Second Amendment Project Newsletter, April 26, 2000.
The Second Amendment Project is based at the Independence
Institute, a
free-market think tank in Golden, Colorado. http://i2i.org
=========================================================
Table of Contents for this issue

1. Grover Norquist to speak at Independence Institute.
2. Kopel/Gorman op-ed in NY Post on school safety.
3. Two Kopel columns and one Gorman column on the Elian
Gonzalez kidnapping.
4. “Leftist Actions Speak Louder than Words.” By Linda
Gorman.
5. Worth reading on the web.
6. New poll on Waco.
7. Issue Backgrounder on contingent fee government lawsuits.
By Dave Kopel.

=========================================================
1. Grover Norquist event
Grover Norquist, will be speaking at the Independence
Institute on Sunday
April 30 at 3:00 pm. Grover is the head of the Washington DC
based Americans
for Tax Reform (ATR) http://www.atr.org/ and the unofficial
leader of the
“Leave Us Alone” coalition. Spend a lazy Sunday after noon
with us and
learn why we are winning. RSVP at 303-279-6536 or
[email protected]
Free for Independence members, $5 for non-members.

=========================================================
2. April 20, 2000, New York Post
School Safety. By Linda Gorman and Dave Kopel

Psychologists have found that people consider an event more
likely when
instances of it are easy to imagine or recall. Given the
saturation coverage
of school violence since the Columbine shootings, it comes
as no surprise
that the number of people who fear for their children’s
safety at school has
risen dramatically. According to a Washington Post poll
conducted last
November, 60% of surveyed adults felt that “children in
America are no
longer safe at their own schools.” The good news, though, is
that schools
are actually safer than they used to be.

According to the National School Safety Center, there were
26 violent deaths
at school during the 1998-99 school year, including the 13
at Columbine.
That’s half as many as in 1992-93, when 55 people were
killed on school
property. With roughly 52 million people enrolled in U.S.
public schools,
the chances of dying a violent death at a government school
are about one in
two million.

And at non-government schools-where discipline is stronger,
and students
more motivated to be there-fatalities are very, very, very
rare.

How about non-fatal crimes? A joint report from the U.S.
Departments of
Education and Justice found that there were 102 crimes
against students per
1,000 students in 1997. This was down from 144 such crimes
in 1992. These
figures include non-violent crimes, such as a student’s
calculator being
stolen surreptitiously.

The report shows that the percentage of students who
reported carrying a
weapon on school property fell from about 12% in 1993 to
8.5% in 1997.
Weapons threats, physical fights, and instances of bullying
have remained
constant since 1992.

One reason that your child is safer in school today than in
1992 is that
school administrators have been more conscientious about
cracking down on
violent crime and violent threats at school.

Unfortunately, too many school administrators seem unable to
tell the
difference between normal behavior and crime. For example,
using “zero
tolerance” as an excuse to display zero intelligence, school
officials have
arrested teenagers on a bus for felony “assault” because the
peanuts they
were throwing at one another happened to hit a bus driver,
have suspended
kindergartners for using finger guns on the playground, and
expelled an
honor student for having a pocket knife in a first-aid kit
locked in a car.

Another sign of the decline in common sense regarding school
safety is the
widespread use of a new psychological computer profiling
program, from the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The program will
intensify the
persecution of students who don’t into some BATF
bureaucrat’s definition of
“average” behavior.

In the Columbine case, long before the murder spree began,
the killers had
committed a felony by breaking into a car to steal property,
and had made
detailed death threats both in person and on the Internet.
If sheriffs and
schools are too obtuse to address such obvious dangers, then
all the
computer programs in the world won’t help.

What’s the best way to address the rare, but horrifying
crimes of attempted
mass murder at public schools? Many lives were saved in
Pearl, Mississippi
and Edinboro, Pennsylvania, when adults used their
lawfully-owned firearms
to stop school murder sprees in progress. Making it illegal
for law-abiding,
trained, caring teachers to possess firearms at school is
simply an
invitation for punks like the Columbine duo to attack people
with impunity.
Gun ban advocates should put aside their ideology, and allow
responsible
teachers-with proper training and strict safety
regulations-to possess
firearms to protect themselves and their students.

=========================================================
3. Elian Gonzalez columns.
Q: What’s the Elian case doing in a Second Amendment Project
newsletter?
A: Castro’s tyranny needs gun control to survive. And the
Castro-style
kidnapping of Elian on Easter weekend by the jackbooted
bunny is a horrific
example of firearms abuse.

“Is Miami another Waco?” National Review Online. Apr. 26,
2000.
By Dave Kopel.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment042600e.html

“Mr. President, You’re No JFK”. The Elian Gonzalez
kidnapping.
By Dave Kopel. National Review Online, Apr. 24, 2000.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment042400e.html

“Elian’s Return Another Leftist Atrocity.” By Linda Gorman.
Colorado Daily, Apr. 11, 2000

=========================================================
4. LEFTIST ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS. by Linda
Gorman.
Colorado Daily, Mar. 28, 2000.

The peculiar mix of doublespeak and intransigent intolerance
that
characterizes the Left was on full display in three separate
incidents last
week.

Before Charlton Heston’s March 21 speech at CU-Boulder, the
Colorado Daily
reported that 2nd Amendment defenders protested loudly but
peacefully
outside Macky auditorium until “a large contingent of
gun-control advocates
arrived.”[i] Tensions rose. Mr. Robert Howell “threw a
punch at another
man,” scuffled briefly, and was wrestled to the ground by
police officers.
The Denver Rocky Mountain News reported that Mr. Howell is
vice-president of
the Boulder chapter of the Bell Campaign.[ii] Charitably
speaking, the Bell
Campaign consists of utopian dreamers who would consider
even complete gun
prohibition a “reasonable” restriction, and who believe that
when guns are
outlawed not even criminals will have guns. Its accuracy
can be gauged from
its web page where, as of this writing, it calls Boulder “a
suburb of
Denver.”[iii]

In an Orwellian twist worthy of President Clinton, Boulder
chapter’s
president, Sam Cole, told The Denver Rocky Mountain News
that the group was
going to adopt new guidelines for protests because “Our
protesters and
members are a very peaceful group of individuals that
believe in
nonviolence, and we have a zero tolerance for violence at
demonstrations.”
Given that new guidelines are evidently needed to rule out
assault and
battery, one wonders what the old ones were.

Evidence that the Left believes in freedom of speech only if
it does not
involve dissent from politically correct orthodoxy was
provided by the
ruckus created over UCSU Legislative Council representative
Regan Alpert’s
FlatIrons Review editorial. Ms. Alpert pointed out that the
practice of
pigeonholing Americans into bureaucratically convenient
identity groups
undermines American identity and threatens to divide the
country.

Readers should be aware that this practice also menaces the
public’s health.
Reports indicate that Americans across the country are being
made sick to
their stomachs by Census advertisements ceaselessly
exhorting various
pigeonholed groups of government dependents to stand up and
be counted.
Otherwise, they are warned, other porkers may crowd them out
of their
rightful place at the government trough.

As penance for her sin of pointing out the obvious, Ms.
Alpert was subjected
to a variety of illogical rantings by a crew of politically
correct
demonstrators. “There are things you cannot say,” one
reportedly said, “and
if you’re going to say them, you have to take responsibility
for them. Our
culture is not a grouping. Ideas have consequences. You
said something
that threatens our existence. You said something that
threatens who it is
we are.”[iv]

If this demonstrator’s “our culture” teaches him that his
very existence is
“threatened” when Ms. Alpert calls him an American, it must
be even less
robust than his logic and he is quite right to worry that it
is endangered.
In an effort to build characters capable of withstanding
mild adversity,
American parents used to tell their children that “sticks
and stones may
break my bones but words can never harm me.” This man
appears to have
skipped that lesson. Like the average two-year-old aspiring
to be a
professional inhabitant of the state of high dudgeon, he
responds to
anything that a challenges his right to rule the universe by
donning the
mantle of victimhood and throwing a fit.

Evidence of the Left’s tendency to destroy those who stand
in its way was
provided by Democratic Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New
York. Mr.
Spitzer does not like the fact that guns are still legal and
people still
buy them. He and a coalition of politicians unable to
convince legislatures
to pass the laws they want are scheming to get their way by
improperly using
the powers of their offices to force gun manufacturers to
‘voluntarily’
comply with a trumped up regulatory scheme designed to put
them out of
business. Mr. Spitzer says he plans to “squeeze
manufacturers like a
pincers and hurt them in the marketplace.” His ally, Mayor
Bill Campbell of
Atlanta, promises that gun manufacturers will comply or
“they will cease
operations.”[v]

Gun manufacturers sell a safe, effective, well-engineered
product that saves
millions of lives each year. Hypocrites all, people like
Mr. Spitzer ooze
concern for the weak and defenseless while plotting to
deprive them of the
most effective means of self-protection ever invented.
Democrats who are
autocrats in disguise, they will deprive you of your
paycheck without a
qualm if you happen to get paid for making a legal product
not to their
liking.

They got away with these tactics once when they targeted
tobacco companies.
Now they are after gun manufacturers. Soon they may be
after you. Let them
get away with this and anything, including your SUV, your
beer, or your
favorite form of entertainment, will be at risk. They say
that they care,
but their actions speak louder than their words.

———————–
[i]Terje Langeland. 22 March 2000. “Holy Moses! A brawl!,”
Colorado Daily
web site as of 22 March 2000. http://www.codaily.com.
[ii]Carla Crowder. 23 March 2000. “Two sides of gun debate
clash,” The
Denver Rocky Mountain News, online edition.
www.insidedenver.com/news/0323fite1.shtml as of 23 March
2000.
[iii]The Bell Campaign as of 23 March 2000. Chapter
Information, Chapters
Developing: Focus on Colorado, p. 1.
bttp://www.bellcampaign.org/chapter/Colorado.htm.
[iv] Julie Gordon. 20 March 2000. “UCSU rep in firestorm,”
Colorado Daily,
as posted at http://www.codaily.com/Headlines/headline1.htm
on 20 March
2000.
[v] Lawrence L. Knutson. 22 March 2000. “Cops To Favor
Cooperative Gun
Companies,” Washington Post, Online edition as of 23 March
2000.

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000322/aponline2

12606_001.htm.
———————–
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://i2i.org.

=========================================================
5. Worth reading on the Web:

a. “Let’s Send Clinton on a Cruise: Americans Deserve a
Vacation.”
Great column by Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel,
regarding
the conflict between the NRA and the Sociopath-in-Chief.

http://orlandosentinel.com/automagic/columnists/2000-03-21/O

PEDreese21m03210
0.html

b. “JAMming a Prescription for Gun Grabs.” Steven Miloy
of the Cato Institute looks at another Arthur Kellermann
study: a new article in the Journal of the American
Medical Association which uses data from Columbia to argue
against licensed carrying of handguns for protection in the
U.S.

http://www.cato.org/dailys/03-14-00.html

c. New General Accounting Office report on the National
Instant
Check System (NICS).

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/g100064.pdf

You need Adobe Acrobat Reader for this file. If you don’t
have it,
it’s free at http://www.adobe.com

Note: Please do not refer to the NICS check as the “Brady
Check.” Mrs.
Brady and her lobby fought very hard against the McCollum
Amendment in
1988, which began the research for establishing NICS.

d. “Paranoid about Gun Ownership?” Geoff Metcalf for
WorldNet Daily. “Gun control” as slow-motion gun
Prohibition, and the link between gun prohibition and
genocide.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_metcalf/20000320_xcgme_

paranoid_a.shtml

e. “NRA Critics Should Listen First.” By Al Knight, Denver
Post.
Knight applauds Charlton Heston for speaking out against
thought control and
timidity.

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/knight0319.htm

=========================================================
6. New Poll.

Harris. Released April 19(!), conducted April 7-10.
“Do you think there has been an official cover-up by
the government or the FBI to keep the public from
learning the truth about the events in Waco?”
Yes, cover-up: 51%. No: 33%. Don’t know/refuse to answer:
16%.

===========================================================
7. Issue Backgrounder on Contingent Fees for government
lawsuits.

Dave Kopel argues that government attorneys should not be
hired on a
contingent fee basis, since government workers are not
supposed
to use the force of government to enrich themselves
personally. The issue
arise in the frivolous anti-gun lawsuits, but has much
broader application.

http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Backgrounders/ContingentFees.htm

===========================================================
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

That’s all folks!

The Paul Revere Network – http://www.PaulRevere.org
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