Kopel’s Second Amendment Newsletter. October 23, 2001.
The Second Amendment Project is based at the Independence
Institute, a free-market think tank in Golden, Colorado.
http://i2i.org
For Dave Kopel’s writings, go to:
http://www.davidkopel.com

========================================================
***Important news about this newsletter***

Starting with this issue, electronic distribution of this newsletter
will be
handled by the Second Amendment Foundation, based in Bellevue,
Washington.
This will give me more time to work on the content of the newsletter,
instead of maintaining the mailing list and conducting the e-mailings.
Over time, we hope to use the Second Amendment Foundation’s expertise
to improve the production quality of this newsletter.

Soon, the Second Amendment Foundation will begin making back issues of
the
newsletter available on-line.

Like the previous issue, this issue contains articles and links related
to the war. Almost
all of them will have some connection to Second Amendment issues. In
some cases, the
connection will be obvious – e.g., armed pilots. In other cases, there
will be discussion of
civil liberties issues where gun rights are placed at risk over the long
term – e.g., in the
expansion of warrantless surveillance, which could be used against gun
owners or
activists by some future administration, or a national ID card, which
could be used to
store gun registration information.

Finally, all my material has moved to a new website:
http://www.davidkopel.com/ (or .org or .net).

The website and I are both still affiliated with the Independence
Institute, and
my new site contains plenty of links to the main Independence Institute
website.
But there are now so many documents on the Independence main site that
we needed to
move my material over to separate site, to make it easier for users to
find and read. If
you’d like to go straight to the Second Amendment page for my new site,
which contains
links to scores of firearms-related articles, go to:
http://www.davidkopel.org/2damendment.htm

Best wishes,
Dave Kopel

=========================================================
Table of Contents for this issue
1. New Kopel law review article: “Lawyers, Guns, and Burglars.” Arizona
Law
Review.
2. New Kopel short articles: Armed pilots. Civil liberties and the war.
3. “The passengers were all disarmed.” By Vin Suprynowicz.
4. Links. Special sections on the War, the Emerson case, and more.

=========================================================
1. “Lawyers, Guns, and Burglars” 43 Arizona Law Review 345.
By Dave Kopel
http://www.davidkopel.com/2A/LawRev/LawyersGunsBurglars.htm

How America’s high rate of household gun ownership dramatically reduces
the home
invasion burglary rate. Because burglars don’t know which homes are
armed, most
burglars avoid entering homes while they are occupied. As a result, all
Americans – even
members of gun prohibition groups – are made safer by American gun
ownership.

The HTML version of this article is brand new, and still needs some
spiffing up and
improved links. (Any volunteers?)

=========================================================
2. New Kopel short articles.

a. Coming this week and next in National Review Online: articles on the
Emerson case, on
Switzerland, and on phony claims against .50 caliber rifles

b. Coming next weekend on National Review Online, Weekend Edition. Book
review of
“Shots in Dark: The Policy, Politics, and Symbolism of Gun Control,” by
William
Vizzard.

c. Will the War Kill the Bill of Rights?
Discusses secret searches and warrantless Internet/e-mail surveillance.
Cato Institute
October 18, 2001
http://www.cato.org/current/terrorism/pubs/kopel-011018.html

d. A Potential Ally? In conversation with Iran.
National Review Online. Oct. 3, 2001.
Kopel’s interview with the Tehran newspaper Siasat Roos (Politics of the
Day).
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel100301.shtml

e. ID Nation. A national ID card is the wrong way to go.
National Review Online. Oct. 2, 2001. Kopel and two other writers.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-symposium100201.shtml

f. Wargames. How conflict simulation games from Avalon Hill, SPI, and
other
companies have educated Americans about the realities of war.
With Glenn Harlan Reynolds.
National Review Online. Oct. 1, 2001
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel100101.shtml

g. Arms in the Air. Thinking through arming pilots.
National Review Online. Sept. 26, 2001.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel092601.shtml

h. Don’t Press the Panic Button. The antiterrorism legislation before
Congress is
dangerous. National Review Online. Sept. 21, 2001.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel092101.shtml

===============================================================
3. The passengers were all disarmed
Sept. 14, 2001
By Vin Suprynowicz

For years, Americans hoping to travel peacefully between major cities
have suffered the indignity of being run through metal detectors, being
made to empty our pockets and our purses, remove our belt buckles and
our
steel-insoled boots, answer rote questions about whether we’ve stupidly
let some guy in a turban insert in our bags a “gift for my sister in
Boston.”

Our bags have been scanned and subjected to “random searches.”

All of this has cost us millions of productive hours wasted, not to
mention billions in salaries for these laughably ineffective goons, all
dutifully passed on to us in the price of our airline tickets.

I have long warned the only reason no plane was hijacked in this country
in the past decade was because no serious terrorist had tried. “The Fred
and Ethel Mertz security system” would have zero impact on anyone
serious
enough to plan ahead and plant a “mole” among the minimum wage employees
who load soda pop and TV dinners aboard our aircraft.

Tuesday, I hoped I was wrong. As it quickly became clear terrorists had
placed several agents aboard each of four transcontinental flights
taking
off from Eastern airports with an aim to using those fueled-up jets as
flying bombs, I waited to hear in how many cases our crack security
operatives had polished off the would-be terrorists before they ever
made
it to the plane.

Had all the metal detectors and bomb-sniffing wands and random bag
checks and “may I see your travel papers please” stopped even one
terrorist team?

Nope. The Fred and Ethel Mertz security system stoppeth not even one in
four. The only reason one of the four planes failed to hit its target -
it
now appears from passenger cell phone calls made from the plane which
crashed near Pittsburgh – is that some brave American men decided to “do
something,” counterattacking their captors.

So what will Congress and the FAA and the airlines – the ones that
manage to avoid immediate bankruptcy – do in the months to come?

Will the Powers That Be conclude, “Well, we tried disarming law-abiding
Americans and running the metal detectors and scanning the bags; that
obviously didn’t work. So, we might as well try the Archie Bunker plan”?

(Decades ago, leftist series creator Norman Lear had Carroll O’Connor’s
lead character in the TV show “All in the Family” propose the best way
to
prevent airline hijackings was to issue loaded firearms to the
passengers
upon boarding, collecting them again as the travelers disembarked.
“Norman
Lear obviously thought the notion represented the very height of
right-wing absurdity,” my friend, novelist L. Neil Smith, wrote to me
last week. “But
somebody tell me — now — how an aircraft full of well-armed people
could
be hijacked and used against civilization the way four were today.”)

No, there will be no restoration of the Second Amendment in once free
and fearless America. Instead, fulfilling a pretty good definition of
insanity, what they’ll do is a whole lot more of what already hasn’t
worked.

Now we’re going to make our law-abiding disarmed victims-to-be wait in
even more interminable lines while we search their bags and their
persons really, really,
really well.

For nail-clippers and scissors and little, tiny knives.

“That’s not gonna do any good, it’s the minimum wage employee comin’ in
the back door who did this,” exclaims my friend Pete the pilot (he
didn’t
want me to use his real name.) Pete flies 757s and 767s – precisely the
models that were hijacked – for a major airline back East.

Today’s commercial aircraft swarm with people in the hours before they
take off, Pete explained to me last Tuesday. From the janitors who
vacuum
out the planes to the employees of the contract catering firms that load
the TV dinners and the soda pop into the pantries, these tend to be
minimum-wage employees, often recent immigrants in high-turnover jobs.
Background checks on these workers are minimal to nonexistent, Pete
explains. A mail-order driver’s license would get Osama bin Laden’s
nephew
one of these jobs, whereupon all he would have to do is wait to be told
which night to leave the knives and box-cutters – or the full-auto Uzi,
for that matter – in with the ice cubes or under the cushion of seat
11-C.

But that won’t be fixed, Pete says. Instead, he (and all of us) will be
banned from carrying even his little Schrade Old-Timer pocket-knife with
the under-four-inch blade. “It’ll all be, as it always has been,
public-relations sort of stuff; they’ll make it appear
that they’re doing something. … I worry they’ll impose more
Draconian restrictions on our liberties that aren’t gonna make us any
more
secure.

“It’s company policy that the pilots can’t be armed on the airplane,”
Pete says. “Now we’ve seen from recent events that that makes us sitting
ducks.”
——————–
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to
Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 — or
dialing
775-348-8591.

============================================================
4. Links.

a. The War

Only Guns Can Stop Terrorists
It’s harder to victimize armed citizens.
By John R. Lott, Jr.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001226

Saved by the Militia
Arming an army against terrorism.
September 18, 2001
By Randy E. Barnett
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-barnett091801.shtml

Save Lives, Arm Pilots
Tanya Metaksa, FrontPage Magazine
Oct. 3, 2001
http://www.frontpagemag.com/columnists/metaksa/2001/metaksa10-03-01.htm

“Interview With An Unlikely Hero”
RiShawn Biddle, Forbes.com
Sept. 13, 2001
The story of one of the heroes of flight 93
http://www.forbes.com/2001/09/13/0913hero.html

bin Laden target.
Practice your parasite extermination skills
http://www.sightm1911.com/lib/other/osm_target.htm

Attacks on American Muslims Reaffirm Wisdom of 2nd
Amendment
By Glenn J. Sacks
Pasadena Star-News.
http://www.glennjsacks.com/attacks_on_american.htm

Americans in Good Standing
Advocate for armed citizens on planes.
“Americans have the right to protect themselves and can take an active
role in making
our skies safe again.”
www.americansingoodstanding.com

Project Safe Skies
Another group to promote safety by promoting armed passengers.
http://www.projectsafeskies.org/

For Many Without Guns, Attack Was a Call to Arm
By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post
Oct. 2, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55662-2001Oct1.html

Mommy Liberty
Popular new image shows Statue of Liberty with a revolver!
Wired
Sept. 26, 2001
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47102,00.html

Many a truth is said in jest…
“Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell: We Expected Eternal
Paradise For This,
Say Suicide Bombers”
The Onion
Sept. 26, 2001
http://www.theonion.com/onion3734/hijackers_surprised.html

======================================================
b. General Firearms Issues

Operation Self-Defense
Collects reports of firearms self-defense

https://www.keepandbeararms.com/opsd/

New California gun control law, full text, 105 pages.
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/bill/asm/ab_0001-0050/ab_35_bill_20010912_
amen
ded_sen.pdf

Coverage of “First Monday” anti-gun event
By Ari Armstrong
Colorado Freedom Report
Oct. 9, 2001
http://www.co-freedom.com/2001/10/firstmonday.html

=================================================
c. History. Bellesiles’ “Arming America” hoax continues to unravel.

University asks historian to defend his research on gun ownership book
By David Mehegan,
Boston Globe Staff
Oct. 3, 2001
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/276/living/University_asks_historian_t
o_defend_his
_research_on_gun_ownership_book+.shtml

Gun Control Book Based on Faulty Data
Glenn Harlan Reynolds
FoxNews.com
October 10, 2001

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,36122,00.html
==========================================================
d. Edged Weapons

Knife.com
http://www.knife.com/faqs/lawexp.asp

Historical Armed Combat Association
http://www.thehaca.com/

=======================================================
e. Legal News. Non-Emerson

U.S. v. McFarland.
Judges Garwood & DeMoss (the two majority judges from the Emerson case)
uphold a federal armed robbery conviction, but raise doubts about
whether
the Congressional power to regulate interstate commerce really should
still be interpreted to allow federalization of street crime.
http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/00/00-10569-cr0.htm

Maryland gun rights group’s lawsuit against Governor
Glendenning, for failing to implement the state’s new
handgun safety training mandate (and by failing to implement
the new law which the Governor lobbied for, attempting to
make it impossible to buy handguns).
http://199.244.139.109/dcwww?-show:client/journal/MTG/j2001/q3/m09/t20/p
a/s0
04/003_001_001.dcs

Nellie Jones v. Williams Pawn & Guns
No. 4d00-3723
Florida Court of Appeals
Oct. 10, 2001
Court rejects a vagueness challenge to Florida statute prohibiting sale
of guns to persons
of “unsound mind.”
p://www.4dca.org/

=============================================================
f. The Emerson Case.
The most important Second Amendment victory in court, ever. The case
does not mark
the end of the gun control, but it does mark the beginning of the end of
claims that gun
control laws can ignore the Second Amendment, and that gun prohibition
not
unconstitutional.

The Fifth Circuit’s ruling, in HTML
http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/99/99-10331-cr0.htm

A decision of historic importance
U.S. News & World Report
By Michael Barone
Web exclusive 10/19/01
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/baroneweb/mb_011019.htm

2nd Amendment Victory
National Review interview with Nelson Lund
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory101801.shtml