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.
$30,000 to make up 400 pages of lies? Nice work if you can get it!
However, most lies are constitutionally protected speech, and the way to defeat them is to refute them, not litigate them.
Also, I don't know where you live, but if you live in a state w/o a Conceal Carry, contact me and I will put you in touch with people who are looking to get CCW in whichever state you are in. I am working Illinois very diligently, having come from a state with (theoretically) worse gun control laws -- New York -- that let me have my CCW.
Hang on a tick: Isn't this the a-hole who is being roundly censured by his peers as an academic fraud and outright liar???
And they are giving him MORE money???
WTF!!!
What is this "former boss" business? What happened between you and David?
We are perfectly capable of doing such without a lawsuit. I don't think it's a good idea to try and save the Second Amendment by trampling on the First...
It's okay. They are comfortable with it. Clinton was comfortable with Mary Matlin's husband and pet snake. Adolf was comfortable with Goebbels.
How could a person, with enough brain power to keep their heart beating, possibly feel "comfortable with the quality" of Bellesiles's previous work? The man's a proven Agenda Liar. There's no two ways about it.
OH! It's because Grossman is in on the Anti-Gun Agenda.....how stupid of me not to realize that.
This situation is exactly the same as saying "We know Bellesiles raped and murdered a child but, we are comfortable with him being our babysitter."
Who would sue whom? And under what theory?
They understood that one can destroy individuals and orginizations by bankrupting them via legal means--whether or not you prevail in court.
I have also said I'd join a class-action lawsuit against the usual suspects in a heartbeat.
Are there no pro-Second-Amendment lawyers who will take the case pro bono?
--Boris
It's called "conspiracy to deny civil rights under color of authority."
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