January 27, 2000
BY TIM O’BRIEN

LIBERTARIANS ARE cheering for Brass Roots, a Michigan gun rights organization founded by the 1994 Libertarian Party candidate for the U.S. Senate, Jon Coon.

The group has sued the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Detroit Housing Commission and Detroit Police Chief Benny Napoleon to stop a federal gun buyback program from going forward in Detroit.

If implemented, the scheme would pay $50 to anyone in Detroit who surrenders a firearm to authorities — cash on the spot, no questions asked.

Aside from the dubious public policy of setting the government up in the business of offering to fence stolen property and, potentially, dispose of evidence of even more serious crimes, the plan would violate numerous state and federal laws.

Gun rights groups have long argued that various and sundry firearm-transfer registrations, waiting periods and other restrictions to firearm transfers are as unnecessarily burdensome on gun owners as they are unlikely to deter criminals.

The bitter irony of this government scheme to deliberately circumvent these laws through a gun buyback was not lost on Brass Roots.

Still, before filing the complaint in federal district court, Brass Roots tried every other obvious route to express their concerns.

They contacted HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo as soon Detroit’s application to participate in the plan was announced in November, and were told that there was no step in the approval process for participation by third parties.

They wrote to Gov. John Engler asking how it was that the federal government could operate a program — which no one even pretended would be limited to HUD properties — that so clearly intruded upon state and local jurisdiction.

There was no response at all from the governor’s office.

They contacted Detroit Housing Commission Director John Nelson Jr., pointing out all the violations of state and federal laws that this gun buyback would entail.

They received no response from Nelson, either.

Finally, with no remaining options open to them, the organization went to court.

The complaint is similar to one brought last fall by the Libertarian Party of Chicago’s chairman, Matt Beauchamp, to halt the gun buyback program in Cook County, Illinois.

The plaintiffs in both cases charged that none of the participants in the program are federally licensed to “engage in the business of importing, or dealing in firearms,” that the stated intent of the plan is to purchase weapons from anonymous individuals, “thus knowing or having cause to believe” that the firearms could be stolen, and that the chief of police, charged with administering the program, will “deliberately fail to make appropriate entry in, or properly maintain” records that he is required to keep on firearms transfers.

All three are felonies under federal law.

Just to give a bit of perspective, consider how authorities have dealt with even more obscure gun law “technicalities” in recent years.

In 1992, a reclusive man named Randy Weaver who lived in the remote area of Ruby Ridge, Idaho, was merely accused of selling a shotgun with a barrel that was one quarter of an inch below the minimum legal length and not having the firearm-posession paperwork authorities apparently now regard as inconsequential.

When Weaver failed to appear for trial on that charge, several agents went to the mountaintop cabin where Weaver lived with his wife and four children and shot his 14-year-old son, Samuel, in the back, killing the child. Then, during a week-long siege of the property, a government sniper killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki, with a high-powered assasin’s rifle while she stood in the doorway of the cabin clutching her infant child.

The next year, nearly a hundred federal agents stormed the Branch Davidian religious commune outside of Waco, Texas, in a military-style assault to serve a search warrant for possession of illegal firearm parts and to arrest the group’s leader, David Koresh, on federal firearms charges. After a 51-day siege, ending in a fiery assault of tanks and tear gas, approximately 81 Branch Davidians — many of them women and children — were dead.

Now authorities would, as a matter of policy, cavalierly violate far more serious firearms laws than those that prompted the two deadly incidents in Idaho and Texas?

Not if Brass Roots has anything to say about it.

A request for a preliminary injunction will be heard later this month by U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman.

Unfortunately, Brass Roots’ chance of success was significantly reduced this month as U.S. District Court Judge Elaine Bucklo dismissed the Illinois complaint, saying Libertarian Mike Beauchamp “alleges no other basis for his lawsuit than his interest in ensuring that public officials act in accordance with the law. That is an insufficient basis.”

And that’s a sad state of affairs for our republic.

TIM O’BRIEN of Allen Park is executive director of the Libertarian Party of Michigan. Write to him in care of the Free Press Editorial Page, 600 W. Fort St., Detroit, MI 48226.