Posted on 05/03/2002 10:11:59 AM PDT by Richard Poe
A RESTLESS SPIRIT is taking hold of American gun owners. When I write about gun issues nowadays, many readers respond impatiently, "We already know our gun rights are threatened. Tell us what we can do about it!"
I am reminded of something my former boss David Horowitz wrote. In one of the blacker moments of the 2000 election crisis, one of our Web sites received a query from a reader, asking how Republicans could stop Al Gore from stealing the presidency.
Horowitz, a shrewd political strategist whose book The Art of Political War became a manual for the Bush campaign, responded with a quote from Al Capone: "If he comes at you with a fist, you come at him with a bat. If he comes at you with a bat, you come at him with a knife. If he comes at you with a knife, you come at him with a gun."
This principle can also be applied to the struggle over gun rights.
Lawsuits are a favorite weapon of the gun-ban movement. Litigation can drive manufacturers and gun dealers out of business. It can scare police into cutting back on handgun permits, for fear of issuing a permit to the wrong person. It can discourage gun owners from shooting criminals, lest the criminal sue them for millions.
Anyone who deals with guns nowadays lives in fear of lawsuits. Yet, the anti-gun activists – who threaten millions of lives by obstructing people’s right to defend themselves – go about their business without a care in the world.
That needs to change. The gun-ban movement is uniquely vulnerable to class-action lawsuits. Gun-banners violate Americans’ constitutional liberties, imperil their lives and justify their actions with bogus statistics, junk science and outright lies.
One target might be the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which is reportedly financing crude, anti-gun propaganda with taxpayer funds.
Emory University colonial history professor Michael A. Bellesiles has been widely accused of academic fraud. His September 2000 book Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture claims that few Americans owned guns before the Civil War. America’s age-old love affair with firearms is only a myth, he says, invented for political purposes by a modern-day, right-wing "gun cult."
The Establishment rolled out the red carpet for Bellesiles, with a front-page puff piece in The New York Times Book Review and a coveted Bancroft Prize in History from Columbia University.
But there were problems. Bellesiles had based his claims largely on probate records, which list items bequeathed to a dead person’s heirs.
As columnist Vyn Suprynowicz pointed out, even modern gun owners frequently pass on their firearms to friends and family without written wills.
Even worse, the very existence of some of the records Bellesiles claims to have studied now seems doubtful. For instance, he supposedly examined probate records at a National Archives Center in East Point, Georgia. But when Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren investigated, the center denied having any such archives.
As questions began snowballing, Bellesiles’ excuses grew flimsier. "Bellesiles regularly began to change his story about how and where he did his research work, " observes historian Ronald Radosh. "… His data, he says, were destroyed in an office flood; he examined so many records that he simply does not remember where he used them, and has therefore come up with different stories about archives that cannot be found."
Bellesiles’ past supporters began ducking for cover. Historian Don Hickey of Wayne State College in Nebraska pronounced Arming America "a case of genuine, bona fide academic fraud."
Such charges might have destroyed other scholars. But Bellesiles had an advantage. He served the "gun-lie industry" – the network of media, activist, government and academic institutions dedicated to debunking and discrediting gun rights in America. His benefactors would not leave him out in the cold.
In fact, the Newberry Library of Chicago has granted Bellesiles $30,000 to write a new book on guns – a 400-year study of firearms regulation in America.
"Our Review Committee… felt comfortable with the quality of his existing work," explained Jim Grossman, the library’s Vice President for Research and Education.
Most Americans who have studied the matter do not share Grossman’s comfort with the fabrications of Michael Bellesiles. Nevertheless, our tax money continues to fund them.
Conservatives have long nurtured a visceral disdain for the legal profession. But they need to get over it. Litigation is a tool, just like a gun. In the right hands, a well-targeted lawsuit can do a great deal of good.
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Richard Poe is a New-York-Times-bestselling author and cyberjournalist. His latest book is The Seven Myths of Gun Control.
Surprisingly, I found your book at the 86th St. Barnes and Hovel on the Upper East Side. I was shocked they even stocked it since it wasn't the standard liberal schlock. (Even though they had just one copy and I got it.) The true story about the massacre of the naked kids in the snow (Chicago area, I think) gave me nightmares, as well as the one about the kids in California who couldn't protect themselves against their psycho neighbor because of inane and meddling storage laws. I applied for a gun permit in December (I live in anti-gun NJ) and will feel better once I finally get it and have it readily accessible. Thanks so much for your incredible work on this book, and your continued efforts.
What about "no-questions-asked" so-called "gun buybacks"? I understand no paperwork is prepared and yet a handgun or rifle is transferred from one owner to another. Does it matter that the transfer is to a city or police dept.? Do police depts have to complete paperwork on weapons purchased through distributors?
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that anyone and everyone involved in no-questions-asked "gun buybacks" is committing a federal crime (a felony?). What would it take to "scare" police into thinking twice about this practice?
--Boris
Very good! there's a whole set of costs related to self-defense that could be added to the list of tax deductions. Range-related costs, ammunition and components, hearing and eye protection, targets, etc. This has real possibilities.
I like the idea of taking the offensive with counter-suits and agressive reaction suits. In the past we have assumed that common sense would prevail only to learn that the liberal media had contaminated the jury pool, liberal judges had permiated the judiciary, and welfare-accustomed jurors willing gave away billions of dollars to underserving claimants, with a large portion of it going to the lawyers and then the politicians. Common sense is a rarity, making an agressive counter offensive a desirable move.
As far as Bellesiles is concerned, common sense would again disprove his premise on its face. When you consider that this country before the Civil War, and even after it, was basically frontier peopled by pioneers who fed themselves from the bounty of wildlife as well as the crops they grew, who faced hostile Indians unfriendly to the encrouchment into their world, where the population was widespread and lawmen were few, it is rediculous to propose that few of them had guns. Does he think they outran the deer, wrestled the bears, choked the buffalo, threw sticks at the wolves, or any other outrageous-to-assume methods? Is he not aware that a lively trade of selling guns to the Indians existed? In the Civil War does he think all firearms were government issued? It was not necessary, especially in the South, because almost everyone had their own firearms.
His argument is bogus but no more so than the reasons for banning asbestos, smoking, DDT, CFCs, the internal combustion engine, etc. All are part of a plan to destroy America and all demcoracies (I know, we aren't), with America and Israel in the crosshairs at the moment. Fight them hard and get in their faces. They are liars! Sue their asses off.
They should, but they'll NEVER get called on it unless a 2nd Amendment attorney takes it on.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that anyone and everyone involved in no-questions-asked "gun buybacks" is committing a federal crime (a felony?). What would it take to "scare" police into thinking twice about this practice?
Find a federal prosecutor with the huevos needed to take this one on.
Thnk about this: "no questions" gun buys by the police will result in cagey murderers using the cops to dispose of the evidence for them. And the murderer gets some in-pocket cash, too!
Stay Safe !
The only problem with that is that it would end up as a de facto registration of all of these people as gun owners.
I do agree with your sentiment - to go on the offensive. The best thing that we can do is to grow our numbers. Take a non-shooter to the range, and start off with something light like a .22, so that the recoil doesn't put them off. Better yet, take a non-shooting woman to the range. The fears that the antis play off of happen to appeal most to women, who are generally more passive and less accepting of guns. Best option: take an anti-gun female to the range. They may find that they like it or, even if not, that not all gun owners are cavemen or red-neck militia members.
So much for the nice and proper way to win this fight. Another way to go on the offensive is to target politicians who have, or who pledge to, screw us. This needs to be done at the national or, at least, state level. The politican in question must be utterly destroyed - personally and politically - as a warning to others. This does not mean violence of any type, nor even any illegal activities - it just means a willingness to dig up the dirt on these scum and the intestinal fortitude to use it, repeatedly, until the pol loses the election and has his/her reputation throroughly discredited. This is no game. Many decent people who've done nothing to harm another person have gone to prison for violating unconstitutional laws, and those labeled as felons have lost jobs and lost the ability to obtain many other jobs (try to get a government job, or one requiring a security clearance, or any professional license when you have a felony on your record). We need to fight as dirty, or more so, than the other side has and does. If we don't, we will continue to lose our rights.
The targets of lawsuits should be the states that have clear Second Amendments in their constitutions. Anti-gunners and their organizations that commit assault or destruction of private property during demonstrations. Anti-gun organizations that use tax dollars. Cities that violate state CCW laws. Washington D.C. for violating the Second Amendment with their gun ban. If the KKK can be sued for being a hate group, so can anti-gun groups. Business should be sued if CCW's aren't allowed and a person is a victim of a crime while they are a customer.
Really? I wonder what kinds of gun regulations there were in 1602 in "America"?
Maybe I read this wrong. I bet they are paying him $30,000 to study gun regulations for the next 400 years.
$30,000 to make up 400 pages of lies? Nice work if you can get it!
I had no idea that America had been around for 400 years.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
The ACLU has already provided us with the model for a lawsuit. There was a civil lawsuit against the KKK members who had created an 'atmosphere resulting' in the deaths of individuals by racists.
The murderers were not even members of the KKK if memory serves, but were familiar with their racist literature.
Clearly a civl liability case could be made against those promoting gun control in a given state by those who have sufferred from a robbery, rape, or the murder of a loved one. After all there is clear statistical evidence that a given number of robberies, rape, or murders would not occur if gun control were not existent in those states.
A class action civil lawsuit for all those who had been robbed, raped, or had a loved one murdered should be made. Those who work to keep the populace unarmed should bear direct responsibility for their disgusting actions that impact the well being of their fellow citizens in such a negative manner.
Sue them. Sue them into bankruptcy. No organization should be able to effectively promote crimes of aggression against the citizenry of this country and get away scott free.
RileyD, nwJ
The SECOND AMENDMENT SISTERS is without question the most amazing and active organization in the womans' gun-rights movement. May I take a moment to congratulate all of you -- and THANK YOU ALL!!!!
(Will one of you marry me?)
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