Posted on 01/08/2007 8:50:49 AM PST by kiriath_jearim
He was much larger than me and had a beefy football-player build and short dark hair -- the bouncer type. He was going to get physical if I objected. He was ready to push as we walked quickly past the long row of tables covered with guns and ammunition, past the woman collecting money for admission. Talk to him, I said to myself. Talk to him. I kept telling him I didn't work for the newspapers as he herded me to the exit.
"No pictures," he kept repeating.
"No pictures," he insisted one last time as he opened the heavy door and gently pushed me out. Then he closed the door and left me standing outside with my camera dangling from my hand. A hand-lettered sign appeared outside the entrance: NO CAMERAS ALLOWED.
Thirty minutes earlier I had walked into the public fairgrounds to attend a local gun show in Moscow, Idaho. It was the mid-1990s, and I was taking photographs of abandoned lumber mills and deserted mines in the Pacific Northwest. I was shooting what I thought were the industrial ruins of the rural West. I had also taken pictures of men in gun stores eyeing new rifles, and men hunting during deer and elk seasons. I wanted to add pictures of men and women at gun shows. At that point, I wasn't writing about gun culture. I was only taking pictures of daily life in small, rural Western towns.
When I came back to the gun show to talk with the organizer, an unofficial compromise had been reached with the relevant public officials. I could come back the next morning with my camera and take pictures before the public was admitted, provided the exhibitors agreed.
Before I left, I asked him why they enforced rules against cameras. What was the problem? Was it a distrust of government? Did they think I worked for the ATF, the IRS or the FBI? Was it anger against gun-control groups? Did they think I worked for Sarah Brady's handgun organization, or for CeaseFire, a Seattle-based gun violence prevention group? Maybe it was about hunting and animal rights? Or worse, I could be a PETA activist?
He looked at me hard and responded with one word, "Alimony."
"What?" I asked. Had I heard right? "Alimony?"
"Yes, alimony." He explained that the men inside the gun show didn't want their pictures showing up in newspapers where their ex-wives might see them spending what was legally theirs.
Wives were threats. Girlfriends were threats. They are the new scourges of secular life, hunting down unsuspecting men to get bucks and tear out their hearts. Women who talked too much were threats. And women who held public office and wouldn't shut up were the scourge of the land. I also have picked up bumper stickers at gun shows that said: "I just got a gun for my wife. It's the best trade I ever made." Or handouts detailing the "Top 10 Reasons Handguns Are Better than Women," ending with the No. 1 reason, "You can buy a silencer for a handgun." I also had seen some pretty vicious materials on Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno. A new fear floated above some of the gun exhibits: judges, lawyers and voters were giving women too much power, and the women were using that power to take guns away from their husbands, their boyfriends and their constituents. A gun-grabber lurked in the heart of the liberated woman.
Maybe the no-camera rule was about alimony. In this latest male fantasy about the war between the sexes, I could have been hired by a female predator to shoot pictures at a gun show for a ruthless ex- or estranged wife. I was just part of a new generation of bottom feeders out to get men, one of the vast army of women intent on misandry, a new word invented to capture this hatred of men by women.
At the law seminar in Reno during the 2002 National Rifle Association annual convention, I learned about other ways women can grab guns. In the midst of these carefully paced presentations, I first heard about the legal problems gun owners confronted when faced with domestic-violence restrictions. Under the terms of certain restraining orders, ownership of guns is prohibited. Domestic violence and divorce set in motion a range of state and federal statutes and laws aimed at disarming violent or potentially violent intimate partners. The 1996 Lautenberg Amendment that followed passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act made it a federal crime to possess a firearm while subject to a restraining order or after a misdemeanor conviction of the crime of domestic violence.
No one at the law seminar lingered on why there was domestic violence in the United States, or how this violence affected men, women and children, or what steps could be taken to reduce or prevent such violence. For many of the lawyers present, it was strictly a legal issue about due process, federal statutes and legal precedents. What happened in the living room or bedroom, likely sites of what crime analysts called simple assault, was off the political and rhetorical radar screens. I also heard no discussion on how to protect women from men in their own homes. No, the subject was about individuals convicted of misdemeanors or slapped with restraining orders who had lost their right to own firearms. And the big issue was how to get them back. It was all about the guns.
I found out that the police were particularly vulnerable. There was mention of how the Minneapolis Police Department was practically disarmed because so many police had present or past restraining orders against them. No one talked about domestic violence, because violence in the home didn't have the emotional punch of a violent predator breaking into your home. Then the homeowner was a hero defending his property, not a villain beating up on his spouse. The vigilante gun owner could hang a sign in his window announcing "Warning, Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again." But what kind of sign could the battered wife hang up?
In 2005, Ted Nugent, in his keynote address to the NRA annual meeting in Houston, could rant about plugging all the bad guys: "I want 'em dead." But what if the cop or the soldier or the storeowner was the bad guy? Cops were a touchy subject in gun-rights circles. Some police organizations wanted exceptions made for officers under restraining orders, which would make it more difficult for them to lose their firearms. Other cops wanted "law enforcement persons" held to a "higher standard, not a different standard." In 1997, Ronald Hampton, the executive director of the National Black Police Association, testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime. He spoke against exempting police officers. According to other testimony, police and military personnel were implicated in the crime of domestic violence at higher rates than were the general population.
In 1998, the National Institute for Justice reported that each year 1.5 million women were raped or physically assaulted by intimate partners. Many of these attacks occurred in the privacy of the home. Men were more likely to be attacked by strangers. In contrast, women were seven to 14 times "more likely to report that an intimate partner beat them up, choked or tried to drown them, threatened them with a gun, or actually used a gun on them."
As a woman at gun shows, I am usually pitched specific guns to ward off the predator breaking into my house or stalking me. At a gun show in the state of Washington, I spent time talking with an arms manufacturer who specialized in variations of the AR-15, originally made by Colt. This marketing specialist at the booth told me that the AR-15 could be adapted for home defense. I could put in a short barrel, less than 16 inches long -- what cops used in closed spaces to shoot the bad guys. He warned me that he couldn't put the short barrel in the gun receiver because he would be breaking the law. No barrel under 16 inches can go into the gun frame. Instead, he held it about a half-inch from the gun frame and demonstrated how it would work. It was an impressive-looking weapon. Stocky and mean, a dull black.
Only once do I remember a salesman trying to sell me a gun to shoot my husband or boyfriend if he turned abusive. His personal philosophy on life was that everyone should be armed and packing. If everyone in the world were armed, there would be no domestic violence; in fact, there would be no violence at all. The bad husbands would finally get what they deserved. And all the bad people in the world would be stopped -- killed or executed on the spot. He insisted that even everyone in a bar, the traditional hot spot for assault, should be packing heat. Forget about alcohol. The gun itself would stop the violence. So what if the guy packing was drunk out of his skull? The gun had this amazing magic to prevent violence. It was a talisman of peace. I had reached the logical end of the gun-rights argument. Stop crime: Arm everyone.
Yet something was desperately wrong with this picture, even though I knew that some women, fearing for their lives every day, have decided to arm themselves against their ex-loved ones. Overall, domestic violence took the glamour out of the crime scene that pro-gun activists loved to describe. Husbands and wives shooting it out in the living room didn't have the same appeal as the brave homeowner gunning down a crazed burglar. And what about all those ad campaigns to get me to buy guns? The magazine and book tales of masked young predators generated gun sales. How do you advertise buying guns when the criminal was an ex-husband, a boyfriend, or a guy you dated a couple of weeks ago?
At the law seminar, I sat thinking about how much the right to own a gun owed to the typical crime-scene scenario. Those millions of hours that Americans spend watching cop shows and vigilante heroes have helped pump up the psychic investment in guns. Still, I was having a hard time understanding how teams of lawyers for the National Rifle Association and other gun groups were ready to defend men under restraining orders. Maybe I just wasn't listening right.
At one point a question came up about Attorney General John Ashcroft and his push in the Department of Justice to accept the Second Amendment as an individual right to own guns. We were told that the Emerson case would determine whether Ashcroft's position would hold. Over the next couple of years, everywhere I turned in the gun-rights world the Emerson case was heralded as a great Second Amendment victory. Second Amendment activists would hand me copies of the complete legal ruling in paperback form. It was the greatest news to hit the gun lobby in years.
It came down to this: In 1998, the wife of Timothy Joe Emerson filed for divorce and applied for a restraining order against her husband. At a hearing, Sacha Emerson alleged that her husband made a threat over the telephone. He threatened to kill her "friend." The restraining order was granted. Later, her husband was indicted for "possession of a firearm while being under a restraining order." But, in a Texas federal district court, this indictment was dismissed by Judge Sam Cummings. In a memorandum brimming with colonial history, the Second Amendment reared its righteous head. Cummings argued that the federal actions to protect women against intimate partner violence didn't hold up against the struggles of our revolutionary fathers to found a nation with arms.
The government appealed to the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals, which upheld the indictment against the husband. Emerson's attorneys argued there were insufficient judicial findings that he was a "credible threat"; the 5th Circuit Court disagreed. Two of the three judges accepted the argument that while the Second Amendment gave an individual a right to own a gun, it did not give an individual under a restraining order the right to own a gun. This was especially true, the court found, since upon purchasing a Beretta semiautomatic pistol, the husband had signed a BATF Form 4473, stating that "so long as he was under a court order such as that of Sept. 14, 1998, federal law prohibited his continued possession of that weapon." The third judge on the court "chose not to join" in the lengthy individual rights argument because they were "dicta" and "at best an advisory treatise on this long-running debate" and really had nothing to do with the decision made by the court. He went on to say that if the Second Amendment was interpreted as an individual and not a collective right, in a way, who cares? There would still be legal grounds for "reasonable restriction" on gun ownership.
Was Sacha Emerson just another gun-grabbing wife? In reading the opinion of the 5th Circuit Court, I wondered, because most of the opinion was not about the restraining order at all. That question was settled in a concise statement by the judges. Supported by amicus curiae submitted by the NRA, the Second Amendment Foundation, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the Texas State Rifle Association, two of the three federal judges had used the opinion to expound for more than 50 pages about how the Second Amendment protected individual rights.
At meetings of the NRA, including their law seminar, I repeatedly heard these legal opinions, especially arguments focused on what our founding fathers said or didn't say about the right to bear arms. I guess the two federal judges were hoping that the Supreme Court would jump on their position and finally give the gun-rights activists what they had been claiming in their brand of conservative politics for 30 years. The final, sweet vindication by the highest court in the land seemed within reach. The prize was finally in sight. Who cared if some frightened wife in Texas was worried enough to get a restraining order? She was probably overreacting. She didn't need protection; his gun did.
In the end the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear any further appeals. Gun rights activists would have to wait. I wonder how Sacha Emerson reacted to this court drama.
[Joan Burbick will make a presentation of her book "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave. The event is sponsored by Elliott Bay Book and Center for Civic Life. This excerpt is published with permission of The New Press.]
I'll point out that her claim that she was unable to photograph or take corroborative footage of her anecdotes is extremely convenient for her.
She sounds like a whiny hippie to me.
Yes, well they are two very vicious persons.
"Warning, Batterers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again."?
Geez, this gal is talented; I can't even drag the TRUTH out into such a massive screed.
This is a rewrite. I am positive that I have read this before.
The problem of restraining orders is that they are issued without the sightest hint of proof. The court hands them out simply on the say so of the person asking for it. It's usually a tactic employed in the larger divorce strategy and usually by the woman.
I think in some jurisdictions, it's actually got worse than that, they're just issued prophylactically, so to speak, and on both partners.
considering the fact that Domestic violence restraining orders are just as easy to get as an indictment against a ham sandwich, I think people are very reasonable to be concerned.
The problems is the issue has become political. The feminist mantra AND the infighting of a girlfriend who is using the verbal abuse of domestic violence laws as a personal pit bull.
When the boyfriend declares the restraining order is the last straw it is amazing how many women are shocked to find out the law does not allowing them to "just drop the charges".
"No one at the law seminar lingered on why there was domestic violence in the United States"
This woman is a walking explanation for the existence of domestic violence.
Besides, why "in the United States?" Why should the US be different in this regard than any other human society?
Ok, I can buy that...
The fact that she spends two sentences presenting an interest in portraying the ambiance of decaying old western townery, and then spends 500 words decrying their supposed obsession for guns, and supposed phobia against women, and herself (the prying and I'm sure an attitudinal asshole to deal with), tells me that she went looking for the fight.
What fricking part of NO CAMERAS ALLOWED does she not get? She admits that she openly had a camera, but the organizers, through their thick-headedness just couldn't see, or believe that she didn't work for a newspaper, etc. Yet, where does this article appear? Sheez.
It's just unbelievable how fully anti-2nd ammendment activists just DON'T GET IT, and are truly detached from realization.
"This woman is a walking explanation for the existence of domestic violence."
How so?
Halfway through this lecture I needed a beer or three. Finding none, I couldn't bring myself to finish reading it.
She doesn't even touch on the fact that many, many women make up all kinds of crap because the courts are so skewed in their favor in domestic issues. Men have to pay through the nose, lose most rights to even see their children, and then on top of that, can't even continue on with their lives with any semblence of normalcy because of the false claims made on them. I know all cases aren't like this, but far too many of them are.
bump
"... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one MAKES them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. ......just pass the the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."- p.411, Ayn Rand, ATLAS SHRUGGED, Signet Books, NY, 1957 "...
I stopped reading at this point. The author, in her self-appointed righteousness, fails to see that she just made the argument that an armed society is a polite society.
This story stinks to high heaven. I *might* be able to understand why she wasn't allowed to take pictures, though. Sounds like she'd stand out at a gun show like Al Sharpton at a Klan rally. I imagine the powers that be (cops? maybe? wouldn't be unlikely at a gun show and would be attuned to such things) saw that she stuck out, thought that she was up to something, and addressed the situation accordingly.
And the net effect is that the restrainee ends up having his civil rights violated, AND his personal property confiscated without due process of law.
That's the real issue here.
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