. That will make him more
likely to beat or kill you. Rape is not as bad as being
dead.

Of course time marches on, dead bodies accumulate, and the
politically correct advice changes form. Today women are
advised to take immediate action against their attackers.
They should drop everything, make noise, fight back, and try
to run.

What they really should do is carry a gun. With a gun, a
100 pound woman is more than a match for an attacker twice
her size and has a real possibility of convincing him that
the cost of raping her is far too high. Without a gun she
can fight back, and, unless she is extremely lucky, get
raped anyway.

Let others argue about the preventative effects of
consciousness raising and educational programs. Let the
lawyers and the victim advocates argue over the nuances of
whether “no” means “no” and what evidence will be allowable
should a rape victim survive to see her day in court. A
woman facing a rapist needs effective self-defense. A gun
is the most effective form of self-defense ever devised. It
follows that those interested in preventing rape would
support laws giving women the right to buy and carry a gun
should they feel it necessary.

According to John Lott and David Mustard’s landmark 1997
study “Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed
Handguns,” if all states had adopted right-to-carry laws in
1992 roughly 4,000 rapes a year could have been prevented.
(See http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/%7Ellou/guns.html.)

Results from the Department of Justice’s National Crime
Victimization Survey support Lott and Mustard’s conclusion.
They show that women who offer no resistance are 2.5 times
more likely to be seriously injured than women who resist
their attackers with a gun.

Groups like SAFE, Handgun Control, and the Bell Campaign say
that this is nonsense. They point to the paper by Arthur
Kellermann et al. that appeared in the New England Journal
of Medicine in 1993 and use its results to claim that owning
a gun increases one’s risk of being murdered. Using a
methodology designed for medical research, Kellermann
matched a “case sample” of 444 homicides with 388 controls
who lived nearby and were the same sex, race, and
approximate age. But gun ownership is not random.

Kellermann et al. ignored the possibility that people who
thought they were more likely to be killed might also be
more likely to have a gun in the house. They also failed to
report that in only 8 of the 444 homicides was it
established that the house gun was the one used in the
homicide.

Because real data show that guns do more good than harm, gun
phobics typically rely on emotional half-truths. One SAFE
representative suggested that those in favor of concealed
carry visualize Mile High Stadium filled with 70,000 drunken
fans. Imagine the carnage! She must consider Bronco fans
particularly urderous. Buccaneer and Dolphin fans, many of
whom tipple at least a bit on game days, manage to avoid
shooting one another despite the fact that Florida has
relatively liberal shall issue concealed-carry law.

It is theoretically possible that liberalizing gun laws
would increase accidental firearms deaths (although John
Lott’s research finds no evidence of a significant
increase). At present the United States has about 1,000
accidental firearms deaths each year, 300 with handguns. In
contrast, there were almost 96,000 forcible rapes, an
estimated 4,000 of which would have been prevented by
liberalizing gun laws.

Public policy is about tradeoffs. What’s yours?
____________________
Linda Gorman is a Senior Fellow at the Independence
Institute, a free-market think tank in Golden, Colorado.
Citations for the sources used in this article are available
at the Institute’s web site,

http://independenceinstitute.org/gorman.htm

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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