Bummer for Sarah Brady
It’s been a great year for gun rights.

BY KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Thursday, November 15, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
Gun-control groups are now embarking on their latest offensive. Shamelessly seizing on the events of Sept. 11, the guns-kill-people crowd are demanding that a crackdown on terrorism include stricter gun laws.

In support of this demand, representatives from Americans for Gun Safety and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence cite instances in which terrorists had either possessed firearms (shocking!) or expressed a desire to obtain them. All this, they claim, pointed to the need to close (what else?) gun-show “loopholes.” “This could signal a historic shift in the gun debate,” said one.

If all this seems like a bit of a stretch, that’s because it is. But then again, it isn’t surprising. Gun-control groups wouldn’t like to admit it, but things have been pretty rough going for them recently. In fact, 2001 is shaping up to be a seminal year in terms of gun rights. From federal court decisions in favor of individual ownership, to the news that Attorney General John Ashcroft plans to protect the Second Amendment, the little victories for gun-rights forces continue to pile up.

Perhaps the news with the biggest political impact is that gun manufacturers are stopping the lawsuit train in its tracks. Back in the 1990s, egged on by the Clinton administration, some 30 cities and counties set out to give gun manufacturers the old tobacco treatment. With visions of windfalls dancing in their heads, lawyers began arguing that gun companies sold unreasonably dangerous products and should be held liable for urban violence.

The first of these, and one of the more egregious, was launched by Mayor Marc Morial of New Orleans. It argued that guns were “defective” because they didn’t have mechanisms to prevent “unauthorized users” from firing them, and because they didn’t have all sorts of gizmos to alert users there was a round in the chamber. In reality, the suit was a thinly veiled attempt to make gun companies redesign their products in a way that would make them either unusable or too expensive to afford.

Thankfully, elected officials (remembering the tobacco fallout) saw what was coming. The Louisiana Legislature became one of several dozen to pass state laws shielding manufacturers from government lawsuits. A series of nasty court battles ensued, until the Louisiana Supreme Court in April broke up Mr. Morial’s party, ruling that “the lawsuit constitutes an indirect attempt to regulate the lawful design, manufacture, marketing and sale of firearms.” The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear New Orleans’s appeal. Meanwhile, lawsuits filed by Chicago, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia and the state of New York were also among those unceremoniously tossed out of court. Stay tuned for more.

There are lessons here. The first is that meddlesome attorneys and courts can be kept in place. What it takes is a legislature to step up and exercise its end of the checks-and-balances system. Another lesson goes to the industry: Those gun companies that went into the battle aggressively came out victorious. One company that took the worst beating, Smith & Wesson, had tucked its tail and agreed to a government deal to redesign guns in return for protection from lawsuits. It found itself hoodwinked by its government “partners” and abandoned by its customers.

Another 2001 rainbow for the gun world is the Bush administration. Back in May, Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly signaled the Justice Department’s belief that the Second Amendment protects individual gun rights (as opposed to a “collective” right) and announced that this interpretation would become official U.S. policy. That move signaled an abrupt end to what had become a deluge of knee-jerk gun-control policies from the Clinton administration. Better yet, it opened the door for gun groups to challenge many of the more restrictive laws passed in the past decade.

The best news was last month’s decision in U.S. v. Emerson. The closely watched case, argued before the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, focused on a Texas man who said federal domestic-violence statutes restricting gun ownership deprived him of his Second Amendment rights. The verdict was a doozy.

Although the Fifth Circuit upheld the statute in question, it became the first federal appeals court to rule that the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals the right to own guns. Such an broad interpretation of the Second Amendment, bolstered in recent years by scholarly work supporting the individual-rights view, could set the stage for far more concrete legal victories for gun owners.

There’s good statistical news out too. According to the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts report, the number of accidental firearms fatalities fell to an all-time low in 2000. The total of 600 deaths in 2000 was 25% lower than in 1999 and a 58% lower than in 1990. (For comparison, accidental drowning deaths in 2000 were 3,900.) A lot of the credit goes to groups like the Boys Scouts, hunter-safety organizations and the National Rifle Association, which have devoted increasing amounts of time to gun-safety awareness. Numbers also continue to support the case that states with right-to carry laws tend to have less crime than states that don’t.

What makes all this more interesting, and relevant, is that Americans simply can’t seem to buy enough guns in the wake of Sept. 11. Gun sales in many states have surged by 25% to 30%, and applications for concealed-weapons permits are pouring in. Gun dealers say that a significant number of those stepping up to the counter are women, first-time buyers and people who previously cringed at the thought of a firearm.

That’s what makes the latest assault by the gun-control lobby so ridiculous. All those gun buyers have realized the obvious: Guns–or box cutters or anthrax–don’t do bad things. Bad people do. Getting rid of one object they can use for violence will only send them hunting for another.

Even leftist filmmaker Michael Moore seems to have figured this out. He wrote of his most recent project: “This started out as a documentary on gun violence in America, but the largest mass murder in our history was just committed–without the use of a single gun! Not a bullet fired! . . . I can’t stop thinking about this. A thousand gun control laws would never have prevented this massacre. What am I doing?”

He’s right of course. No gun law is ever going to prevent a terrorist, or for that matter a domestic murderer, from getting a gun. The only thing such laws will ever do is take away the rights of honest citizens. Our courts and politicians are beginning to understand that.

Ms. Strassel is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/colum…el/?id=95001467

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