Posted on 09/27/2003 6:45:56 PM PDT by jdege
PAM EASTON
HOUSTON - Gun rights advocates said Saturday during a national conference that they must recruit a younger following and exercise their right to bear arms as much as possible to keep their cause alive.
"If we don't get new shooters, if we don't get new blood ... we are going to wither and die," said Joe Waldron, executive director of the Citizens' Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which co-sponsored the Gun Rights Policy Conference along with the Second Amendment Foundation.
Waldron said it is important for aging gun rights advocates to pass along the history of the Second Amendment to younger generations.
Dave Smith, president of Houston-based Texans for Gun Safety, said it didn't surprise him that people on the other side of the issue are expanding their marketing strategies.
"We are very concerned about the effort to market guns to younger people and to ladies," he said. "The big problem is handguns, and that is what they are promoting. When they are talking about rights, what they are really talking about is they want to sell lots of guns to lots of people."
Damaso Torres, 27, was among the younger of the 500 conference attendees who paid nothing for admission, literature or food. He said he began a student group called Students for the Second Amendment at St. Mary's University in San Antonio in 1999. He said the group has expanded to nine Texas campuses and has worked to establish itself in 17 other states.
Torres said gun rights are important to college students.
"The growth was almost thrust upon us," he said. "We started in Texas, so it wasn't as difficult and the obstacles weren't as great."
Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, among the main sponsors of Texas' concealed handgun license legislation passed in 1995, told the convention that he doesn't believe a person should need a license to carry a gun. But he said the law is "moving the ball in the right direction."
"We have to be forever vigilant," he said, adding that no rights can be taken for granted and that gun owners should make themselves more visible.
"Whenever I travel by air, I always carry my gun," Patterson said, explaining he gets strange looks when he checks his gun at the ticket counter, in a locked container.
Patterson urged what he called his fellow "gun bubbas" to join him in traveling with guns so people will realize there's nothing wrong with it.
"Demonstrate that firearms ownership is normal," he said, standing under a banner that read, "Gun Rights Freedom."
"Oh my god," Smith, of Texans for Gun Safety, said of that suggestion. "The more people that see guns in the hands of private individuals, the more afraid of guns they become. Our whole thrust of airline safety is to keep the guns away."
Robert Glock, whose family developed Glock handguns, told the conference that America is in a unique position because of the Second Amendment. But he cautioned that the amendment is under constant fire.
"If the (United Nations) gets their way, they will put us out of business and take away your Second Amendment rights forever," he said. "No one in Europe has a Second Amendment right."
Glock said that in many parts of Europe gun ownership is "a privilege the government may bestow upon you" if you are rich and powerful enough "to buy your way into that privilege."
The result of policies in Europe is less violence, Smith said.
"The Second Amendment doesn't give individuals the unabridged right to possess firearms wherever they want to," he said. "The courts have consistently held that society can reasonably place restrictions on firearms and where they are used."
Alan Korwin, author of a book about gun cases which have gone before the Supreme Court, had a different interpretation of the high court's rulings.
"People have told you for a long time you don't have gun rights," he said. "If you didn't have gun rights, then how come there are gun stores?
"You have rights, that's the bottom line."
You can see that this concept scares him. That is one reason that I consistantly take a gun with me when I travel. I call it the innoculation principle. The more people see others with guns, the more normal it seems to them. I see it happen all the time in Arizona, where we have open carry.
Osama couldn't agree more.
More lies from the hoplophobes. Switzerland has less violence than England. Switzerland has the closet thing to a 2nd Amdment in Europe. With the internet, it is harder for the socialist liars to get away with their propaganda.
Is this accurate? I know of only one in San Francisco, down from about 6 or 7 fifteen years ago.
The Dallas paper is the "Morning News".
The Startlegram is a Ft.Worth paper.
Here in Lost Angeles, they are driving gun stores and shooting ranges out of business. They essentially outlawed gun shows. You're supposed to give a thumb-print when you buy ammunition...except that ammo is still legal to buy over the internet, by phone, mail, e-mail, telegram, fax, smoke signal, and carrier pigeon.
When the Assembly tried (they'll keep trying) to place a 5-cent-a-round tax on ammunition (supposedly to support "trauma centers") sold in CA, just by pure coincidence a Dem Congressman in D.C. tried to make mail-order purchases of ammunition illegal (by requiring that the purchaser 'present himself in person' to complete the purchase). Funny coincidence, eh?
--Boris
Turner's Outdoorsman is one. Tampa and Vanowen, in the Valley. There's another over in Sylmar.
You are probably recalling that they drove B&B out of business...but a few remain alive--for the moment.
--Boris
So that 4 thugs with boxcutters or sharp pieces of plastic can take over airliner and crash them into buildings holding large numbers of people. One gun on each of those flights could have ended the problem before it had barely begun.
I saw lots of guns today, in the hands of lots of private citizens. Didn't scare me in the least. No one else in the area, including one young mother with her daughter, seemed the least bit frightened either. Maybe something the so called water in Houston? More likely a problem with an overly strong bong.
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