vin/010727-short.html
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA EDITORS: A LONGER VERSION, AT 1,500 WORDS, ALSO MOVES FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JULY 27, 2001 THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz Disloyal to the United States?
New Attorney General (and former U.S. Sen.) John Ashcroft has said he will honor President Bush's desire to extend the federal ban on further manufacture or import of certain semi-automatic rifles with pistol grips, bayonet lugs, and 20-round magazines.
Sen. Ashcroft testified at his Senate confirmation hearing, "I don't believe the Second Amendment to be one that forbids any regulation of guns."
This is a radical defender of the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights? Paging Wimp Central.
Sen. Ashcroft does not promise the long-overdue shutdown of the firearms division of the BATF. He does not even call for the average American to again be allowed to purchase a newly-imported machine gun through the mails, as any of our law-abiding grandparents could before 1934.
Rather, the attorney general embraces what is now described in the legal journals as the standard position on the Second Amendment (endorsed by the liberal Lawrence Tribe of Harvard, among others), that while some "pragmatic" regulation may be allowable, the Second Amendment means what it plainly says: that individual, private citizens of these United States have a "right to keep and bear arms," which none may "infringe."
And how has the left -- which continually insists it has no desire to actually ban firearms in private hands -- responded to Mr. Ashcroft's pitifully moderate stance?
There now arises from among their midst a cacophony of outraged shrieks and bellows the like of which has not been heard since an equally timid Republican insurgency asserted in 1994 that perhaps, just maybe, an owner whose property had been reduced to worthlessness by environmental regulations might be entitled to some compensation under the Fifth Amendment's "takings" clause.
The prediction of the Reactionary Left at the time -- that this would lead to the paving-over of paradise -- does not seem to have come to fruition. (In fact, the federal government now rules millions more acres off limits to the private citizen than ever before.)
This time from the socialist fringe, the leaders of the victim disarmament movement shriek that if Mr. Ashcroft succeeds in getting the FBI to destroy records of their gun-buyer "instant background checks" as soon as they're completed -- precisely as the gun grabbers assured us they would, back when they were promoting their precious "Brady Bill" -- why, it will "eviscerate the ability of law enforcement officials to prevent fraud and illegal gun sales by unscrupulous dealers to straw purchasers."
Why? Because "instant checks" are worthless? How many illegal sales are permitted by the "instant check" but then tracked down, 89 days later? And how do we know these records are really being destroyed after 90 days, anyway? Has any FBI agent ever been led away in handcuffs and locked up in Leavenworth for retaining such a record for, say, 150 days? Is such enforcement of a (start ital)limit(end ital) on government authority even conceivable, today?
By writing a letter to the National Rifle Association, rejecting the argument that the Second protects only a " 'collective' right of the states to maintain militias," Mr. Ashcroft has shown "disloyalty to his client, the United States, and an impermissible conflict of interest," charge U.S. Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Charles E. Schumer, in an article published in the July 21 Boston Globe.
Disloyalty to the United States? By reading out the plain English of the Bill of Rights? Are Sens. Kennedy and Schumer now taking a page from the late Sen. Joe McCarthy?
"In a series of stealth measures and after private communication with the gun lobby, Attorney General John Ashcroft is quietly taking steps to erode the very gun laws he has sworn under oath to defend," thunder the rape enablers Kennedy and Schumer, conveniently provided by the U.S. government with all the armed bodyguards they desire, even as they would incrementally disarm the rest of us.
In his May 17 letter to the NRA, the ruffled senators squawk, "Ashcroft also articulated a new standard for evaluating gun laws, proposing to require that any restriction on gun ownership be supported by a compelling state interest -- a test that very few laws can survive."
What an interesting acknowledgement -- that few of the infringements on the Bill of Rights promoted by Sens. Schumer and Kennedy could withstand this simple test, demanding that some "compelling state interest" be shown for further erosion of our rights.
In fact, every existing "gun control" laws (start ital)is(end ital) unwise, unconstitutional and counterproductive. Counties which allow law-abiding private citizens to go armed have seen their rates of violent crime drop markedly, as documented by Dr. John Lott of Yale in his fine, peer-reviewed book "More Guns, Less Crime."
Sens. Kennedy and Schumer are on the losing end of this debate over individual liberties. They have nothing left in their arsenal but foot-stomping, hog-bellowing, feigned outrage and manufactured fear. And their overreaction to Mr. Ashcroft's extremely modest pronouncements shows that they know it.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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