FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JULY 9, 2000
EDITORS: A SHORTER VERSION OF THIS COLUMN, AT 1,150 WORDS, ALSO MOVES
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
The two most threadbare ‘gun control’ lies

I don’t know if they’re the two (start ital)biggest(end ital) lies told
by the victim disarmament gang, but they’re easily the most threadbare,
climbing out of their graves over and over to spread their stench like
rotting vampires that have been killed but never properly staked.

First, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and others of his ilk
keep insisting the reason we need “mandatory child safety trigger locks” is
to substantially stop the “12 children killed by firearms every day in
America.”

Let’s give a tip of the hat to historian Clayton E. Cramer (writing in
the July 1 edition of Shotgun News) for going directly to the web site of
the Centers for Disease Control
(www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/statab/unpubd/mortabs/gmwki.htm — search under
ICD 922.0) and looking up the actual number of American children under the
age of 15 who are killed in handgun accidents each year.

For 1997, that number was 21 — down from a high of 55 in 1990.

No, that’s not a typo. Twenty-one children dead in handgun accidents in
the whole of America in the entire year 1997.

Now, those are sad incidents. But compare them to the number of Jewish
and Gypsy children who died in Europe — not as collateral casualties of
war but at the hands of “legitimate” governments — in each of the years
1939 through 1945, because their parents allowed themselves to be (start
ital)dis(end ital)armed under “gun control” laws which never disarm
government police or other criminals.

Government-mandated airbags seriously injure more children than die in
handgun accidents. Lightning and amusement park accidents and drowning in
mop buckets beat out handguns in causing accidental deaths of children
under 15. So why the national hysteria — and more importantly, where do
Mr. Gore and the “gun control” gang come up with that “12-a-day” statistic?

They get to “12 a day” by adding in all deaths of “children” up through
the age of 19 which are firearm related, including suicides, 18- and
19-year old drug gangsters shooting each other in disputes over drug
distribution turf, and even 19-year-old “children” righteously shot dead by
cops or law-abiding citizens while in the act of committing rapes, murders,
and armed robberies.

The question I’d like to hear someone stand up and ask candidate Gore
(assuming we still had a system in which real citizens could ask unscreened
questions of our candidates, of course) is: “Mr. Vice President, I was the
victim of a sexual assault, but I managed to get to my nightstand and get
my dad’s old Smith and shoot my assailant after he’d blackened both my eyes
and broken my jaw. You say mandatory trigger locks would stop 12 child
gunshot deaths every day — I assume you’re leading up to a law that would
require those locks to be in place all the time.

“But the CDC says that in order to get to that number, you’re including in
the so-called ‘children’ in your statistic 18- and 19-year-olds righteously
shot while committing rapes and other serious crimes. Is the death of my
19-year-old assailant one of the ‘child gunshot deaths’ you want to
prevent? Is it your plan to require my gun to be locked up in such a way
that I won’t be able to use it to defend myself the next time a 19-year-old
thug decides to break into my house and try to rape me? Are you saying it’s
‘safer’ for me to be beaten and raped than for me to have an unlocked gun
to defend myself?”

# # #

The second most threadbare and putrescent “gun control” lie is that those
of us who want to maintain the great American tradition of a populace armed
and thus free, consistently misquote and misunderstand the Second
Amendment.

(For the record, by the way, the Bill of Rights only acknowledges
pre-existing human rights — these rights would not disappear even if the
populace were foolish enough to attempt a repeal.)

Anyway: As this argument goes, we gun nuts insist on quoting only the
second clause of the amendment: “The right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed,” while purposely dropping and ignoring the
introductory clause, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the
security of a free state, …”

What this introductory clause proves is that the Founding Fathers didn’t
want each and every law-abiding American to continue owning firearms of
military usefulness, the victim disarmament gang patronizingly explains.
Instead, it proves that Americans were meant to retain a right to carry
firearms only when they’re actively on duty in the regular army or the
National Guard.

Don’t laugh — this bizarre reading was actually offered up with a
straight face by U.S. Attorney William B. Mateja in oral arguments before
the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last month in the case of U.S. vs.
physician Timothy Joe Emerson, a Texan charged with illegally possessing a
firearm because his wife had filed a routine restraining order against him
during his divorce proceedings.

(A federal grand jury indicted Dr. Emerson, who was “greatly surprised”
to learn he may have violated any law, but the case never got to trial. In
April, U.S. District Court Judge Sam Cummings in Lubbock properly found
that the law denying guns to those under a restraining order was an
unconstitutional infringement of the “individual right to bear arms.” The
federal law, Judge Cummings wrote, “is unconstitutional because it allows a
state court divorce proceeding, without particularized findings of the
threat of future violence, to automatically deprive a citizen of his Second
Amendment rights.”)

On the bright side, the three judges hearing the appeal in New Orleans
could barely conceal their incredulousness when the U.S. attorney told them
yes, even the shotguns at home in the judges’ closets could be outlawed
with a flick of the wrist, since they weren’t using them in the course of
their National Guard duties — see www.saf.org/EmersonViewOptions.html, or
www.2ndlawlib.org.

Now, Congress enacted the law which gave birth to the American “National
Guard” as we know it in the year 1917, partially in horror at the
demonstrated effectiveness of citizen militias in giving hives to the
central authorities in Mexico in the recent revolution there, and during
that same decade of hideous “progressivism” which brought us the personal
income tax, the Federal Reserve Board, alcohol Prohibition, and the
beginnings of our delightful and long-running Drug War via the Harrison
Narcotics Act.

That the Founding Fathers gathered together in 1789, peered into their
crystal ball, and wrote a Second Amendment which meant the word “militia”
to be read in light of a statist ordinance which wouldn’t even be written
until the First World War would require a bit of a leap of faith, even if
we didn’t have Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, who drafted the Second
Amendment along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, on the record advising
us (in 1788): “A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people
themselves. … All regulations tending to render this militia useless and
defenseless, by establishing select corps of militia or distinct bodies of
military men not having permanent interests and attachments in the
community (are) to be avoided. … To preserve liberty, it is essential
that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike,
especially when young, how to use them.”

I, and others deluded into believing we were engaged in a rational
discussion, where facts and evidence might count for something, have
offered up reams of documented statements from the Founding Fathers that
“no free man is to be debarred the use of arms” (Thomas Jefferson’s
proposed draft for the Virginia constitution) and that “The main thing is
that every man be armed — everyone who is able must have a gun” (Patrick
Henry, 1788), etc.

But the other side just keeps croaking out their memorized little chant
about “ignoring the first clause.”

# # #

So imagine the interest with which I received last week from Yale
University Press a copy of the weighty and definitive new 400-page tome of
history and analysis, “The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction,” by
that leading constitutional scholar, current Southmayd Professor of Law at
Yale University, Akhil Reed Amar.

For those who have been in a cave for some little time, let me point out
that the law school at Yale is not what we would call a nest of right-wing
militia activism. In fact, I don’t think it would be unfair to
characterize professor Amar’s politics as leaning somewhat to the left.

Yet how does professor Amar deal with the “You forgot the first clause,
nyah nyah nyah” argument?

Beginning on page 51, he explains: “Several modern scholars have read the
(second) amendment as protecting only arms bearing in organized ‘state
militias,’ like SWAT teams and National Guard units. …

“This reading doesn’t quite work. The states’-rights reading puts great
weight on the word (start ital)militia(end ital), but the word appears only
in the amendment’s subordinate clause. The ultimate right to keep and bear
arms belongs to “the people,” not the states. As the language of the Tenth
Amendment shows, these two are of course not identical: when the
Constitution means ‘states,’ it says so.

“Thus, as noted above, ‘the people’ at the core of the Second Amendment
are the same people at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment.
Elbridge Gerry put the point nicely in the First Congress, in language that
closely tracked the populist concern about governmental self-dealing at the
root of earlier amendments: ‘This declaration of rights, I take it, is
intended to secure (start ital)the people(end ital) against the
mal-administration of the (start ital)Government(end ital).’

“What’s more, the ‘militia,’ as used in the amendment and in clause 16,
had a very different meaning two hundred years ago than in ordinary
conversation today. Nowadays, it is quite common to speak loosely of the
National Guard as the ‘state militia,’ but two hundred years ago, any band
of paid, semiprofessional, part-time volunteers, like today’s Guard, would
have been called “a (start ital)select(end ital) corps” or “(start
ital)select(end ital) militia” — and viewed in many quarters as little
better than a standing army.

“In 1789, when used without any qualifying adjective, ‘the militia’
referred to all citizens capable of bearing arms. The seeming tension
between the dependent and the main clauses of the Second Amendment thus
evaporates on closer inspection — the “militia” is identical to “the
people” in the core sense described above. Indeed, the version of the
amendment that initially passed the House, only to be stylistically
shortened in the Senate, explicitly defined the militia as ‘composed of the
body of the People.’ This is clearly the sense in which ‘(start
ital)the(end ital) militia’ is used in clause 16 and throughout (start
ital)The Federalist,(end ital) in keeping with standard usage confirmed by
contemporaneous dictionaries, legal and otherwise. As Tench Coxe wrote in a
1788 Pennsylvania essay, ‘Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves?’ “

Thus endeth today’s reading from professor Amar.

A word of advice to those who would deprive law-abiding Americans of
their historical and unalienable right (not a “privilege” subject to
license or permit or registration or taxation — or do you propose to start
having Americans apply for “Freedom of Religion permits” and “Freedom of
Speech licenses”?) to keep at home and carry in their cars weapons of
military usefulness, including belt-fed machine guns and rocket-propelled
grenades and shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missiles:

Get yourself some new lies; the old ones are wearing thin.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. His book, “Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom
Movement, 1993-1998,” is available at $24.95 postpaid by dialing
1-800-244-2224; or via web site

http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.

***

Vin Suprynowicz, [email protected]

“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.” — John
Hay, 1872

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and
thus clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken

* * *

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