PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT — June 2000 (Part 2)

The Lessons of History

The chief reason America has remained a free country is the
widespread private ownership of firearms. Individual ownership of guns
made the American Revolution possible. The principal purpose of the
Second Amendment was to maintain our freedom from government. It
is an insult to our heritage to imply that the Founding Fathers wrote
the Second Amendment just to protect deer hunters.

My good friend, the late Reverend Stephen Dunker, C.M., was a
missionary in China who was imprisoned by the Communists during
the early 1950s. I heard him tell of his experiences many times.
When the Communists first took over the area where he lived, they
appeared to be good rulers. They established law and order and
cleaned up the traffic in drugs and prostitutes. Then one day the
Communist bosses announced, “You can see that we have
established a good society and you have no need for your guns.
Everyone must come in the night and dump all guns in the town
square.” The people believed and obeyed. The next day, the reign of
terror began, with public executions and cruel imprisonments.
Everyone accused of being a “landlord” was dragged through the
streets and executed; a “landlord” was anyone who farmed his little
plot of ground with two water buffalo instead of one.

Gun confiscation leads to a loss of freedom, increased crime, and
the government moving to the left. This has already happened in
England and Australia. After Great Britain banned most guns in 1997,
making armed self-defense punishable as murder, violence
skyrocketed because criminals know that law abiding citizens have
been disarmed. Armed crime rose 10% in 1998. The Sunday Times
of London reported on the new black market in guns: “Up to 3 million
illegal guns are in circulation in Britain, leading to a rise in drive-by
shootings and gangland-style execution.” There has been such a
heavy increase in the use of knives for violent attacks that new laws
have been passed giving police the power to search anyone for knives
in designated areas.

In 1996 Australia banned 60% of all firearms and required registration
of all guns and the licensing of gun owners. Police confiscated
640,381 firearms, going door to door without search warrants. Two
years later, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that all crime
had risen and armed robberies were up 44%.

Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D., described his first-hand experience in
Cuba. Before 1958, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista had all citizens
register their firearms. After the revolution, Raul and Fidel Castro had
their Communist thugs go door to door and, using the registration
lists, confiscate all firearms. As soon as the Cubans were disarmed,
that was the end of their freedom.

Tyrannical governments kill far more people than private criminals.
The Nazis conducted a massive search-and-seizure operation in
1933 to disarm their political opponents, in 1938 to disarm the Jews,
and when they occupied Europe in 1939-41 they proclaimed the
death penalty for anyone who failed to surrender all guns within 24
hours.

The first line of safety has to be an ability to defend yourself. In some
areas, a woman who is being stalked by her ex-husband must wait
10 days to buy a gun, even if her life has been threatened. Some
cities criminalize carrying guns for self-defense but make exceptions
for people carrying money or jewels. Are money and jewels more
important to protect than people’s lives?

History teaches us that registration leads to the confiscation of guns
and that is the goal of many gun control advocates. Pete Shields,
founder of Handgun Control Inc., told The New Yorker: “The first
problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and
sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns
registered. The final problem is to make possession of all handguns
and all handgun ammunition — except for the military, police,
licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun
collectors — totally illegal.”

Atlanta public-safety commissioner George Napper told U.S News, “If
I had my druthers, the only people who would have guns would be
those who enforce the law.” Like those who “enforced the law” at
Waco? or at Ruby Ridge? or invading a Miami home to grab Eli?n
Gonzalez?

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution states:
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free
state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be
infringed.” Polls show that up to 80% of the public believe citizens
have a constitutional right to own guns.

If the First Amendment read “A free press being necessary to the
security of a free state, Congress shall make no law respecting . . .
the freedom of speech, or of the press,” nobody would argue that free
speech belongs only to newspapers. Likewise, they should not argue
that the right to keep and bear arms belongs only to government
agents.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority in U.S. v.
Verdugo-Urquidez (1990), stated that the term “the people” has the
same meaning in the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth
Amendments. All those five amendments in the Bill of Rights use the
term “the people” to guarantee a right for individual citizens, not just
some collective right of the state as a whole. There is no reason to
believe that the Second Amendment uses the term “the people”
differently from the other four amendments.

The claim that “militia” just refers to the National Guard is ridiculous.
The same Congress that passed the Second Amendment also
passed the Militia Act of 1792 which defined militia as “each and
every able-bodied male citizen” from age 18 to 45 (with some
exceptions) and stated that each one shall “provide himself” with a
gun, ammunition, and a bayonet.

The currently effective Militia Act substantially keeps the same
language (“all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and . . .
under 45″), and further defines militia as: “(1) the organized militia,
which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2)
the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia
who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.” (10
U.S.C. 311)

In recent years, a scholarly consensus has emerged across the
political spectrum that the Second Amendment protects an individual
right. Between 1980 and 1995, of 39 law review articles, 35 noted the
Supreme Court’s prior acknowledgement of the individual right of the
Second Amendment and only four claimed the right is a collective
right of the states (and 3 of those 4 were authored or co-authored by
persons connected with the gun-control lobby).

The Founding Fathers on the Right to Own Guns:

James Madison: Americans have “the advantage of being armed” –
unlike the citizens of other countries where “the governments are
afraid to trust the people with arms.”

* Patrick Henry: “The great objective is that every man be
armed. . . . Everyone who is able may have a gun.”
* George Mason: “To disarm the people [is] the best and most
effectual way to enslave them.”
* Samuel Adams: “The Constitution shall never be construed .
. . to prevent the people of the United States who are
peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”
* Alexander Hamilton: “The best we can hope for concerning
the people at large is that they be properly armed.”
* Richard Henry Lee: “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.”

For more information: John Lott Jr., More Guns, Less Crime (2nd
edition, 2000). Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D., articles on England and
Australia in the Medical Sentinel, May/June 2000, and letter on Cuba
to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, December 28, 1999.
Professor Sanford Levinson, “The Embarrassing Second
Amendment,” Yale Law Journal, 1989. Professor James D. Wright,
“Second Thoughts about Gun Control,” The Public Interest, Spring
1988. Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed, Independent
Institute, 1994, and the Wall Street Journal, June 4, 1999. Daniel D.
Polsby, Firearms and Crime, Independent Institute, 1997. Joyce Lee
Malcolm, lecture at the Independent Institute, September 21, 1999,
http://www.independent.org/ For law review articles, gun court
cases, and the 1982 Senate report, see

http://www.2ndlawlib.org/.

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Read this report online:

http://eagleforum.org/psr/2000/june00/psrjune2000.html