Liberty Notes
Kevin L. Jamison
It is a good day for Liberty.
We have one year and two months before Hillary Clinton begins her campaign for president.
The ATF is in the process of re-defining the “Stinger” pen gun from pistols to “any other weapon” a restricted category requiring federal registration. There does not appear to be a plan to track down the owners of these pistols as was done with owners of revolving shotguns ten years ago.
In late September, 2006 an armed man penetrated the Capital Building in Washington D.C. Despite the barriers, the alarms, the detectors, and the police, this man, described as a “nut” penetrated the congressional offices. Despite all the security precautions, it was unarmed civilian workers in the building who captured the man. So when you are guaranteed police protection, ask how good a warranty that is if they cannot protect Congress.
Venezuela joins North Korea in warning of an imminent American invasion. To conduct such an invasion the Pentagon would have to rent an army from Hollywood, our Regulars, Reserve and National Guard being occupied in the sand. For the last forty years Cuba has annually warned of an imminent American invasion. This would make sense if they would call it a national holiday so that the population could go to the beach to build sand castles, seemingly an adequate defense.
WMSA membership secretary Mark Pursell has sent me my membership renewal and a very nice letter thanking me for renewing my membership. This does not appear to be a trap; he sends these letters to everyone. We shall need every renewed member and new member that we can get. This column will appear in the newsletter after the elections, but it seems that anti-gun candidates will win in at least some congressional elections. This is not because of the gun issue, but because of misfortune and poor decisions by incumbents and their party. This will encourage the opposition, and we will be fighting for our lives in 2008. We have asked our people to “Vote Freedom First” one more time, despite other concerns or issues. Now we need to recruit enough fresh blood to carry on.
A woman in Erie, Pennsylvania attacked her boyfriend with her 4-week-old baby. She has been charged with aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and simple assault. Injuries to the boyfriend are unknown; the baby suffered a skull fracture and bleeding in the brain. I would like to say “only in a town called Erie”, but I fear that I would be wrong.
I keep running out of paper clips. This may seem to be a small problem, but it should not be a problem at all. I clip papers together and send them to my office manager; she clips papers together and sends them to me. It’s a closed system; we should not be losing paper clips. I blame the North Koreans. They steal my paper clips and make their missiles out of them. That explains a lot.
Jeff Cooper has died. Colonel Cooper was a warrior, a gentleman, and a philosopher. His death is a great loss to the shooting community. He introduced combat handgunning as a science. He was known for learned and blunt comments on firearms and self-defense. In January of 1975 he wrote, “One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that ‘violence begets violence.’ I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure—and in some cases I have—that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy.” And in November of 1993 he wrote, “Fight back! Whenever you are offered violence, fight back! The aggressor does not fear the law, so he must be taught to fear you. Whatever the risk, and at whatever the cost, fight back!” This is the lesson of the man, he never apologized for self-defense, he celebrated it. He will be missed.
It is pointed out to me that when President Bush came to Kansas City two of the eight persons invited to greet him were NRA-Election Volunteer Coordinators. This indicates our value to the Republican Party, and their regard for us.
A former client has married a man with children; she has no children but owns a gun. Her new husband’s ex-wife objects to a gun in the house with the children and threatens legal action. My client is concerned over this threat. I explained that legal action is easy, winning is hard. It would be even harder for the opposition if she took a safety course and had the gun locked in a safe.
After the school shooting in Joplin, Governor Blunt suggested that we look at allowing armed teachers. The politically correct reaction was that teachers are unsafe, incompetent, ineffective and worse. One teacher responded that if a student was rampaging through the school killing everyone in sight she could not bring herself to point a gun at someone she was supposed to protect. She did not explain why, among all her other students, the one she had to protect was the one doing the killing. It was claimed that under stress the teacher responding to a killer would miss, and thus kill a bystander. Actually, under stress, people tend to shoot high, making it less likely to hit a bystander. In the shooting of the unfortunate Mr. Dialo in New York, three detectives surrounded Mr. Dialo and fired at him more than 40 times at point blank range, they hit him 19 times, but did not hit any of the detectives. If we are to believe that teachers are so inherently bad shots that they will miss, what is the use of self-defense? In every one of these mass murders whenever the killers met with resistance, even ineffective resistance, they committed suicide or surrendered. At the high school in Pearl, Mississippi a vice-principal ran to his car for a handgun, confronted the shooter, who then surrendered. At the Appalachia School of Law, two students ran to their cars for handguns and confronted the killer, who then surrendered. At Columbine an officer, who had been given school duty because he failed his shooting test, fired a single ineffective shot at very long range, and the killers went into the library and committed suicide. At the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre a responding officer fired a single ineffective shot, and the killer went into the rest room and committed suicide. Of course, while waiting for this response, they continued to kill. When someone says that arming teachers is a ludicrous response to school shootings, remind them that the only time shooters have been stopped is when someone arrived with a gun, and until that point they continued to kill.
A survivor of the Columbine attack suggests that anger management courses be made available as an alternative to armed teachers. The two are not mutually exclusive. I am reminded of a Xerox employee in Hawaii who took an anger management class, and went on to kill a number of his fellow employees.
A newspaper columnist says that the solution to school killings is not armed teachers but disarmed students. Laws already disarm students, and the recent killers have broken into safes to obtain guns. If guns were to go away, which I take it is her point, we must remember that these sociopaths have shown an ability to obtain bomb recipes from the internet. In the late 50’s a student in Detroit wanted a day off from school, he set fire to the building, killing 93 students and two nuns.
Mike Hendricks, a Kansas City Star columnist, called Larry Pratt a “wingnut”. Mr. Pratt of Gun Owners of America exceeded mere “nut” status by warning that mental commitments are abused to prevent categories of people from owning guns. The Veterans Administration has been notorious for violating the privacy of veterans who have sought treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by putting them in the NICS computers, to be denied gun ownership. The number of veterans coming back from Iraq with PTSD indicates that many of our best will be arbitrarily denied. The Veteran’s Administration is not the only culprit. Home invaders victimized a man in Maryland. He called the police who located the home invaders. The criminals were not arrested. The victim owned guns and an anti-gun detective thought that made him crazy. The victim was sent for psychiatric evaluation, which he passed after five days imprisoned in the psychiatric ward. When he returned he found that the police had stolen his guns, and refused to return them. He filed suit to recover the guns. He won, but the police destroyed the guns as soon as he filed the suit. He was awarded the value of the guns, which was paid by the local government, not the guilty parties, so this conduct will continue. The NRA has assisted in his legal representation.
A man in Wisconsin was accused of threatening a neighbor with a gun. At trial the complaining witness admitted that the incident never happened and she lied because she hates gun owners. The court refused to hold her in contempt, and the prosecutor refused to charge her with filing a false police report. A government employee was fired because he was a member of the NRA, and his boss hates gun owners. The NRA stepped in and he got his job back, the gun-hating boss suffered no disability. A police officer in Arizona bought a handgun as a gift for his girlfriend. His girlfriend had no legal disability against owning guns. One of the questions on the 4473 is “Are you the real buyer of this gun?”; the officer wrote “yes”. Sarah Brady bought a gun for a relative and answered the same question the same way. Federal authorities accused the police officer of lying on the 4473 and went out of their way to prosecute. He lost his job, but eventually prevailed with the support of the NRA’s Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund. I would like to say that the officer is the only police officer prosecuted on such nebulous grounds, but I would be wrong. Summaries of such frivolous, abusive, insane and just plain evil prosecutions can be found at www.nradefensefund.org.
The media reports that a local man shot and killed his girlfriend, he says by accident. The lady’s distraught mother complains that he thought more of his guns than her daughter’s safety. Evidence of this appears to be that he subscribed to gun magazines. Many of us could be condemned on the same grounds. The man is under arrest.
A Blue Springs woman was charged with murder, two counts of child endangerment and unlawful transfer of a weapon for allegedly leaving a teenage boy alone with an “assault rifle”. A teenager shot a 14-year old boy with a rifle, and this led to the menu of charges. I do not follow the sequence of events leading to such charges, but the defendant will have months and tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills to come to her own understanding.
The Wyoming Supreme Court has ruled that a felon cannot possess a muzzle-loading firearm. The guest of honor had made diligent inquiries to determine if he could own a muzzle-loading rifle for deer hunting. Federal law allows him to do so, but the Wyoming State Supreme Court ruled that state law prohibiting ownership of “firearms” means all firearms and sent the man off to prison. The opinion does not record if the justices shouted “surprise” when they did so. Missouri law allows felons to possess muzzle-loading firearms. However, persons convicted of “dangerous felonies” are not allowed to possess handguns for five years after release from the Department of Corrections. This could be interpreted to include muzzle-loading handguns.
The leftist group ACORN has been running voter registration drives. A significant number of registrations filed by this group were found to be fraudulent. The Missouri Supreme Court has struck down the voter ID law, so the Kansas City and St. Louis machines will have the benefit of the cemetery precincts again this year. This makes our turnout all the more important.
Not all is darkness on the horizon, but all personnel are advised to keep a candle handy. It is said that it is better to light one little candle than to curse the darkness; of course some of us will do both.
We shall overcome.