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.
Some of us suggested lawsuits against HCI, and various municipalities, etc a couple years ago. I'm for it. Make those a-holes pay costs and think twice about using the courts in that manner.
I would say that a couple of the most prominent gun-control groups are certainly guilty of this. However, it's tricky -- because so often, what they do is selectively present true facts and then spin them so as to reach the desired conclusion. Functionally, they are lying, but literally? I'm not quite sure what option there is, litigation wise, to attack that kind of practice.
WHO
You gonna sue ??
While I generally agree with you there is no constitutional right to conspire to deprive Americans of their civil rights. This may provide the hook by which those people like Mayor dailey of Chicago can be brought to heel in the Federal Court system.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Yeah, like the possibility of the IRS tracking ammo sales and consumption. Clinton didn't arm those agents to the teeth so that they'd fare better in an audit.
As is true with so many itemized tax deductions, take advantage of those you prefer. If you're worried about the IRS being abusive per ammunition purchase then don't use that category. Perhaps the allowance is handled in a way that specifics of ammunition purchased aren't identified. I would rather have the recognition made that self-defense preparations are an appropriate expense tied to our exercise of 2nd amendment rights than no consideration of those costs (investments) made at all.
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