Shooting Blanks

Shooting Blanks Shooting Blanks Facts Don’t Matter to the Gun Ban Crowd Alan Gottlieb and Dave Workman Merril Press Bellevue, Washington Shooting Blanks © 2011 Alan M. Gottlieb & Dave Workman Cover Design by Andrew M. Gottlieb All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission from the publisher. Shooting Blanks is published by Merril Press, P.O. Box 1682, Bellevue, WA 98009. www.merrilpress.com Phone: 425-454-7009 Distributed to the book trade by Midpoint Trade Books, 27 W. 20th Street, New York, N.Y. 10011 www.midpointtradebooks.com Phone: 212-727-0190 FIRST EDITION LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA GOTTLIEB, ALAN M. SHOOTING BLANKS : FACTS DON’T MATTER TO THE GUN BAN CROWD / ALAN GOTTLIEB AND DAVE WORKMAN. P. CM. ISBN 978-0-936783-63-5 1. GUN CONTROL--UNITED STATES. 2. FIREARMS--UNITED STATES. 3. FIREARMS--LAW AND LEGISLATION--UNITED STATES. I. WORKMAN, DAVE. II. TITLE. HV7436.G6759 2011 363.330973--DC23 2011033370 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Dedicated to all those anti-gun rights activists and organizations that consistently shoot off their mouths before reloading their brains. C O N T E N T S Foreword Facts Don’t Matter to the Gun Ban Crowd 1 Chapter 1 There Will Be Blood on the Streets 9 Chapter 2 Banning Guns Makes Society Safer 22 Chapter 3 Only Police Should Have Guns 35 Chapter 4 Guns Do Not Belong on Campus 52 Chapter 5 Lax Gun Laws Fuel Mexican Drug War 66 Chapter 6 Gun Safety Laws Save Children 81 Chapter 7 Access to Guns Is Far Too Easy 96 Chapter 8 You Don’t Hunt Ducks with an Assault Weapon 112 Chapter 9 The Second Amendment Is Outdated 127 Chapter 10 Gun Permits Should Be Public Record 141 Chapter 11 Reporting and Registering Sales Keeps Gun Dealers Honest 150 Chapter 12 We Should Limit the Number of Guns People Can Buy 164 Chapter 13 America Should Pattern Its Gun Laws after Europe 174 Epilogue Deliberately Shooting Blanks 183 Foreword Facts Don’t Matter to the Gun Ban Crowd Gun control is an emotional issue, and the politics of gun control – the more accurate term would be gun prohibition – are steeped in emotionalism; often highly inflammatory rhetoric that demonizes firearms and the people who legally own them. From deliberately misinterpreting and subsequently misrepresenting court rulings, to misquoting the Second Amendment and then fabricating arguments and making grossly exaggerated predictions, the anti-gun-rights lobby has turned the process of firearms demonization into an art form. Attacks on gun rights come in many forms and they are not always overt. Often times they are purposefully subtle. Many veteran gun rights activists are familiar with the way Dennis Henigan, an attorney and vice president of the anti-gun Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, carefully misquoted the Second Amendment during an interview that has become a popular staple on YouTube. This was prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in District of Columbia v. Dick Anthony Heller in June 2008, in which the high court ruled in a 5-4 decision with Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the majority that the Second Amendment protected and 1 2 | Shooting Blanks affirmed an individual civil right to keep and bear arms that extends well beyond service in a militia. In discussing the Second Amendment, Henigan cleverly, and many believe deliberately, left out three key words. He quoted the Amendment as: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” What’s missing? The actual language of the Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” At the time, and even in the wake of the court’s Heller ruling, gun prohibition advocates maintained the court had “re-written history” and refuted the long-maintained belief of gun banners that the right to keep and bear arms was something of a communal right. That is, they believed in what is typically referred to as “the collectivist view” that the Second Amendment only protected a state’s right to organize and arm a militia. This belief was largely founded on a misinterpretation – which many believe ultimately became a deliberate misrepresentation – of the high court’s 1939 ruling in U.S. v. Miller, which went against a couple of bootleggers who had been convicted of, among other things, having a sawed-off shotgun. In his losing opinion on Heller, former Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, perhaps the court’s most liberal justice, insisted that the Miller case established that the Second Amendment only protected a collective right, not an individual one. The argument had been made so often over the years that it became accepted as fact. A careful reading of Justice Scalia’s majority opinion, however, reveals that this argument is, and always has been, nonsense. Here is what Justice Scalia wrote: JUSTICE STEVENS places overwhelming reliance upon this Court’s decision in United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174 (1939). “[H]undreds of judges,” we are told, “have relied on the view of Foreword | 3 the amendment we endorsed there,” post, at 2, and “[e]ven if the textual and historical arguments on both side of the issue were evenly balanced, respect for the well-settled views of all of our predecessors on this Court, and for the rule of law itself . would prevent most jurists from endorsing such a dramatic upheaval in the law,” post, at 4. And what is, according to JUSTICE STEVENS, the holding of Miller that demands such obeisance? That the Second Amendment “protects the right to keep and bear arms for certain military purposes, but that it does not curtail the legislature’s power to regulate the nonmilitary use and ownership of weapons.” Nothing so clearly demonstrates the weakness of JUSTICE STEVENS’ case. Miller did not hold that and cannot possibly be read to have held that. The judgment in the case upheld against a Second Amendment challenge two men’s federal convictions for transporting an unregistered short-barreled shotgun in interstate commerce, in violation of the National Firearms Act, 48 Stat. 1236. It is entirely clear that the Court’s basis for saying that the Second Amendment did not apply was not that the defendants were “bear[ing] arms” not “for . military purposes” but for “nonmilitary use,” post, at 2. Rather, it was that the type of weapon at issue was not eligible for Second Amendment protection: “In the absence of any evidence tending to show that the possession or use of a [shortbarreled shotgun] at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.” 307 U. S., at 178 (emphasis added). “Certainly,” the Court continued, “it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the 4 | Shooting Blanks common defense.” Ibid. Beyond that, the opinion provided no explanation of the content of the right. This holding is not only consistent with, but positively suggests, that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms (though only arms that “have some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia”). Had the Court believed that the Second Amendment protects only those serving in the militia, it would have been odd to examine the character of the weapon rather than simply note that the two crooks were not militiamen. JUSTICE STEVENS can say again and again that Miller did “not turn on the difference between muskets and sawed-off shotguns, it turned, rather, on the basic difference between the military and nonmilitary use and possession of guns,” post, at 42–43, but the words of the opinion prove otherwise. The most JUSTICE STEVENS can plausibly claim for Miller is that it declined to decide the nature of the Second Amendment right, despite the Solicitor General’s argument (made in the alternative) that the right was collective, see Brief for United States, O. T. 1938, No. 696, pp. 4–5. Miller stands only for the proposition that the Second Amendment right, whatever its nature, extends only to certain types of weapons. It is particularly wrongheaded to read Miller for more than what it said, because the case did not even purport to be a thorough examination of the Second Amendment. JUSTICE STEVENS claims, post, at 42, that the opinion reached its conclusion “[a]fter reviewing many of the same sources that are discussed at greater length by the Court today.” Despite Justice Scalia’s exhaustively researched opinion, which explored the history of the Second Foreword | 5 Amendment, gun prohibitionists continued to argue that the Heller ruling was wrong, until they hit on another strategy. They determined that the ruling did allow for “reasonable regulation” of firearms, and then set about defining what, in their opinion, is “reasonable.” A careful look at some of the laws defended by the gun prohibition lobby clearly demonstrates that even local gun bans are “reasonable” in their opinion. The anti-gun community furiously defended the Chicago handgun ban that was essentially nullified by the Supreme Court majority in McDonald v.

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