From: AdmrlLocke@aol.com Sent: Monday, July 17, 2000 11:22 AM To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: LibertyNet: Trust Individuals Or Government (With Guns)? LibertyNet A Drop of Reason in a Sea of Irrationality Issue 7/17/00 Dear Friend of Liberty, Today's liberals believe you can trust government, but not individuals, with guns. The belief contradicts itself right from the start, since governments consist of individuals. Does being a member or employee of government make a gun-wielding individual safer? Today's liberals think so--unless the gun-wielding individuals are apprehending a criminal who has shot one of them. The classical liberals who founded America, by contrast, didn't think so at all. In fact the Founding Fathers specifically argued for a well-armed populace to act as a check against the power of government. James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution, argued in The Federalist, Number 46 "the advantage of being armed, which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation." Any tyranny attempted by the federal government "would be opposed by a militia amounting to near half a million citizens with arms in their hands." In the first piece below, Rod D. Martin exposes the results of 1990s gun-confiscation in two other English-speaking countries, Great Britain and Australia. British and Australian government confiscation of private guns has produced dramatic and clear results: crime rates in both countries are skyrocketing. The skyrocketing crime rates don't include criminal actions by the governments themselves: in Australia, police no longer need a search warrant to break into your home and seize your possessions. In America, by contrast, rates for all types of crimes have been falling since the early 1980s; in the 1990s the actual number of crimes in America has been falling as well. While aging of American's population probably contributes the most to our drop in crime, Britain and Australia experience the same pattern of aging populations. Indeed, as Martin indicates, crimes rates had been falling in Australia for the previous quarter-century--right up until the government confiscated private firearms. In America, furthermore, the states which have passed general concealed-carry permit laws have lead the way with the largest reductions in both rates and numbers of crime. Guns in the hands of private citizens clearly deter crime; government disarmament of citizens clearly encourages crime. Martin's piece provides another startling new piece of evidence. You may already know, as did I, that law-abiding Americans use their private firearms to prevent crimes between 2 and 2.5 million times a year. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck has carefully compiled the figures, including only incidents which involve an actual confrontation between gun-owner and criminal. Professor Kleck has defended the validity of his figures against shrill and often ad hominem attacks by gun-controllers. But you might not know, as I did not, that a study done by the anti-gun Police Foundation for Janet Reno came to a similar conclusion: American citizens use their private firearms 1.5 million times a year to actively prevent crimes; Americans use guns far more often to deter than to commit crimes. The Police Foundation's conclusions make it the 15th study in recent years to discover what we've been saying all along: private ownership of firearms deters crime. What Part of "Destroy All Records" Don't You Understand? --------------------------------------------------- The second piece below contains two excerpts from the Friday, July 14th issue of NRA Fax Alert. You can get the alert delivered by email as well (I believe by sending an email to majordomo@nra.org with the word "Subscribe" in the body of the email, without the quotation marks). The first excerpt demonstrates how gun-controllers in the federal judiciary will ignore even the plain language of the law and allow the Clinton administration to impose its own gun-control agenda. What part of "destroy all records" don't the Clinton-appointed judges and Janet Reno understand? Apparently it isn't just Bill Clinton, but also his judicial appointees, who don't know the definition of what "is" is. Aided and abetted by Clinton judicial appointees, the FBI under Clinton-appointee Reno continues to compile lists of law-abiding gun-owners, in direct violation of the law. ATF vs. The First Amendment -------------------------- The second excerpt from Friday's NRA Alert details an even more egregious outrage by the federal government: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (known both as BATF and ATF) has been harassing John Ross. Ross wrote a novel, called Unintended Consequences, about the gradual erosion of our right to bear arms in America, in which he portrays the ATF in an unfavorable light. The ATF has responded apparently by harassing Ross and book venders selling the novel, and even by trying to turn his wife against him. ATF vs. Everyone --------------- As I argue in the third piece below, a column of mine from early 1996, the ATF in fact has a long history of ignoring not only the First Amendment, but the Second Amendment, federal law, Congress, and even the Supreme Court. ATF also has a long history of harassing law-abiding citizens it doesn't like; long before Janet Reno began corrupting the FBI, the ATF began illegally compiling lists of law-abiding gun owners. Why doesn't Congress dissolve this rogue agency and transfer its few legitimate functions to the FBI? Could it be that even members of Congress fear the ATF? Sincerely, David B. Levenstam, CPA, MT, MA Bush/Cox in 2000! To subscribe to LibertyNet, email me at AdmrlLocke@aol.com, with a message to the effect that you'd like to subscribe. LibertyNet and GrammNet back issues available at http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3390/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------FEW ER GUNS = MORE CRIME by Rod D. Martin, 11 July 2000 Four years into the British and Australian gun bans, the verdict on gun control is in: disaster. Those who argue for the right of self-defense have always said that banning guns would disarm the law-abiding while encouraging the criminals. Yet even by the standards of most pro-gun arguments, the actual results of total gun control have been startling, leaving anti-gunners and government officials at a loss to explain the debacle. Take Australia. Just over one year ago, the Australian government spent more than $500 million to confiscate 640,381 privately-owned firearms, even using deadly force. This followed a partial ban of over 60 percent of the country's private weapons in 1996. The promise: a dramatic reduction in crime, in exchange for the right of common citizens to defend themselves. The results: utter mayhem, showing yet again that, as in most things, government cannot take care of you as well as you can. In the first year of the ban, Australian homicides increased 3.2 percent, and in the state of Victoria, gun homicides shot up 300 percent. Assaults increased 8.6 percent. Armed robberies rose a whopping 44 percent, after having dropped for 25 straight years before the ban. Since then, homicides have jumped 29 percent, kidnappings have risen 38 percent, assaults have increased 17 percent, and armed robberies have skyrocketed an additional 73 percent. In Australia today, police can go house to house, enter your home without a warrant, search for guns, copy your hard drive, seize your records, and take you to jail. What they cannot do is protect you. It's worse in Britain, where virtually all guns were banned in 1996 following the Dunblane massacre. Americans tend to believe Britain a peaceful place with little crime. Post-confiscation, quite the opposite proves true: the crime rate in England and Wales is now 60 percent higher than in the United States. Indeed, it is higher than in every one of the 50 states. As in Australia, British police are incapable of stopping this growing anarchy. Despite having more policemen per capita than the U.S., despite installing more electronic surveillance equipment than any other Western country, robbery and sex crimes have shot ahead of U.S. numbers, property crime is now twice as high, and assaults and muggings are now between twice and three times as high as in America. Perhaps the most telling statistic is the "hot burglary" rate; i.e., those burglaries which are committed while the homeowner is present. In the United States, these burglaries account for just over 10 percent of the total: criminals fear getting shot. In post-gun-ban Britain, however, "hot burglaries" account for more than half of the total, meaning that vastly more Britons face an armed intruder each year, with absolutely no way to defend themselves either from the burglary itself or from whatever other assaults, rapes or murders the criminal may choose to commit. The contrast between this horror story and the American experience is vast. The U.S. crime rate has fallen precipitously throughout the 1990s, largely driven downward by those states which have enacted concealed-carry laws. And in fact, gun ownership has been shown in survey after survey to be one of the single most important factors in preventing violent crime. Of particular note, Janet Reno's Department of Justice commissioned a survey in 1994 by the openly anti-gun Police Foundation. That exhaustive study, "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms," was completed in 1997, and its conclusion was clear: "Guns are used far more often to defend against crime than to perpetrate crime." In the year studied, 1.5 million Americans used guns to defend their homes, families or property. In the words of the study, literally "millions of attempted assaults, thefts and break-ins were foiled by armed citizens during the 12-month period." And as the study itself admits, its conclusions are "directly comparable" to other similar studies: the Police Foundation's work was the fifteenth national survey to reach this same conclusion in the past twenty-two years, every one of them having found results in the same range. The common sense of gun ownership is inescapable: a family, or a single mother, alone at home, facing an armed intruder in the middle of the night, does not have time to call 911. By the time the police arrive, no matter how competent they are, no matter how quickly they respond, she and her children will be dead. It's that simple. She can defend herself and her children, or she can face her merciless predator, alone. The fact is simple: guns save lives. Lots of lives. Every day. Criminals would far rather prey on the weak than on someone who can fight back. Private gun ownership means people can help protect their families and keep the peace; it also makes certain that crime does not pay. And if you don't believe it, just visit our British and Australian cousins. Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 11 July 2000. -- Rod D. Martin is National Chairman of The Vanguard, an organization dedicated to the promotion of conservative causes. He is a Fellow of the Kuyper Institute for Political Studies, an elder of Covenant Baptist Church, and an attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------Fro m Friday, July 14, 2000 NRA-ILA FAX ALERT Vol. 7, No. 28 COURT ALLOWS FBI TO MAINTAIN RECORDS ON LAW-ABIDING GUN PURCHASERS On Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in National Rifle Association of America, Inc., et al. v. Janet Reno (see FAX Alerts Vol. 5, No. 50 and Vol. 6, Nos. 3 & 27) that the FBI is not prohibited from maintaining an "Audit Log" on law-abiding gun purchasers who have cleared a National Instant Check System (NICS) check. The 2-1 ruling was sharply divided, however, with two Clinton appointees ruling in favor of Attorney General Janet Reno and the Department of Justice (DOJ), and one Reagan appointee strongly dissenting. NRA's opinion on the case is very simple -- the Brady Act, which established NICS, clearly directs that all information submitted on a firearm purchaser be destroyed immediately once the system determines that the transfer should not be denied. Also, federal law prohibits the registration of gun owners, not only under the Brady Act itself, but also under the 1986 Firearms Owners' Protection Act. Reno, however, contends that the retention of records, which she refers to as an "Audit Log," is needed to ensure proper management of NICS. She also claims that the current system (NICS) is not capable of destroying the records of law-abiding gun buyers, and it is her opinion that federal law is not explicit enough to "prohibit generally the recordation of information generated by the NICS." The majority opinion agreed with Reno and is shot through with Clintonesque ramblings over the possible meanings of words that, for most of us, are quite clear -- words such as "record" and "destroy." The majority opinion by Judges David S. Tatel and Merrick B. Garland held that federal law "does not prohibit all forms of registration," and that maintaining the "Audit Log" is permissible because it does not include all firearm owners in the United States, and is not permanent. However, federal law does specifically prohibit "any system of registration of firearms, firearm owners, or firearm transactions or dispositions," regardless of how complete the records are or how long they are kept. The majority also held that, even though the Brady Act clearly states that the FBI must destroy all records on lawful firearm transfers that are subject to a NICS check, the law sets no specific timetable as to when the records must be destroyed. Tatel and Garland claimed the Brady Act is vague and the court must defer to "agency expertise." In his dissent, Judge David B. Sentelle argued that Reno exceeded her authority, and that Congress was clear when it stated that records on lawful gun purchasers subject to NICS must be "destroyed." Reno's assertion that the lack of the word "immediately" following Congress's command to "destroy all records" led Sentelle to write, "The Attorney General's position strikes me as reminiscent of a petulant child pulling her sister's hair. Her mother tells her, ‘Don't pull the baby's hair.' The child says, ‘All right, Mama,' but again pulls the infant's hair. Her defense is, ‘Mama, you didn't say I had to stop right now.' I do not think that the parent's command to the child is ambiguous, nor that of Congress to the Attorney General." NRA-ILA Executive Director James Jay Baker commented, "When you have words in the law like ‘destroy,' ‘don't record' and ‘no system of registration,' it seems fairly obvious to us." NRA will be filing a motion for a re-hearing before the full court and will also continue to press for Congressional action to clarify, beyond any doubt, the law that prohibits any retention of information on law-abiding gun purchasers through NICS. On June 21, hearings were held in the U.S. Senate to address recurring problems with the overall operation of NICS (see FAX Alert Vol. 7, No. 25), during which retired U.S. Senator Bob Dole (R-Kan.) testified that his original intent when working on the legislation that eventually became the Brady Act was to mandate the immediate destruction of the records in question. Be sure to let your federal lawmakers know that you would like to see them work with NRA to put an end to the Clinton-Gore Administration's maintaining any records on law-abiding gun owners. You can contact your U.S. Senators by calling (202) 224-3121, your U.S. Representative by calling (202) 225-3121, or use the "Write Your Reps" tool at www.NRAILA.org. BATF ATTACKING FIRST AMENDMENT? Many in the pro-gun community are familiar with the novel Unintended Consequences by John Ross. This fictional work tells the story of the gradual erosion of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in America, and also paints a rather negative picture of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (BATF). Now a letter to BATF Director Bradley Buckles from the author's attorney alleges that the BATF has been harassing Mr. Ross and others involved in the distribution of his book. The letter claims that "in 1997 the book's publisher became aware that individuals purporting to be BATF agents had threatened vendors of the book in at least three different states with ‘problems' if they did not cease their sales of the book." The letter states that similar incidents did not occur after a $10,000 reward was offered for information to identify the "agents." But the letter from Ross's attorney, James H. Jeffries, III, goes on to state that BATF agents "have engaged in an official effort to enlist Mrs. Ross, who is amicably separated from her husband as an informant against her husband." Mrs. Ross, apparently, has expressed no interest in assisting the BATF, and Jeffries has demanded that BATF "cease and desist from this unconstitutional abuse of power." He has also asked for a full investigation by the Inspector General of the Treasury Department, and requested the U.S. Attorney General look into whether Mr. Ross's civil rights have been violated by BATF. Stay tuned. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ATF: Jack-Booted Thugs? By David B. Levenstam, CPA, MT, MA The liberal media have harshly condemned the NRA for characterizing agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) as "jack-booted government thugs." Encouraged by the media, gun-control-freaks have piled on. The control-freaks range from liberal statist Representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) to moderate statist George Bush who, with his ban on certain imported weapons, enshrined in law the nonsense that semi-automatic rifles which merely look like fully-automatic weapons are also "assault-weapons". These liberals and moderates have in turn characterized the NRA as a voice of right-wing extremism. Yet speaking on the floor of the House back in 1980, Representative John Dingell of Michigan, a Democrat with impeccable liberal credentials, called ATF agents "jack-booted fascists"--although the liberal media neglected to condemn him. So it's not merely conservatives who allege that ATF agents are lawless oppressors, even if it's only conservatives who are being attacked for the allegations. It's true that ATF is a Prohibition-era relic with nothing better to do than to harass law-abiding distilleries and gun-owners. But are its agents jack-booted thugs? If you're like most Americans, you'd never even heard of ATF before its devastating raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco County, Texas, which ended in the deaths of 82 people, including 25 children. So you may have been lead to believe that ATF's Waco raid was the sole provocation behind the NRA's characterization of ATF agents. Dingell, however, made his comment 13 years before Waco, in response to a pattern of abuse and injury by ATF. Space allows only a brief sample of ATF outrages. In June 1971, for example, ATF agents wearing plainclothes and ski masks raided the home of Ken Ballew in Silver Spring, Maryland. Ballew, unaware they were government agents, grabbed a gun to defend himself. ATF agents shot him in the head, paralyzing him. They found nothing illegal and refused to pay any damages for crippling the innocent man. In June of 1978, ATF agents detained hundreds of lawful gun owners and dealers at a San Jose gun show. The agents photographed them and forced them to sign a "warning" for no authorized law-enforcement purpose. Such arbitrary, Gestapo tactics led a Senate subcommittee, in February 1982, to issue a report of ATF abuses, criticizing the agency for "secret law-making." The report dismissed "ATF's claims, both of focus upon gun-using criminals, and of recent reforms, [as] empty words." Despite the Senate report criticizing ATF infringements of the liberty of law-abiding citizens, ATF continues its flagrant pattern of abuse and assault. For instance, in April 1991, 23 ATF agents raided the home of Del Knudson near Coville, Washington. They confined his wife in one room while her hysterical 6-year-old daughter screamed for her and her 1-year-old daughter sat abandoned in the bath tub. ATF agents also handcuffed an elderly neighbor who offered to watch the children. Agents confiscated legal gun parts--and never filed any charges. Similarly, in December of 1991, ATF agents--followed by two TV crews--burst into the home of John Lawmaster in Tulsa. ATF agents smashed the front and back doors, furniture, drawers, closets, filing cabinets, and even pulled down a ceiling. They left guns and ammunition scattered around the house, which they then left open and unattended for any criminal to burgle. ATF found nothing illegal, but still refuses to pay damages. These sorts of unreasonable searches and seizures--to say nothing of injuries and shootings--by King George's heavily-booted thugs are just the sort of outrage that prompted the Founding Fathers to adopt the Fourth Amendment. The First Amendment is also under regular assault by ATF--especially if you happen to be a producer of alcohol. That's been the experience of numerous producers, large and small, including Coors, G. Heileman, Bert and Sherry Grant, Federico Cabo, and Kermit Lynch. Despite the lack of any legislative authority, ATF decided in 1993 that the Grants, who make Grant's Scottish Ale, can't include the Ale's vitamin content on the label. The ATF's policy, created without legal authority, finds "all therapeutic claims, regardless of their truthfulness, inherently misleading." When the Grants issued a press release on ATF's arbitrary policy, ATF began an investigation of their company, tying up the plant for three weeks and forcing the Grants to replace the label on another of their products. Worse yet, ATF suddenly decided that Grant's Cider, in production for a decade, wasn't cider after all, but wine. While cider is exempt from federal excise taxes, wine is taxed at a rate of $1.07 per gallon. ATF claims the Grants owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in back-taxes, plus the annual occupational tax for wineries, plus interest, plus penalties. That's in addition to the $100,000 in legal fees and lost sales they've suffered already. The Grants paid a high price for exercising their First Amendment rights to print the healthful content of their product, and to tell the world how the ATF ordered them not to. On the other hand, ATF persecuted Federico Cabo because, it claimed, the label and packaging of his Black Death vodka would create the impression "that the product is inherently unsafe for human consumption at any level." (The label shows a skull, and the vodka is distributed in coffin-shaped boxes.) In other words, ATF won't let you say that alcohol is healthy or that it is unhealthy. The kindly censors at ATF likewise dictated that Kermit Lynch couldn't quote either Thomas Jefferson or Louis Pasteur on the labels of his wine. The ATF's speech guardians similarly ordered Coors to remove the alcohol content of its beers from the beers' labels. And G. Heileman, ruled the ATF, couldn't even use the name "PowerMaster" for a new malt liquor--because the name might suggest a high alcohol content. (Huh? It sounds like ATF agents have been sampling what they regulate.) Federal courts have ruled--in 1981, 1992, 1994, and 1995--that ATF is violating the First Amendment by censoring the form and content of labels. Yet none of the rulings has stopped ATF from continuing to censor and harass other alcohol makers. Recently, the Supreme Court itself held that ATF violates the Constitution with its kindly censorship. Yet it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will be able to control ATF any better than the lower courts have. Congress also has been unable control ATF. Congress included a provision in the Federal Gun Control Act of 1968 to prohibit any federal agency from compiling a registry of gun owners. ATF nonetheless claimed authorization under the law to seize the records of out-of-business gun dealers to start compiling a registry. So in 1978, Congress passed another law forbidding ATF from compiling a national registry, and cut ATF's budget as well. That stopped ATF--briefly. However, ATF soon returned to compiling its illegal list. ATF continues compiling a national gun registry despite passage in 1986 of the Volkmer-McClure Act, which forbids any government in the U.S. from compiling a registry of gun owners. In May 1994, ATF agent Pay Hynes even bragged to Forrest Sawyer of ABC's Day 1 that ATF had already computerized 60 million records of gun owners. So ATF regularly violates the express will of Congress, as well the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, and the portion of your liberty the amendments are supposed to guarantee. ATF violations show it to be a rogue agency, a lawless band--armed and dangerous--even if we ignore Waco. Then there's the ATF raid on Waco itself. The initial excuse for the raid--that Branch Davidian leader David Koresh illegally converted semi-automatic weapons to fully automatic function--was false. ATF's own investigators admitted before the raid that they had insufficient evidence that Branch Davidians had converted any weapons. During the current congressional hearings on Waco, ATF agents even testified that they refused an invitation by Koresh to come and examine his firearms long before the deadly raid. In any case, it's legal under federal law for you to own a fully-automatic weapon made before 1986, as long as you pay the $200 federal tax. Even if the Koresh had made an illegal conversion, essentially he would have been guilty only of minor tax evasion. Killing people based on insufficient evidence of evading a $200 tax sounds like an act of heavily-booted KGB agents, not of legitimate law-enforcement officials in America, land of liberty. Since the ATF had insufficient evidence to warrant an arrest, it's not surprising that in the congressional hearings we've just learned from legal experts that the ATF search warrant was "inflammatory," "sloppy," and filled with "factual inaccuracies." Nor is it surprising that ATF agent Robert Rodriguez testified that he warned ATF officials that Koresh knew about the planned ATF raid, guaranteeing that an invasion of the compound would result in deaths of Branch Davidians and ATF agents alike. The hearings have revealed that the Treasury Department's own report contains the testimony of 61 ATF agents in agreement with Rodriguez's claim that Koresh has been forewarned. And in perhaps the most stunning revelation of all--so far--ATF agents testified that ATF officials lied to the Defense Department about the presence of a "drug lab" in the Davidian's compound in order get military firepower for the raid. Their total lack of evidence, illegal search warrant, lack of surprise, and lying to another federal agency aside, ATF officials ordered agents to invade the compound, guns blazing, as admitted by ATF agent Rolland Ballesteros, one of the agents who led the assault. Yet they quietly and safely could have arrested Koresh on any of the three days each week on which he regularly left the compound to shop for groceries, or, for that matter, during any of the frequent times at which he went for a run. In fact, Koresh once had been arrested without incident by the local sheriff on charges for which he was tried and found not guilty. Thus there was no excuse for ATF agents to invade the compound, guns blazing. Later allegations that ATF had to act to protect children against abuse also are false. An anti-gun social worker, Joyce Sparks, tried to bring charges of child abuse against Koresh because he was teaching his children that gun ownership is desirable. The Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services dismissed her allegations as the patent nonsense they were. In any case, ATF doesn't enforce state child abuse laws. The federal government's own psychologist admitted after the siege that he found absolutely no evidence of child abuse. Used in retrospect to justify ATF's murderous assault, the charges of child abuse are eerily reminiscent of false charges often made to justify murdering other people symbolized by the Star of David: Jews in Europe often were alleged to drink the blood of children. For centuries, the strategy of making such hysterical claims, playing on people's ignorant paranoia, successfully justified the tyranny of government thugs. So far the strategy seems to have worked for ATF as well. The murderous raid at Waco served merely to publicize widely the sort of tyrannical abuse of which ATF has long been guilty. Indeed, no less a liberal icon than the ACLU is joining the NRA in demanding an investigation into not just Waco, but twenty-five separate instances of ATF abuse. With such an egregious pattern of harassment, injury and killing of innocent, law-abiding citizens--violating the laws of Congress, the rulings of federal courts, and the First and Fourth Amendments--ATF agents are jack-booted government thugs indeed. As a final note, there are the allegations of a persuasive pattern of sexual harassment of women in ATF by male agents. In fact, 60 Minutes was set to air an expose of ATF sexual harassment when ATF agents invaded Waco, stealing the headlines from the show. And the current congressional hearings on Waco have revealed that for the past 15 years, ATF agents have attended the "Good Ol' Boys' Roundup," where they engage in racist and anti-Semitic "games." But surely none of the NRA's pious detractors consider pervasive sexual harassment, racism, or anti-Semitism to be the act of government thugs.