The Historical National Gun Control Thread

The Post's View
No, Hillary Clinton does not want to ‘abolish’ the Second Amendment

By Editorial Board August 10
DONALD TRUMP’S latest on-stage outrage was really two. The one that got the attention this week was his apparent suggestion that “Second Amendment people” rise in an armed insurrection against the federal government if Hillary Clinton wins the election. The second was his premise for the claim: that “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment.”

The addition of “essentially” does not render this absurd statement any less absurd. Ms. Clinton plays up her opposition to the National Rifle Association, but her positions are, if anything, too modest.

What Mr. Trump seems to have meant — always a risky way to begin a sentence — is that Ms. Clinton would appoint judges who might scale back the overly broad protections for gun ownership that the Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment to provide. Doing so would not be anything like abolishing an amendment, which no court can do. It would reflect a legitimate legal debate, anchored in the text, on the Second Amendment’s confounding words.

In any case, Ms. Clinton does not appear to be interested in pressing a radical re-interpretation of the Second Amendment. “Gun ownership is part of the fabric of many law-abiding communities,” her fact sheet on gun policy declares. She has endorsed a balance between upholding Americans’ constitutionally protected access to firearms and enacting rudimentary safety measures. What kinds of safety measures? The sorts that, polling indicates, most Americans support.

These center on improving and enhancing background checks. Ms. Clinton would close loopholes that allow many guns to be sold — at shows and over the Internet — unchecked. She would use this more comprehensive background check system to deny weapons to domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill, a measure that research indicates could save lives. She would end the practice of allowing gun sales to go through if federal officials do not rapidly complete a background check. And she would ban assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. If these policies sound familiar, that is because they echo and elaborate upon the Brady Bill and other legislation Ms. Clinton’s husband signed during his presidency, during which gun ownership in the United States continued to flourish. Indeed, another key piece of Ms. Clinton’s plan is simply to enforce existing laws more rigorously.

We would argue that the next president should aim to move well beyond this familiar policy template. Decent universal background checks would help, but requiring all gun owners to be properly licensed would help more. As so-called smart-gun technology improves, it may be technically and legally feasible to require fingerprint readers and other safety devices on guns sold in the United States.

The country should be looking for measures that reduce gun deaths without significantly curbing legitimate gun use. That goal does not seem to interest the NRA — or the lobby’s latest mouthpiece, Mr. Trump.

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R56 Ed said:

It's way past time to hold prosecutors and judges liable for their refusal to take (and keep) violent criminals off the streets. These folks are the real cause of violent crime that could be prevented. Perhaps if Freddie Gray had been in jail serving time for any of his prior convictions he'd still be alive today. Are there any groups that monitor the sentences that are handed out by individual judges?

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The Literary Digest
June 16, 1934
Page 19

Club-Women Mapping War on Gangsters

Federation at Odds With Rifle Association After Ban on Pistols Is Deleted From Firearm Sale Regulation Bill

In their war on crime, the club-women of America are out to subjugate organized riflemen in order to get at the gangsters. The riflemen and others want pistols and revolvers readily purchasable for home defense against the gangsters. The clubwomen say that the bill they advocate for the regulation of firearms will not interfere with defense of hearth and home, in which they are as much interested as the men.

In a recent meeting at Hot Springs. Arkansas, the General Federation of Women's Clubs heard the Assistant Attorney-General of the United States. Joseph B. Keenan, say that the National Rifle Association had proved more powerful than the Department of Justice. It seems that the association had pistols and revolvers deleted from a Federal bill to regulate the sale of firearms, before the Ways and Means Committee of the House. Mr. Keenan said that the measure, as written originally, would have done much to check crime. He wanted to know who was running the Government.

Mrs. William Dick Sporborg of Port Chester, New York, chairman of the clubwomen's resolutions committee, jumped to her feet to say that if 1,000,000 members of the Rifle Association were strong enough to get the smaller firearms taken from the bill, “two million American club-women are strong enough to lick them to a frazzle and make them put back into that measure the pistols and revolvers they deleted from it.” Thereupon she offered a resolution, which was adopted and ordered telegraphed to members of the Ways and Means Committee and other Congressional leaders. The resolution expressed the “outrage” felt by the women at the alteration of the bill, and said: “We hold that the security and safety of the homes and families of all the people of this country and the protection of life and property for all the 120,000,000 people of the land transcend the selfish interests of any organized small minority. We hold you accountable for your responsibility to the people of your State and of your country, and demand that the bill to regulate the sale and possession of firearms include pistols and revolvers, and that it be speedily enacted into law.”

Field & Stream, a magazine for sportsmen published in New York City, came to the rescue of the embattled riflemen and Congressmen. In a telegram to the clubwomen, the magazine said it was absurd to think that the Rifle Association was stronger than the Department of Justice, that pistols and revolvers were omitted from the bill “because of the fact that the security and safety of the homes and families of all the people of this country demand it,” and that the proposed law “is a vicious measure that would affect only honest citizens without the slightest effect on criminals, and is believed by many people to be part of an announced effort to ultimately deny all citizens the right to possess firearms of any kind and for any purpose.” The telegram closed with a request that the clubwomen rescind the resolution.

Instead, the club-women reiterated their position. A reply sent to the magazine by Mrs. Grace Morrison Poole, president of the Federation, and Mrs. Sporborg said “that through compliance with regulations that demand proper identification, accredited licensing and registration, no respectable citizen of honest intent would be denied protection.”

“The intent of the campaign that the Federation is waging against the crime wave in this country,” the resolution went on, “is to make it more difficult for the gangster to have access to firearms. The more speedily this country passes laws which disarm the underworld, the increasingly less will be the need of protection on the part of honest citizens. That is the objective of the Federation in its conscientious interest in the homes and lives of the American public. Its slogan is to 'disarm the gangster, not arm the citizenry.' ”

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GUNS MAGAZINE
September 1957

TRIGGER TALK
Cover Headliner

"Why Not Have A Pro-Gun Law," is possibly the longest article we have ever published. It may well be also the most important article we have ever published.

The "call to arms" which ends the story, urging all firearms enthusiasts to write to the Director of the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Unit, Treasury, Washington 25, D. C., to protest new revised federal regulations in the gun law field is a little like Paul Revere's "one if by land, two if by sea." Only now it isn't the "British are coming," it is the bureaucrats.

There has been some serious thought among Congressmen and Senators as to the activities of this branch of the Treasury which administers the federal gun laws. Some congressmen have been outspoken in expressing the view that the Treasury has been attempting actually to alter law, to make law, which is a privilege jealously guarded by the Congress. In "Why Not A Pro-Gun Law," the author brings up to date the present situation in anti-firearms legislation. We are now at a crossroads. For decades shooting enthusiasts have been complacent while lawmakers, directed by people who are not all well-intentioned by any means, have been chipping away at the edges of American freedom. Restrictive firearms laws are but one face of restrictive federal interference into American private affairs. We exist in a republic which is supposed to guarantee liberty under law. When laws become destructive of these liberties, it is the right and duty of the people to alter or to abolish those laws, and to institute new forms of law which shall best effect their safety and happiness. . Old militiaman Tom Jefferson would doubtless applaud this paraphrasing of his immortal document, the Declaration of Independence.

Fortunately, it is not too late. The revised regulations are not yet in effect as of press-time. A public hearing on the new revised regulations is scheduled for Tuesday, August 27, 1957, at 10:00 AM, room 3313, Internal Revenue Bldg., 12th and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, D. C. Any protests can be made in person there, and eastern-area readers of GUNS may find their interests best served if they obtain complete copies of the regulations, read and understand their implications, and appear to register their protests in person.

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GUNS MAGAZINE
September 1957

ANTI-GUN LAW PROPONENTS ARE NOT ALL DO-GOODERS.
LAWS THAT STRIKE AT CIVIL LIBERTIES THREATEN BUSINESS AS WELL AS OUR AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE.
IF WE MUST LEGISLATE, THEN . . . Why Not Have a PRO Gun Law?
By WILLIAM B. EDWARDS

THE ANTI-GUN LAWMAKERS are having a brisk season for 1957. With the practical nature of Andrew Volsteads and the subtlety of Carrie Nations they have attacked the root of all evil and the ills of mankind by the simple expedient of trying to take away all guns. Recently proposed Treasury regulations came close to this ideal; they could have destroyed the firearms industry and the shooting sport. Under the guise of protecting the people, these makers of rules who push anti-gun bills such as these are forging weapons, not into ploughshares, but into an iron collar of restraint, worthy of a fascist state. Year by year more anti-gun laws are proposed. Meanwhile, pro-gun collectors and shooters are mollified by the excuse "these laws are thought up by well-meaning, innocent do-gooders." Certainly a few anti-gun advocates may seem to be well-intentioned, but let's look at "well meaning" legislators in the forefront of anti-gun legislation.

Take a good look at genial, charming, personable "Big Tim" Sullivan, who disarmed the citizens of crime-ridden New York in 1911 with the grandaddy of anti-gun laws, then went mad the following year and was confined. Says the biographical dictionary, "Vice and crime were carefully organized in his territory and paid graft to his machine, as did many lines of legitimate business, including push-cart peddlers . . . When charged with grafting, or partnership with crime and vice, he could rise in the [New York state] Assembly or on a campaign rostrum and, by telling the story of his tenement boyhood and the sacrifices of his mother, reduce even hardened political opponents to tears . . ."

"Big Tim" was of the cloth of Adolph Hitler and the spellbinders of the ages. Election fights which stimulated the public pulse in those days hampered Big Tim's grasp on politics. So he pushed through a law requiring everyone in New York state to get a police permit to buy or possess a pistol or revolver. Sullivan knew he could control the police. This meant that when Sullivan's boys went on their ballot-box stuffing sprees, they could be reasonably sure of having no opposition. Big Tim was not a "well-meaning legislator" in his pistol law ideas. The Sullivan law weakened the opposition, sweetened the Tammany kitty. Anti-gun bills are a popular stepping stone to political fame, and many in the anti-gun ranks share "Big Tim's motives.

A most ironic instance of the do-good legislator at work occurred in Connecticut last spring. A brutal murder of two people incensed the public against guns and a fantastic spate of 24 anti-firearms bills was put into the mill, including the demand to register every pistol or revolver in the state. This is a common form of anti-gun bill, though just what it is supposed to accomplish is not clear.

According to Fred A. Roff, Jr., of the Colt's gun company, the criminal committed the murders with a registered revolver. And the criminal was already a convicted felon: Outlawing guns is impossible. The police themselves are often a source of pistols to people who do not bother with licenses and permits. I bought seven revolvers including a Colt DA M1878 .45 revolver and a small engraved Smith & Wesson .32 from one Chicago policeman, who did not want to insult me by asking for a permit. Though I bought them as "collector's items," they had been confiscated by the officer in the normal course of his work. He was logical in selling the guns to me, knowing me to be a gun collector; yet "Confiscated guns must be destroyed according to law," declares Chicago police commissioner T. J. O'Connor.

Another gun which came my way from a policeman violated state and federal law. It was a .38 Smith & Wesson with numbers ground off that once belonged to the famous kidnapper "Machine Gun" Kelly. The gun was taken from one of Kelly's gang by then-detective Charles Zimmerman, later Buffalo, New York, chief of police. When he retired to California, Zimmerman kept the gun in memory of a high point in his career. His widow sold it to me as a collector's item.

According to the Penal Law, section 1899, State of New York, "firearms and other enumerated dangerous weapons (confiscated in criminal proceedings) must be either be destroyed or retained by the Police Department..."

Evidently in New York, as in other places, there are two kinds of law -- one for police, and one for civilians. Federal law was also violated by Zimmerman by retaining a gun from which a number had been erased, and by transporting it across a state line.

While cops claim they can curb crime by taking away all guns, and the pro-gun guys come back with worn-out cliches such as "with what gun did Cain slay Abel," the realities are that not even law enforcement agencies agree on what should be done with confiscated guns.

"The Los Angeles Police Department complies with law by dumping these guns into the deep waters of the Pacific ocean each year on July 1st," says A. C. Hohmann of Los Angeles. But in Boston, the Commissioner of Public Safety "may sell or destroy the same, and in case of a sale . . . shall pay over the net proceeds to the Commonwealth."

In Washington, D. C., "Pistols, machine guns, etc., are either destroyed or transferred to the regular inventories of Federal or District government agencies," reports Inspector Earl Hartmen, property clerk. Yet by stealing from government sources alone, criminals get nearly half the guns used in crime.

Philadelphia police recently made a smart, money saving move, which implicated the city government, common carriers, several gun dealers, and numerous other people, in a violation of the Federal Firearms Act.

Procurement commissioner Michael Sura decided that some confiscated Philadelphia police guns were worth money. He "scooped up up 2,662 weapons which technically belonged as evidence from past trials and arranged. . . with the Courts to offer them at public sale," wrote David O. Moreton in the May issue of Law & Order, the police monthly magazine.

These guns were bid in by a New York gun dealer. Commissioner Sura thriftily saved Philadelphia nearly $10,000 in trade for new police equipment, yet demonstrated strikingly the logical inconsistency of the police attitude toward firearms. And he helped many people violate the federal law.

The 1938 Federal Firearms Act states:

"It shall be unlawful for any person to transport, ship, or knowingly receive in interstate or foreign commerce any firearm from which the manufacturer's serial number has been removed, obliterated, or altered, and the possession of any such firearm shall be presumptive evidence that such firearm was transported, shipped, or received, as the case may be, by the possessor in violation of this chapter."
In this lot of guns were many with numbers ground off, and everybody from Commissioner Sura, to the common carrier, to the New York dealer, to final owner may have violated federal law during their possession, transfer, shipment, or receipt of such firearms as the New Navy .38 Colt revolver illustrated, from which the serial numbers have been erased. Yet the sales and transfers in themselves were lawful transactions.

What, then, of the overall value of federal anti-firearms legislation? Has Congress any reason to make laws restricting the possession and use for lawful purposes of any kind of firearm? The answer is, no. But they are able to restrict guns by exercising a highly valued privilege of Congress, to raise and collect taxes. Congress has tried to "control" guns by excessive taxation.

Most of us agree that to provide for the common defense, to run our government, we must pay taxes. We should naturally expect to give the government considerably more in tax money than the costs of accounting and collecting this money, so there will be a little left over for housing, defense, public works, welfare and social security, veterans' compensation, and other needs. But Congress' anti-gun laws cost the people more to administer than they bring in.

The Treasury handles Congress' gun-taxing laws because Congress has prohibited itself from making gun-restricting laws by saying in the Constitution's second amendment that "A well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Contrary to what some of the more rabid pro-gun guys claim, this does not mean that everyone can go around carrying a gun. It does not mean that everyone cannot go around carrying a gun either. The application of its meaning is in the expression "well regulated militia."

The National Guard is not a (Constitutional) "well regulated militia;" it is part of our U. S. Army organized reserve forces.

The militia ideas of the framers of the Constitution opposed the existence of a standing army. Formal expression of the militia concept was set forth in "Plan for A Militia" published in London in 1745 by a Colonel Martin. The ideas in this little book had much to do with the phrasing of the 2nd amendment. The army cost too much, said the Colonel; militia would be cheaper. "No mercenary army [Martin's word for "professional" or "standing army"] which this nation can support without becoming bankrupt, is sufficient for its security against foreign invasion; yet a national militia is capable of defending it with great certainty, and little expense." The militia included "the military service of all men capable of bearing arms, from the age of 18 to that of 50 years; except such as may be exempted by law . . ."

Over a century later, the militia term held the same meaning. In Wilhelm's Military Dictionary (1881) under "Militia" is the explanation, "The laws of the United States require the enrollment into the militia of all able-bodied males between the ages of 18 and 45 years, with certain exceptions according to law (such as judges, clergymen, doctors)." And at that time, "The organized militia of the United States numbers 125,906 men, the number of men available for military duty unorganized, is 6,598,105." Out of a population in 1881 of 50,000,000, the figure compares well today with our 18,000,000 licensed hunters with a national population of 170,000,000. Our shooters are our "militia;" our hunters, smallbore rifle shooters, target pistol marksmen, shotgunners, gun collectors, all are members of the militia of the United States.

But according to decree of the Courts, "militia" is said to mean only the "National Guard." And the pro-gun guys who smart under the edict that no anti-firearms laws have invaded the rights of citizens as embodied in the second amendment, flinch as the National Guard status is waved in their faces. They can flinch even more, for the term well-regulated, though not relating to the National Guard, did mean that guns were to be kept in an armory. The militia idea definitely regulated guns. When the militia companies were organized, "the government may send to every captain for each man so enrolled a good firelock (smoothbore flintlock musket) . . . and during every captain's possession of the arms, each is to be allowed an armorer to keep them clean . . . The captain, not the individual militiaman, was to keep the "firelock."

These two aspects of the much-mooted Second Amendment have caused conflict. The word "militia" does refer to everyone between 18 and 45 or 50 years of age. But secondly, the amendment does not say that "everybody ought to carry a gun." The first point, that the "militia" includes everyone, is a score for the pro-gun crowd; the second point favors the anti-gun lawmakers by proposing storage of arms in a government armory.

But there is one more point, the heart of the controversy, for the amendment does not really relate to the concept of the "militia," nor to the "security of a free state," but specifically to the "right of the citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Stress that word "right," for it applies to all citizens. It is not a limitation on the states, as many examiners of constitutional doctrine generally observe. If it were, it would have been written "the right of the states to raise citizen militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." The Bill of Rights refers to the citizens. Clearly, the Second Amendment means what it says. Court decisions which affirm that an anti-firearms law is "constitutional" because it doesn't prevent the National Guard from carrying pistols are clearly legalistic nonsense: the National Guard is not "militia."

TIMES CHANGE. The National Guard is indispensible to our pattern of national defense. The "militia" today consists of 20,000,000 gun owners. They face a very real problem, the present and future trend in anti-firearms legislation. Basic rights are infringed, and the national security has been placed in danger by anti-gun laws.

Instead of implementing the Second Amendment, making sure that every man of the "militia" knows how to shoot his, "firelock" -- or Krag, or Springfield, or M-1, or BAR, or full-auto M14 and M15 rifles -- government has used excessive taxation to prohibit using modern military rifles for lawful purposes, and has killed the domestic manufacture of machine guns for defense.

American soldiers are dead today because we did not have enough machine-firing weapons to give them on Bataan and Corregidor. The National Firearms Act (of 1934, amended 1954,) was to blame. Then-attorney general Homer Cummings, after one world war and a dozen minor wars in his lifetime, still believed in 1934 that we would have no more war (it was outlawed by the League of Nations) and there was no need for guns.

Then 1940 found us drilling recruits (who had never seen a gun) to fight a machinegun blitzkrieg, and the army didn't even have guns to give them for drill. The concept of "pre-induction training" in marksmanship was a flame nurtured by a tiny group of shooters in the National Rifle Association, men who knew the truth. Nobody would listen, though they preached the doctrine that rifle shooting is fun, as well as a duty of the citizen.

Even the army has fallen for the anti-gun line. After spending 13 years and great expense in developing a full-auto infantry rifle, the M14, Ordnance has come up with a dilly; the M14 as issued will be semi-automatic only, no advance over the M-1! By substituting a few parts the modem militiaman's "firelock" can be made full-auto -- but how do you convert an ordinary G.I. into a trained automatic rifleman? Will there be time?

There is a way to train 20,000,000 citizen militia. We must have, not anti-gun laws, but pro-gun laws. First step, repeal existing Federal firearms laws. They do not prevent crime. They do not curb crime. They do not give law enforcement officers any tools with which to catch or convict criminals, especially when law enforcement bodies from top to bottom ignore even federal laws regulating firearms. And the high percent of federally owned and registered (U .S. Army) firearms used in crime reveals how ineffective federal control of guns is. In two instances federal firearms laws have been damaging to the national defense. The machine gun act has proved its folly, and prevented the creation of even a sport-shooting program in line with the nation's needs.

In a second instance, the Federal Firearms Act has been so badly written by law cranks (not gun cranks) that petty men with grand visions have seized on it as a stepping stone to power, and the abuse of the public. This mumbo-jumbo of commerce-regulating law hinders the legitimate dealer and manufacturer in guns-would, if proposed regulations went into effect, put gunmakers and dealers out of business. A house of cards, the law regulates the business of firearms making and selling, but carefully avoids the main fact, that of making a criminal's use of a gun unprofitable.

These new regulations include, for example, the requirement that records be kept permanently by the dealer or gunmaker, for the life of the business, or the duration of his successors. Records, in brief, to be kept in perpetuity. Says R. E. Train, assistant to the secretary of the Treasury, in a June 10, 1957 letter to Senator Homer Capehart, "Section 177.51 requires each licensed manufacturer or dealer to maintain records reflecting the receipt and disposition of all firearms. These records are required to be preserved permanently until the licensee or its successor in interest discontinues business. The present regulations provide for the maintenance of such records, but only for six years. The statute itself (15 U.S.C. ff 903 (d) provides that 'dealers shall maintain such permanent records of importation, shipment, or other disposal of firearms and ammunition as the Secretary of the Treasuryshall provide.'

"This section of the proposed regulations which is being widely objected to as imposing a new and unreasonable burden would seem to be clearly required by the words of the statute itself," continues Mr. Train in his opinion to Senator Capehart. "Actually," says Train, "the main difference between the old regulations and the new would seem to be that at the present time these records need only be kept for six years rather than permanently."

Although there is no reasonable explanation offered as to the value of records of a gunmaker kept permanently, nor is it stated who will be able to afford the tremendous cost of searching these records, citizen Train is obviously at fault in his semantic logic.

"Permanent records" does not nor has it ever been intended to mean "keeping records permanently, in perpetuity." A permanent record is, if we take Webster for the meaning, one "not subject to fluctuation or alteration." In the statute quoted by Train, the word "permanent" modifies "records" as an adjective. The new regulations twist it into an adverb, "permanently," which modifies the verb of "keep." Now, does the Treasury want records kept in permanent-type ledgers, available for inspection as required for normal income-tax purposes, or does it want records kept on any old scrap of paper, or in the mind of the dealer, but retained by him for all time? One or the other, but not both, is the meaning of the statute. And once "permanent records" is allowed to mean "records kept permanently," every industry in the U. S. which keeps records, every businessman, every tax payer, every citizen, who should keep records in permanent form for, say, the statutory six or seven years, will have to keep records as long as they are in business, as long as they are taxpayers, as long as they are alive. Why?

This Firearms Department is an odd offspring of an abortive push to get rid of all crime, by getting rid of all guns. The pillars on which it is propped are the National Act of 1934 and the Federal Act of 1938. Both are ostensible revenue-raising acts. Under the National act in 1955-6, $11,000 was taken in from transfer and registration fees, penalties and fines. During the same period, the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Unit of the Treasury (which contains the Firearms Department) spent an amount which the ATU director refused to reveal, though it must have run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In one instance, in downstate Illinois, ATU agents spent five years in "getting" one machine gun collector. When brought to trial, penalties could have totalled 18 years and $45,000. Charitably, the judge gave a token fine of $100, exacted no court costs, thereby apparently expressing his belief that the government's case was a waste of time.

In the Southern District court in California, a Culver City dealer, harassed by ATU agents on direct orders from Washington, spent over $1000 fighting an action brought by the government because he sold antique curio pistols known as "Chicago Protector Palm Pistols." Firing an unobtainable .32 Extra Short Rimfire cartridge, the gun was argued to be a violation of the National machine gun act by other one of those odd twists of meaning which the Treasury seems to enjoy. The court, however, tossed out the case.

Since the Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Unit is supposed to catch bootleggers, and ordered to apprehend criminals engaged in dope peddling, every minute spent on anti-gun foolishness is so much time taken away from their legitimate business. Distilling illegal alcohol is said to be the second largest illegal industry in the U. S. And in the time it takes one ATU man to "get the dope" on an otherwise honest gun-law violator (they don't prove many cases), a narcotics pusher can suborn your boy or your girl into a life-wrecking habit.

Today, right now, there exists crying need to enact constructive legislation in the field of firearms law. Repealing existing laws is a must. Reenacting some provisions of existing laws, together with a look at the "mandatory sentence," should come next.

Judges and juries are reluctant to convict when stiff mandatory sentences are in sight. But let the punishment fit the crime . . . say two to five years in addition to the specific charge, if the crime was committed while carrying a gun, would be workable. Don't exempt shotguns and rifles from penalties for criminal use, but don't aim "anti-gun" laws at any gun just because of its fancied "criminal-type" nature. Yesterday's terror weapon is tomorrow's collector's prize. There should not exist any legislation prohibiting any citizen from using any type of firearm, including machine gun, muffler or silencer, or Buck Rogers ray gun, for any lawful purpose. But if anyone steps out of line with a gun, throw the book at him!

Enact legislation to put some "teeth" into the militia concept, too. Work on that "militia" idea, and while we cut defense spending by the billions, let's up it a few millions in the direction of the citizen soldier. Instead of trying to cut out the Army Director of Civilian Marksmanship's puny appropriation of $300,000 in the false interests of economy, stick a couple of extra zeroes on it, and make military small arms and ammunition available in plenty for rifle club members on approved ranges. Drop some added cash into the federal school aid program, and build decent shooting ranges as elements in the overall sports program. Get the states interested in making the sport of shooting a part of every day of life in the towns, on campus.

The cadre of instructors available, free, from the membership of the National Rifle Association, the U. S. Revolver Association, the National Skeet Shooting Association, the Amateur Trapshooter's Association, the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, the National Single Shot Rifle Association, and many more clubs, shooters' and collectors' organizations all over the nation, can really implement that Second Amendment if we have positive firearms legislative thinking, instead of negative, false, destructive attitudes.

What you can do is twofold: first, write immediately to the Director, Alcohol & Tobacco Tax Unit, Bureau of Internal Revenue, Washington 25, D. C., and give him the benefit of your views of the proposed new regulations. Copies of these regulations can be found in any public library in the May 3, 1957 Federal Register. If you are against the rules, say so. Your letter must be in duplicate.

Second, write to your Senators and Congressmen, in Washington and in your State capital. Tell them what kind of gun laws you think are needed to prevent crime, and what kind of laws you want to see enacted to make your sport of guns and shooting one that will not be taken from you. And consider also your rights, as a citizen under this Constitution. Tell your Congressman about those rights, too. He knows about them, but it is always refreshing to a legislator to have matters called to his attention anew by the people who voted for him. Send a copy of your letter to Guns Magazine for reference. We'd like to know your ideas on constructive firearms legislation. Urge the formation of a Congressional committee to recommend good gun laws.

There are plenty of advocates of anti-gun legislation. The results have been many: national weakness and disarmament, increased crime, novel forms of corruption and graft, political hysteria controlled for selfish political purposes, and manifold invasions of the rights of citizens. After all, why not have a pro-gun law?

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THE MYTH OF THE SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL

NRA

INSTITUTE
FOR
LEGISLATIVE
ACTION

The firearm adorning the cover of this brochure is reproduced actual size. It is a Smith & Wesson K-38—a handgun measuring 17-inches in total length, weighing nearly three pounds, and costing well over $200.

That same K-38 would have been banned as a so-called "Saturday Night Special," under legislation considered in 1976 by the House Judiciary Committee. In fact, under that legislation, the Russo amendment to HR 11193, over 75 percent of all handgun models ever produced would have been banned—including the Colt Single Action Army, the revolver carried in virtually every Western film ever produced.

But how did the nation's major newspapers report the amendment:

The Wall Street Journal—"The legislation would have banned the sale and manufacture of small, easily concealable handguns. ..."

The Washington Star—"The proposed legislation would have banned importation, manufacture, sale or distribution of new 'concealable' handguns by licensed manufacturers and dealers.... It would have banned the manufacture of handguns from cheap metals—the type that fly apart when fired."

The Washington Post—"The key amendment (Russo) would ban the sale or manufacture of concealable handguns on the basis of size and safety devices."

Clearly, a great deal is lost between press reports of a so-called "Saturday Night Special" bill, and what the letter of the law spells out—in large measure because most newspaper editors know little or nothing about firearms.

Yet, under the Russo amendment—a landmark for the concept "Saturday Night Special"—the definition was stretched to an extreme limit. In fact, it was expanded to a point where a mere handful of handgun models would have survived the law and been allowed for purchase and ownership by private citizens.

Congressman Russo's amendment, more than any other single act or effort, has exploded the myth of the "Saturday Night Special." In that, it serves as a benchmark.

After more than ten years of common usage—since the expression "Saturday Night Special" was invented—it has become more than a familiar term to most Americans.

Everybody knows what it means. Or do they?

Ask yourself.

In truth, the term is so elastic that it means anything to everybody. It has become meaningless.

Take the typical definition, and analyze it.

"Saturday Night Special" equals a handgun that is "cheap, easily concealable, unsafe, readily obtainable, non-sporting, and preferred by criminals."

We've all heard that before. But what do those words mean?

CHEAP—What is cheap? Is it $50? Is it $140? What prevents a cheap handgun from becoming an expensive handgun through a simple price rise? Wherever the line is drawn, any law that banned a particular make and model of handgun on the basis of its low price would discriminate against the poor. It would allow only the people who could afford an "expensive handgun" the means to self-defense in their home, while denying those of little wealth that same means to defend themselves, their family, and their homes. Such a measure denies a large segment of law-abiding citizens the right to equal protection under the law.

EASILY CONCEALABLE—Literally any handgun made today is easily concealable. If concealability has anything to do with bulk, barrel length, or weight, any of those factors can be altered within minutes by criminals. Any criminal could make a firearm more concealable by sawing the barrel or altering its other features. The provisions of any such arbitrary length or size requirement definition would only apply to the law-abiding.

The pitfall of accepting "concealability" as a criterion for banning any category of handgun was recently demonstrated by the U.S. Supreme Court. In U.S. v. Powell (No. 74-844), handed down December 2, 1975, the Court held that a sawed-off shotgun with an overall length of 22 inches was a firearm "capable of being concealed" on an average person and is therefore covered by a Federal law forbidding the mailing of concealable weapons.

UNSAFE—Violent crime and criminal use of any weapon has nothing to do with the safety of the weapon. Whether a firearm will withstand any measure of "drop tests" or whether it has a manual safety, grip safety, hammer block, magazine safety or whether it is proof tested using maximum loads has nothing to do with crime. Safe or unsafe, liable to explode or liable to fire when dropped means nothing to the victim of crime. And neither does it mean anything to the criminal.

READILY OBTAINABLE— Presently under the Gun Control Act of 1968, convicted felons, adjudicated mental defectives, drug or alcohol addicts are all prohibited from legally obtaining any type of firearms. In fact, under GCA '68 and under many state laws, handguns are anything but easily obtainable. One of the fallacies in the "Saturday Night Special" question is the idea that the public needs a law to prevent a New Yorker, say, from purchasing handguns in a state where local laws are less stringent, and transporting those handguns back to New York for street sale. It is already illegal under GCA '68.

If all legal commerce in firearms were to end tomorrow, criminal underground sale of firearms would continue unabated, and smuggling, as seen during prohibition with liquor and as is seen today in the drug trade would flourish. Criminals could still get guns.

But we are not the only people saying that. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, commenting on the handgun confiscation question in his home state of Massachusetts, said, ". . . we won't keep guns out of the hands of criminals."

NONSPORTING—This is perhaps the most meaningless and misleading of any of the so-called definitions of "Saturday Night Special" proposed. It makes the assumption that there is no lawful reason to own a firearm for self-defense. In the Second Amendment of the Constitution there is no mention of "sporting arms." The drafters of the Constitution— had they meant for Americans to hold the right to private ownership of firearms only for sporting purposes—would have put it that way: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear sporting arms only shall not be infringed." They didn't say it that way.

The majority of the 50-million handguns now held by individual Americans are owned for the purpose of self defense. It has been estimated that nearly 2.5-million new handguns are manufactured and sold (under careful Federal scrutiny) into legal channels. Most of those firearms are bought by law-abiding citizens for the lawful purpose of defending themselves and their families against deadly force in their homes. Any such "nonsporting" designation would deny them that right.

FOR CRIMINAL USE—This phrase, or the phrases, "often used in crime," or "preferred by criminals," is simply not supportable.

Criminals will use whatever weapons they can get—whether they be long-barreled, heavy, safe, large caliber, pistols or revolvers—or if they be small caliber, alloy-frame, low melting point guns.

In fact, a recent study by the Police Foundation in Washington, D.C. found that "more expensive handguns of well known manufacturers, notably Smith & Wesson and Colt, are as likely to be used in felonies such as murder and robbery as are handguns bearing less familiar brand names and selling for less than $60."

It cannot be stressed enough that it is not the weapon—be it pistol, revolver, rifle, shotgun, fist, knife, ax, bludgeon, yoke, garrott, hammer, ice-pick, blunt-instrument, sword, saw or poison—that is the cause of crime.

A firearm or a blunt-instrument is no more the cause of an assault, than a reporter's typewriter is the cause of a libel. And in either case, control or a prohibition on ownership of an object amounts to a prior restraint. Criminals will continue to ignore laws, simply because that is the nature of crime.

Over the years, since it was created, Saturday Night Special for many proponents of firearms control, has come to mean all handguns. Time Magazine, in reporting the Massachusetts handgun confiscation question wrote: "In Massachusetts, a pioneering effort to ban all handguns fell to a crushing defeat. The referendum proposal was aimed at the nation's most common murder weapon, the cheap Saturday Night Specials. . . ."




So what's next?



All hand guns, then ... all firearms.



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Regrettably, the "gun control" issue has diverted and wasted scarce resources which should have been expended on genuine crime control measures.

Our challenge: To reform and strengthen our federal and state criminal justice systems. We must bring about a sharp reversal in the trend toward undue leniency and "revolving door justice." We must insist upon speedier trials and upon punishments which are commensurate with the crimes. Rehabilitation should be tempered with a realization that not all are rehabilitate.

The job ahead will not be an easy one. The longer gun control advocates distract the nation from this task by embracing that single siren song, the longer it will take and the more difficult will be our job. Beginning is the hardest step, and ILA has taken it. Join ILA. Donate to us. Work with us. We need your help.

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TEN MYTHS ABOUT “GUN CONTROL”

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“The only way to discourage the gun culture is to remove the guns from the hands and shoulders of people who are not in the law enforcement business.”
— The New York Times, September 24, 1975

That editorial conclusion by the nation's most influential news journal, one noted for its advocacy of individual liberties, represents the absolute extreme in the firearms controversy—that no citizen can be trusted to own any kind of firearm. This expressed attitude is particularly ironic since the overwhelming majority of the 60 million American firearms owners have done nothing to deserve such a sweeping condemnation. It is the product of a series of myths which—through incessant repetition—has been mistaken for truth. These myths are being exploited to generate fear and mistrust of the decent and responsible Americans who own firearms. Yet, as this brochure proves, none of these myths will stand up under the cold light of fact.

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MYTH: "The majority of Americans favor strict new additional Federal gun controls."

Until the fall of 1975, when Decision Making Information (DMI), a public opinion research firm of Santa Ana, California, completed a comprehensive survey of Americans' thinking on firearms control, virtually no in-depth public opinion research on the subject existed. That first effort showed indisputably that the American people strongly support the rights of private firearms ownership.

The second and most recent DMI poll, released in March 1979 reaffirms these early results. The DMI project, directed by Dr. Richard B. Wirthlin, was based on a scientifically selected sample of registered voters in 1,500 in-home interviews in May and June of 1978 and supported by in-depth telephone interviews of 1,010 registered voters in December.

Among these recent findings:

• 88 percent of registered voters believe they have an individual right to keep and bear arms.

• Gun ownership was acknowledged in 47 percent of voters' households, projected to 45 million gun owners with 23 percent of the total sample having one or more handguns in the home. In 14 percent of all voters' households, or 13 million households, a gun had been used in defense of self, family, or property. With many voters having a direct experience with firearms for self-defense, DMI finds that 83 percent feel "most people who have guns in their homes feel safer because of it."

• Crime is perceived as an increasing threat in the coming decade with the most feared crimes being crimes of violence committed by criminals, especially murder in the course of another crime and robbery/ mugging. So-called "crimes of passion"— murder by a relative or friend—are of little concern, ranking with "white collar crimes" of fraud/embezzlement/forgery.

• 93 percent favor strict mandatory penalties for criminal misuse of firearms in commission of crime. According to DMI, "The electorate clearly sees steps to increase or hasten the punishment suffered by criminals, especially violent criminals, as the best way to fight crime."

• In an open-ended question on the best means to fight crime, only one percent suggest gun controls. DMI says that since its 1975 survey, " 'gun control' has dropped almost completely out of the public mind—it does not spontaneously occur to voters as an anti-crime measure."

• 83 percent oppose a ban on handguns. 72 percent believe that domestic shootings do not justify a handgun ban. Over 80 percent reject the arguments that banning handguns would prevent assassination attempts on public officials.

• 88 percent agree that "registration of handguns will not prevent criminals from acquiring or using them for illegal purposes," and 61 percent oppose the federal government spending massive sums for a registration system. Furthermore, DMI finds that, "71 percent would be concerned about the loss of privacy entailed in computerized files virtually inherent in a nationwide registration system."

• 51 percent feel that national gun registration might well lead to confiscation.

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The general consensus of the DMI survey finds that while most Americans see crime as worsening, they do not view gun restrictions as effective measures for government to institute in fighting crime. Above all else, the DMI findings conclude that "Clearly, a majority of the American people want government to focus on tougher treatment of criminals before trying new social engineering as the treatment for crime."

These findings are supported by the findings of a Caddell poll [Cambridge Reports, Inc.] sponsored by Milton Eisenhower's Center for the Study and Prevention of Handgun Violence in 1978. Although that Center is on record favoring restrictive gun laws and the poll's question order and wording reflected this bias, the poll confirmed overwhelming opposition to a handgun ban and found that 78 percent of the American people believe that "Gun control laws affect only law-abiding citizens; criminals will always be able to find guns."

There have been four other measures of public opinion on firearms control. In 1975, when the Consumer Product Safety Commission asked for public comment on its proposal to ban handgun ammunition as a "hazardous substance," Americans sent CPSC an estimated 300,000 pieces of mail in opposition to the proposed bullet ban, and less than 300 in favor of the action.

In 1978, the U. S. Treasury Department attempted, by federal regulation, to mandate submission of quarterly reports on all firearms transactions for entry on a central computerized file in Washington, and to establish a so-called "unique" serial number stamped on all newly manufactured firearms. The end result of nearly 345,000 public comments ran 43-to-1 in opposition to the Treasury proposals. Even the responses from the law enforcement sector opposed the provisions 16-to-1. In the face of the largest volume of public comment ever logged against a pending Federal action, the Treasury Department withdrew its proposed firearms regulations in February 1979.

The best tests of public opinion occur at the polls. In April 1981, at the height of the anti-gun hostility raised by the media after the shooting of President Reagan, the voters of Emporia, Kansas, voted by a 2-to-1 margin against encouraging the state legislature to enact stricter "gun control" laws.

The ultimate test of public attitude on the "gun control" question came in November 1976 when Massachusetts voters faced a referendum question calling for the prohibition of all handguns. Although the DMI poll had found New England to be the region of the country most sympathetic to restrictive firearms legislation, the ban-the-handgun question was crushed by a margin of more than 2-to-1.

MYTH: "Since a gun in a home is six times more likely to kill a family member than to stop a criminal, armed citizens are not a deterrent to crime."

This myth, stemming from a superficial "study" of firearms accidents in the Cleveland, Ohio, area, merely represents a comparison of 148 accidental deaths (and some suicides) to the deaths of 23 intruders killed by homeowners over a 16-year period.

[Rushforth, et al., "Accidental Firearm Fatalities in a Metropolitan County," 100 Am. Journal of Epidemiology 499 (1975).]
Gross errors in the "study" and in its citation by "gun control" advocates include: no distinction is made between handgun and long gun deaths; suicides were included as accidental deaths; all accidental firearm fatalities were counted whether the deceased was part of the "family" or not; and Cleveland's experience with crime and accidents during those years was atypical of the nation as a whole.

Moreover, in a later study, the same researchers noted that roughly 10 percent of deaths classified as homicides are actually justifiable2—that means self-defense accounts nationally for over two thousand homicides annually.

[2 Rushforth, et al., "Violent Death in a Metropolitan County," 297 N. Eng. Journal of Medicine 531, 533 (1977).]
The most common weapon used is the firearm, especially the handgun.

But the value of firearms for self-defense cannot be measured simply by a "body count." The fact is, in many cases the armed citizen is able to avert criminal violence, and possible death or injury to himself and his family, without firing a shot—certainly without killing. Firearms often are used to drive off criminals by pointing the gun and perhaps issuing a warning shot, or holding them at bay until police arrive. Many criminals surely are deterred by the very knowledge that they may have to face an armed citizen. Actual killing or even wounding of an intruder occurs only infrequently.

There is ample evidence that armed citizens have a marked deterrent effect on crime. Where public programs emphasizing self-defense with firearms are instituted, crime rates decline. For example, after police trained some 6,000 Orlando, Florida, women in self-defense with firearms in 1966, the area's rape crimes were cut in half. The program also produced a decline in armed robbery and burglary, all of which gave Orlando the distinction of being the only U.S. city to show an overall crime decrease that year.

In Detroit in 1966, there was a record 1,037 chain store and grocery robberies in which many storekeepers were beaten and some murdered. As a result of an incident in which an elderly grocer and his wife were beaten to death after giving up their money, a grocery trade newspaper sponsored firearms self-defense clinics in early 1967. By the second quarter of 1967, grocery store robberies had dropped to 10 per month from the previous year's 86 per month.

Again, in Highland Park, Michigan, store holdups dropped from 1 1/2 per day to no robberies for more than four months from the day police began a well publicized firearms training class for merchants.

Clearly, the announced presence of firearms in the hands of citizens has deterred crime. In general, FBI crime data and polling data on gun ownership suggest that widespread gun ownership serves to deter robbery and burglary. Areas where gun ownership is most widespread report lower levels of robbery and burglary—crimes most feared by a majority of Americans.

Two 1978 national opinion surveys suggest that guns, and particularly handguns, have been used quite frequently and advantageously for defense of person and property. A Caddell poll [Cambridge Reports, Inc.] found that 3 percent of the adult population, or 4.8 million adult Americans, own a handgun for self-defense and have used it for defense. That figure is supported by the Decision Making Information (DMI) poll, which found that 14 percent, or 13 million Americans, live in households in which a family member had used a firearm for protection. Additional questions on handgun ownership and type of defensive use results in a projected 6.6 million Americans using a firearm for protection from another person and about 4.8 million handgun owners— almost exactly the same as the Caddell survey. Those surveys suggest that at least 200,000 times per year, at least 600 times per day, at least 25 times every hour, a handgun is used for protection from a criminal by a law-abiding American citizen.

The only meaningful measure of the successful use of firearms for self-defense is in terms of lives and property protected from criminal acts. Unfortunately, there is no way to count the number of citizens who did not become "statistics" because they had firearms which they knew how to use without endangering themselves and their families.

MYTH: "The only purpose of a handgun is to kill people."

This often repeated statement is patently untrue, but to those Americans whose only knowledge of firearms is the nightly carnage and bloody violence of television, it might seem believable. But when anti-gun scholar James Wright of the University of Massachusetts read some sportsmen's publications, he reached a different conclusion: "Even the most casual and passing familiarity with this literature is therefore sufficient to belie the contention that handguns have 'no legitimate sport or recreational use.' "

There are an estimated 50 to 60 million privately owned handguns in the United States. They are used for hunting, target shooting, protection of families and businesses, and numerous other legitimate and lawful purposes. Only an infinitesimal percent ever are used by criminals in criminal conduct. In 1980, for example, the FBI reported fewer than 12,000 murders in which handguns were used. That amounts to less than .02 percent (two hundredths of one percent) of the privately owned handguns being used to kill. That fact alone renders the myth about the "only purpose" of handguns absurd, for more than 99 percent of all handguns are used neither to murder nor for any other unlawful purpose.

But why do so many Americans wish to own handguns? Many people hunt with handguns each year. Still more target shoot either in formal competition or as a weekend hobby. Millions of Americans are collectors who appreciate handguns for design, workmanship, or historic qualities.

But by far the most commonly cited reason for owning a handgun is self-defense. At least one-sixth of the families in America own handguns for protection and security.

The purpose of a handgun in the home is to preserve life and to discourage acts of violence. It is the immediate means a family has to thwart ultimate criminal force. A handgun's function is one of insurance as well as defense. A handgun in the home is a contingency, based on the knowledge that if there ever comes a time when it is needed, no substitute will do. Certainly no violent intent is implied, any more than a purchaser of life insurance intends to die soon.

MYTH: "Gun registration will curb crime by disarming criminals."

Under existing Federal law and under most state and local laws (some 20,000 gun laws are in effect throughout the United States), anyone convicted of a felony is prohibited from buying, possessing, or owning a firearm of any kind. Studies indicate the effect of these laws on crime is negligible or nonexistent. Criminals with prior felony convictions have ready access to firearms through illegal sources.

In addition, ordinary gun registration requirements cannot constitutionally be used to track down felons with firearms. To require ex-felons to register their weapons— with the registration information usable against them in criminal cases—or to face punishment for not registering their firearms, violates the Fifth Amendment's protection against compulsory self-incrimination. Logic dictates that criminals will not register illegal weapons; the Supreme Court has said they do not have to.

In order to retain some registration without violating the constitutional rights of criminals, Congress has legislated that the information provided for registration may neither be used for the prosecution of crimes up to the time of registration, nor be provided to other federal or state law enforcement authorities.

To further meet that constitutional problem, some gun registration laws have been written to exclude ex-cons from registration requirements. Only the law-abiding would be required to comply with registration requirements.

Without knowing the constitutional problem involved in asking criminals to register their illegally possessed firearms, only 12 percent of Americans expect gun registration laws to curb crime, according to the 1978 DMI findings. Very few think that even an outright ban on gun ownership can reduce crime.

MYTH: "Most murders are argument-related 'crimes of passion' against a relative, neighbor, friend or acquaintance, committed by previously law-abiding individuals with no prior criminal records."

The truth is that the vast majority of murders are committed by persons with long-established patterns of violent criminal behavior. Numerous studies—by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, by the FBI, and by several big city police departments—clearly substantiate this fact.

The average murderer—according to the Senate study of the 120 largest metropolitian areas—had committed six violent criminal offenses before committing murder. And most studies indicate that 65-75 percent of persons arrested for murder have prior records—as do 40-50 percent of murder victims.

The 1980 FBI data showing that 51 percent of the murderers were well-known to the victims is not so surprising. Violent criminals compete with other criminals, with whom they are acquainted. And they have fallings out with erstwhile associates: addicts with pushers, pimps with prostitutes, burglars with fences, and so forth.

Clearly, murderers are not average, hardworking, law-abiding citizens—except that, like the law-abiding citizens, they have friends and relatives who may become the victims of their violent behavior.

Other felons, too, are seldom first-time offenders committing unpremeditated crimes.

In a study of recidivist felons in a California prison, conducted by the Rand Corporation for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) and released in August 1977, researchers found 75 percent of their sample had on the average served slightly more than two prior prison terms, yet the entire sample of 49 habitual offenders interviewed self-reported more than 10,500 felonies during an average 20-year criminal period. Rand recommendations included extended prison sentences for those offenders "whose prior record and current charges reflect serious and sustained criminal activity... at the earliest time such offenders have been identified."

Going into further detail in a 1977 study of "What Happens After Arrest," the Institute for Law & Social Research found that only 30 percent of all persons arrested during the period 1971-75 in Washington, D.C. "accounted for 56 percent of all arrests brought to the Superior Court during that period," yet more than half of all arrests never got past the prosecutor's office. More frightening, one-third of all those arrested for murder or robbery were out on some form of early or conditional release at the time of the offense.

MYTH: "Stiff gun control laws work as evidenced by the low crime rates in England and Japan."

Low crime rates in England and Japan cannot be attributed to their gun laws. Both nations have homogeneous, closely-knit societies with long traditions of cultural restraint on violent crime. And, in Japan, the efficiency of the criminal justice system is an important factor as well. While only 19 percent of the serious crime in the United States is cleared by arrest, Japan solves nearly 60 percent of its serious crime. In Tokyo, there is a 90 percent likelihood that arrestees will be convicted, while recent studies show that in Washington, D.C., less than 30 percent of arrestees are convicted.

Part of Japan's low crime rate can be explained by the sheer efficiency of its criminal justice system—an efficiency aided by having fewer protections of the right to privacy than exist in the United States. The most basic reason, however, is wide respect for law and order so deeply ingrained in the Japanese citizenry. This cultural factor has been passed along to their descendants in the United States, and the murder rate for Japanese Americans—who have access to firearms—is even lower than the murder rate in Japan itself.

Prior to 1920, anyone in England, including criminals, lunatics, drunkards, or law-abiding citizens could freely possess firearms. Since 1920, when the first British gun laws went into effect, England's rate of armed robbery and robberies involving the use of firearms has increased one-hundredfold. In 1972, Chief Inspector Colin Greenwood, a British police officer, in a study of English firearms laws for the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, concluded that English gun laws had no effect on serious armed crime and had not reduced the number of illegal firearms in the country.

In Britain, violent crime has increased fifteen-fold since it stiffened its restrictive gun law in 1957. The number of crimes in which firearms were used for all of England and Wales more than doubled between 1971 and 1979, compared to a 20 percent increase during the same period in the U.S. Total violent crime in London increased 23 percent over the period 1976-77, with an increase in muggings of 25 percent during that one-year time frame.

Interestingly, advocates of stricter gun curbs who claim that British gun laws are effective, avoid mention of Northern Ireland. The gun laws there are even stricter than in the rest of the United Kingdom, and there are even fewer limitations oh police enforcement techniques. Nonetheless, the murder rate there exceeds that in the United States.

The "availability" of firearms does not cause crime. If gun availability, were a factor in crime rates, the world's highest crime rate would be in Switzerland where every able-bodied man between the ages of 18 and 60 has a machine gun and ammunition readily available in his home. Yet Switzerland has a lower crime rate than either Japan or England, where private ownership of firearms is virtually prohibited.

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MYTH: "Law-abiding citizens have no reason to fear licensing and registration laws."

In Massachusetts, firearms control proponents, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy (who has consistently claimed registration would not be used to take guns), pushed for a $200 million effort to confiscate all legally owned handguns in that state—an effort that was ultimately rejected. Middlesex County Sheriff John Buckley, one of the kingpins in that attempt (which would have disarmed off-duty police as well as all private citizens), wrote of the confiscation question: "Banning handguns is not a device for fighting crime." But clearly, it was a device for forcibly taking guns from the law-abiding. And how did the proponents of the ban-the-handgun referendum plan to locate those firearms? From the existing registration and handgun owner licensing lists.

Voters in Massachusetts were appalled. In rejecting the handgun ban referendum, they confirmed that "law-abiding citizens have every reason to fear licensing and registration laws."

As stated by Charles Morgan, avowed handgun prohibitionist and director of the ACLU's Washington office, in an October 1, 1975, hearing of the House Subcommittee on Crime: "I have not one doubt, even if I am in agreement with the National Rifle Association, that that kind of a record-keeping procedure is the first step to eventual confiscation under one administration or another."

The City of Cleveland provides another example of the relationship between firearms registration and firearms confiscation. In 1975, the Cleveland City Council enacted a "Saturday Night Special" ban, which was subsequently challenged and held unconstitutional in the Municipal Court. In 1976, the Council enacted a handgun registration ordinance, under which 11,000 citizens duly registered their handguns. In August 1977 the 8th District Court of Appeals reversed the 1975 Municipal Court decision—thereby reenacting the "SNS" ban. Persons who previously registered handguns termed "Saturday Night Specials" were thus identified and notified that ownership of those guns was illegal and subject to confiscation under the "SNS" law.

The local reaction to the quick change from registration to confiscation forced the police to postpone the confiscation. But the threat was very real, and was felt by citizens who had given up their guns before the grace period was indefinitely extended.

Such threats continue. In 1981, Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts ail faced legislative proposals to ban handguns. Registration rolls would be used either to confiscate guns immediately or as soon as the current permits—or their owners—expired. California voters may soon face a handgun ban referendum, similar to Massachusetts' 1976 referendum, with decades of registration rolls to serve as the basis for finding handguns.

Given these threats, a majority of Americans (51 percent) believe, according to the DMI survey, that national gun registration might well lead to confiscation of registered firearms. Foreign examples, in both tyrannical and democratic regimes, further support that contention. The Nazis used registration lists to confiscate firearms in Czechoslovakia and Denmark. With the coming to power of Communist regimes, confiscation has occurred in Hungary and Cuba. Former Ugandan President Idi Amin called for the confiscation of registered firearms in 1978. And a few terrorist attacks led to confiscation of registered firearms in the more benevolent jurisdictions of Ireland and Bermuda.

While the supposed objective of registration laws is to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, common sense says that the criminal won't register his guns. And yet it is the law-abiding citizens who will be made to pay the price for such schemes.

Total registration would require a computer system second only to the Social Security System. Still additional costs would be incurred by police investigating and processing legitimate citizens, rather than doing their usual jobs of investigating crimes. Indirect costs to a national registration system would include increases in crime, as well as a federally-mandated increase in the size, hence the cost, of state and local police departments.

These are only a few points illustrating the gun owner's opposition to registration, national or state.

MYTH: "The right guaranteed under the Second Amendment is limited specifically to the arming of a 'well-regulated Militia' that can be compared today to the National Guard."

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."

In contrast to other portions of the Constitution, this Amendment contains no qualifiers, no "buts," or "excepts." It is a straightforward statement affirming the people's right to possess firearms.

The perception that the Second Amendment guarantees a collective rather than an individual right is totally inaccurate. The term "militia" historically refers to the people at large, armed and ready to defend their homeland and their freedom with weapons supplied by themselves. Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code states: "The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age . . . ." Moreover, historical records, including Constitutional Convention debates and the Federalist

Papers, clearly indicate that the purpose of the Second Amendment was not to create a standing army, but to guard against the tyranny that the framers of the Constitution feared could be perpetrated by any professional armed body of government. It should be noted here that the arms, records, and ultimate control of the National Guard today lies with the Federal Government. This is the very condition the founding fathers warned against.

In Federalist Paper No. 29, for example, Alexander Hamilton assured the people that the army could always be a "select corps of moderate size" and that the "people at large [were] properly armed" in order to serve as fundamental checks and balances against the standing army, the most dreaded of institutions. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 46, further promised the American people that, unlike the governments of Europe which were "afraid to trust the people with arms," the American people were to continue under the new Constitution to possess "the advantage of being armed" and thereby continually able to form the militia when needed as a "barrier against the enterprises of despotic ambition."

The case of United States v. Miller is frequently cited as a definite ruling that the right to keep and bear arms is a collective right, protecting the organized state militia—now the National Guard—rather than the individual right to own guns. But that was not the issue in United States v. Miller and no such ruling was made.

While such a decision was sought by the Justice Department, which was the only party presenting an argument in the case, the Court decided only that the National Firearms Act of 1934 was constitutional absent the presentation of evidence to the contrary. The case hinged on the narrow question of whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use, and its ownership by individuals thus protected by the Second Amendment. The Court ruled that: "In the absence of [the presentation of] any evidence tending to show that possession of or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. [Emphasis added.] Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense."

Because no evidence or argument was presented by other than the Justice Department, the Court was not made aware that some 30,000 short-barreled shotguns were used as "trench guns" during World War I, nor could it have known that similar guns would be used in World War II and Viet Nam.

However, just three years later, in Cases v. U.S., a case which the Supreme Court chose not to review, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said: "The rule of the Miller case, if intended to be comprehensive and complete would seem already outdated...because of the well-known fact in the so-called 'Commando Units' some sort of military use seems to have been found for almost any modern lethal weapon."

The Supreme Court has ruled on only three other Second Amendment cases—all during the last half of the nineteenth century. In one of these cases, the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of assembly was raised; in another, the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures was raised. The Court held that the Second Amendment, as well as the other Constitutional amendments, were limitations solely on the powers of Congress, and not upon the powers of the States. It was not until two generations later that the Court began to rule, under the Fourteenth Amendment, that the First, Fourth, and various other portions of the Constitution and Bill of Rights limited both Congress and State legislatures. No similar decision concerning the Second Amendment has since been made— the Court has remained silent.

However, it is quite strange that advocates of prohibitive Federal law would cite U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876) and Presser v. Illinois (1886), for in each case the Court held that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed by Congress."

MYTH: "A person in a public place with a gun and without a permit is looking for trouble."

Gun prohibitionists have seized on this myth to back legislative/administrative proposals to penalize and discourage gun ownership by imposing a mandatory prison term on persons carrying or possessing firearms without proper authorization. Massachusetts' Bartley-Fox Law and New York's Koch-Carey Law are premier examples of the current "gun control" strategy. Such legislation is detrimental only to peaceful citizens, not criminals.

By the terms of such a mandatory or increased sentence proposal, the unlicensed carrying of a firearm—no matter how innocent the circumstances—is penalized by a six to twelve month jail sentence. It would be imposed on citizens although in many areas it is virtually impossible for persons to obtain a carry permit. Thus it is not difficult to contemplate circumstances which would extenuate such a sentence: fear of crime, arbitrary denial of authorization and red-tape delay in obtaining official permission to carry a firearm, or misunderstanding of the numerous and vague laws governing the transportation of firearms.

The potential for unknowingly or unwittingly committing a technical violation of a licensing law is enormous. Myriad legal definitions of "carrying" vary from state to state, and city to city, including most transportation of firearms—accessible or not, loaded or not, in a trunk or case. And out-of-state travellers are exceedingly vulnerable because of these various definitions.

It is necessary only to look at the first persons arrested under the Massachusetts and New York "mandatory penalty" laws for proof that such laws are misdirected: an elderly woman passing out religious pamphlets in a dangerous section of Boston, and an Ohio truck driver coming to the aid of a woman apparently being kidnapped in New York City.

In New York City—prior to the enactment of the Koch-Carey mandatory sentence for possession law—the bureaucratic logjam in the licensing division, combined with a soaring crime rate, forced law-abiding citizens to obtain a gun illegally for self-protection. In effect, citizens admitted that they would rather risk a mandatory penalty for illegally owning a firearm than risk their lives and property at the hands of New York's violent, uncontrolled criminals. Literally, honest citizens feared the streets more than the courtroom.

In contrast, the city's criminal element faces no similar threat of punishment. A report carried in the January 4 ,1981, issue of the New York Times says it all: From 104,413 felony arrests in 1978, there were 88,095 cases dismissed by district attorneys or treated as misdemeanors. Of the 16,318 resulting in indictment, 56 percent resulted in felony pleas, 16 percent in misdemeanor pleas, 13 percent in trials to verdict, 12 percent in dismissals and 3 percent in other dispositions.

Yet, under a mandatory or increased penalty for carrying law, gun owners are treated separately and distinctly as being more dangerous and more of a threat to society than perpetrators of violent crimes—simply for possessing or carrying a firearm without the requisite papers. In championing New York's tough Koch-Carey law, Mayor Ed Koch said contemptuously of gun owners, "Nice guys who own guns aren't nice guys." No such rancor was expressed about the city's criminal justice system where the chances of hardened criminals being arrested on felony charges are one in one hundred. And the chance of any given felony arrest ending in a prison sentence is one out of 108, according to the New York Times article.

In essence, a mandatory or increased sentence for firearms carrying convolutes the criminal justice system by making gun owners "criminals" subject to a severe, fixed jail sentence while murderers, robbers, rapists, drug pushers, and "white collar" or corporate thieves often go free. It reflects a world turned upside down, where criminals break laws with impunity and ordinary citizens face harsh punishment. Regrettably, such schemes divert scarce law enforcement resources from pursuing and apprehending violent criminals to surveilling citizens who have no violent intentions.

Such legislation invites police routinely to stop-and-frisk people randomly on the street on suspicion of firearms possession. In fact, the Police Foundation has called for the random use of metal detectors on the streets to apprehend people carrying firearms without authorization. In waiving the constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy, police would be empowered under the Police Foundation's blueprint for disarmament to "systematically stop a certain percentage of people on the streets...in business neighborhoods and run the detectors by them, just as you do at the airport. If the detectors produce some noise then that might establish probable cause for a search."

While admitting that such "police state" tactics would require "methods...that liberals instinctively dislike," government researchers James Q. Wilson and Mark H. Moore called for more aggressive police patrolling in public places, saying: "To inhibit the carrying of handguns, the police should become more aggressive in stopping suspicious people and, where they have reasonable grounds for their suspicions, frisking (i.e., patting down) those stopped to obtain guns. Hand-held magnet meters, of the sort used by airport security guards, might make the street frisks easier and less obtrusive. All this can be done without changing the law." (The Washington Post, April 1, 1981) Note, they said "people," not criminals.

In conclusion, mandatory or increased penalties for possession laws can only have the effect of creating scores of artificial gun-law criminals without disarming roughly 50,000 gun-wielding criminals who are terrorizing society. And its enforcement requires draconian punishment, a massive increase in the number of police, judges and prisons, violations of constitutional rights to privacy and against unreasonable searches and seizures, or more likely, a combination of all three.

Clearly, instead of imposing further penalties upon the law-abiding gun owner and gun purchaser, the proper approach is to impose mandatory punishment for the use of deadly weapons in the commission of violent crime. Instead of "taking guns off the streets," criminals must be removed from society.

The remedy, or any appropriate penalty, must be after the commission of an offense if the presumption of innocence is to be preserved.

THE GREATEST MYTH

Neal Knox
Executive Director
NRA Institute for Legislative Action

The greatest myth perpetrated by the advocates of repressive gun laws is that such laws reduce crime. They do not.

No empirical study of the effectiveness of gun laws has shown any positive effect— although, to the dismay of the prohibitionists, such studies have shown a negative effect. That is, in areas having lower levels of private firearms ownership, the robbery rates are almost invariably higher, presumably because criminals are aware that their intended victims are less likely to have the means with which to defend themselves.

Further, of all the gun laws enacted in the past 10 to 15 years—each promised by its advocates to result in a reduction of crime-not one city, not one state, has experienced a reduction in crime rates, nor even a reduced rate of crime growth in comparison to its neighboring cities and states without such laws.

If gun laws worked, the proponents of such laws would gleefully cite examples of lessened crime. Instead, they uniformly blame the absence of tougher or wider spread measures for the failures of the laws they advocated, and they cite two jurisdictions' gun laws as "working"—Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Yet crime has risen dramatically in the District of Columbia (the murder rate alone rising 17 percent), and not as much in the suburbs and neighboring cities. Indeed, handgun homicides have decreased more in Baltimore, without a handgun ban, than in Washington, D.C., attesting to the failure of the D.C. gun-ban legislation. In Massachusetts, violent crime state's stringent gun laws and the much-vaunted murder-rate simply mirrored that in the other New England states. Washington and Boston were, respectively, the seventh and fifth most violent big cities (pop. over 500,000) when their laws were passed. The 1980 data reveal they have moved into fourth and first places. Statewide, Massachusetts moved from 19th to 12th most violent.

The major visible effect of gun laws is an obvious burden upon the law-abiding, who pay for the follies of their lawmakers by spending time, money and effort to overcome bureaucratic red tape in order to continue owning and enjoying their guns. Needless to say, the criminal does not bother with the niceties of obeying the law—for a criminal is by definition someone who disobeys laws.

There is another visible effect of gun laws, one that burdens the tax-paying public, for gun laws must be administered by bureaucrats who provide nothing productive while draining the public treasury. Further, such laws are implemented and enforced by law enforcement officers who could far better spend their time and talents in the pursuit of criminals rather than investigations of the law-abiding and prosecution for victimless crimes such as simple possession or carrying of a firearm.

But there is an invisible effect of gun laws that may prove far more important than the visible, direct costs—that is, the social costs of increasing numbers of normally law-abiding citizens disobeying unpopular, irritating, or expensive gun laws. Such high social cost was paid during the era of the prohibition of alcohol, when a significant portion, if not the majority, of drinkers simply ignored Federal law. That era produced a generation of scofflaws, and provided fertile ground for the growth of organized crime syndicates that plague the nation a half-century later.

The evidence that gun laws are creating scofflaws is evident to anyone willing to look. In New York City, police estimate that there are two million illegal guns. In Washington, D.C., a recent mandatory re-registration law resulted in compliance by only a fraction of those who had previously registered their guns. The same massive noncompliance—not by criminals, whom no one expects will comply, but by the particular minority groups fearful of repression—is evident wherever stringent gun laws are enacted.

In exchange for such high costs, what have the nation's lawmakers achieved? Not an instance of a reduction in crimes of violence. There is evidence of increases in robberies and other offenses where potential victims are disarmed by governmental fiat.

Gun laws fail because they do not address the issue. The issue is not possession of firearms, but misuse of firearms.

And laws addressed directly to the question of misuse do work. When stiff, certain punishment is levied upon those who misuse firearms—and even when it is merely threatened—crime rates go down.

After adopting a mandatory penalty for using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime in 1975, Virginia's violent crime rate fell 19 percent in five years, murder fell 25 percent, and robbery declined 13 percent. South Carolina recorded a 19 percent decline in murder between 1975 and 1980, following passage of its 1976 mandatory penalty law, and Michigan's "use of a gun, go to jail" law has been credited by Detroit General Hospital doctors with a 50 percent drop in the number of gunshot wounds treated. The hospital study's statistics coincided with police figures—all showing reductions in the use of guns in homicide, rape and robbery, as those crimes fell dramatically in the state of Michigan and particularly in the city of Detroit. The murder rate, for example, fell 8 percent in the state and 10 percent in the city between 1976 and 1980, and robbery fell 8 percent statewide and 31 percent in Detroit itself during those years.

Yet in none of these areas has the mandatory sentencing been fully implemented, due to the reluctance of prosecutors and judges to give up their discretionary authority. Thus far, such astounding reductions in crime are due mainly to the threat of punishment—once the criminals become convinced that they need have no more fear of committing crimes with a gun than any other weapon, crime will again climb.

There is ample evidence that there is a solution to the crime problem, and a solution to the problem of criminal misuse of guns. That solution lies in the promise, not the mere threat, of swift, certain punishment. So

long as the lawmakers refuse to apply that solution, and instead attempt to control crime by controlling law-abiding gun owners, the nation's problems with crime and criminals will only increase.

Our challenge: To reform and strengthen our federal and state criminal justice systems. We must bring about a sharp reversal in the trend toward undue leniency and "revolving door justice." We must insist upon speedier trials and upon punishments which are commensurate with the crimes. Rehabilitation should be tempered with a realization that not all can be rehabilitated.

The job ahead will not be an easy one. The longer gun control advocates distract the nation from this task by embracing that single siren song, the longer it will take and the more difficult will be our job. Beginning is the hardest step, and the NRA Institute has taken it. Join NRA. Support ILA. Work with us. We need your help.

For further information write to:

NRA Institute for Legislative Action
1600 Rhode Island Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036

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© 1981 NRA Institute for Legislative Action

Permission to reprint
granted with appropriate credit to NRA Institute

Rev. 10/81

100M

Click to expand...

The Failure Of Federal Gun Control
by CARL BAKAL
from the Saturday Review, July 3, 1971.

Carl Bakal, a leading authority on gun control, is the author of The Right to Bear Arms (in paperback, No Right to Bear Arms).

Emphasized Phrases in this Article:

“Today, one new handgun is sold in the United States every thirteen seconds, and used handguns are being traded at the rate of more than two a minute.”

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“The total of our annual home-front firearms fatalities now amounts to 23,000—or, in a single year, more than one-half of all the combat deaths the U.S. military has suffered during our entire decade in Vietnam.”

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“The administration has played a not inconsequential role in the relentless efforts of the gun lobby to emasculate the 1968 act through the stratagem of having its provisions repealed bit by bit.”

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In the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, Congress enacted the Gun Control Act of 1968 to "provide for better control of the interstate traffic in firearms." Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on October 22, 1968, and dated to take effect on December 16, the landmark measure was the first federal gun control legislation of any consequence passed in three decades.

The new law virtually bans the interstate and mail-order shipment of firearms to individuals and forbids over-the-counter gun sales to minors. It also prohibits the possession of guns by convicted criminals and certain undesirables, and bars the importation of those cheap, concealable foreign handguns responsible for so much murder and mayhem in this country.

Yet, it is scarcely more difficult to get a gun today than it was before the new law went into effect two-and-a-half years ago. Almost anyone—even a murderer, a madman, an addict, an alcoholic, or another potential assassin— can still easily buy some sort of gun, including a $265.85 Remington deer rifle of the type used to kill the Reverend Dr. King and a $6 Iver Johnson pistol like the one involved in the murder of Senator Kennedy.

In fact, during recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the sale of guns and particularly handguns, which, though comprising only about a quarter of the roughly ninety million privately owned firearms thought to be in this country (some authorities put the figure as high as 200 million), now account for half of all our homicides and three-quarters of all firearms homicides. Whereas the annual sale of shotguns and rifles has doubled since 1963, the sale of handguns, few of which are usable for sporting purposes, has quadrupled, according to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which notes that drastic increases in gun purchases occur in areas that have experienced civil disorders. With twenty-four million handguns already in private hands, an additional two-and-a-half million are being manufactured domestically or imported every year. Today, one new handgun is sold in the United States every thirteen seconds, and used handguns are being traded at the rate of more than two a minute.

In Dallas, gun dealers say their handgun sales have more than doubled since the Gun Control Act of 1968 went into effect. "Before the gun law was passed, we were selling seventy-five to one hundred guns a month," says one dealer. "Now we average two hundred and fifty to three hundred sales a month." And Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade says, "If the gun law is having any effect, I can't tell what it is."

"I don't think that the gun law has cut down the availability any," says Jamie Moore, chief of police in Birmingham, Alabama, a state in which one dealer alone reported that his sales had tripled during the first six months the law was in effect.

Inevitably, crimes committed with guns across the nation have also shown a sharp increase. Armed robbery with guns increased from 99,000 in 1968 to 115,000 in 1969; aggravated assaults by gun increased from 65,000 to 73,000 and murder by gun from 8,900 to 9,400. Coincidentally, our 9,400 firearms homicides in 1969 equaled exactly the number of Americans killed in combat in Vietnam that year. When you add the nearly 3,000 annual domestic fatal victims of firearms accidents and the 10,500 gun suicides here, the total of our annual home-front firearms fatalities now amounts to 23,000—or, in a single year, more than one-half of all the combat deaths the U.S. military has suffered during our entire decade in Vietnam.

What is the reason for all this? What has happened to the law that was supposed to curtail this growing glut of guns and to "provide support to federal, state, and local law enforcement officials in their fight against crime and violence"?

The fact is that the Gun Control Act of 1968, although well-intended and widely heralded as a major step forward, is a sadly inadequate compromise law, one riddled with as many holes as a marksman's target. For example, a provision of the act did indeed stop the importation of the snub-nosed pistols and revolvers known as "Saturday night specials"—cheap, concealable guns of the kind that no sportsman and few police officers would want. Retailing for anywhere from $30 to $15 or even less, they had been coming into the United States (largely from West Germany, Italy, and Spain) at the rate of 750,000 a year, and were a favorite of the criminal, being used in no less than 50 per cent of all crimes involving guns, according to the National Commission on Violence.

However, the new law, while banning the importation of these guns, did not prohibit the importation of their parts. Hence, thanks to Yankee ingenuity, a quaint new "cottage industry" has sprung up in this country. Enterprising former importers have been assembling Saturday night specials here using parts from abroad and cheap local labor—in Miami, Cuban refugees are paid about $1.90 an hour— working in makeshift factories such as converted garages and even a church. In addition, some domestic manufacturers are producing these cheap handguns from parts made exclusively in the United States. As a result, total domestic production of these guns during 1970 was estimated to be about one million—or far more than -the annual flow of foreign guns that the 1968 law was supposed to stop.

In any number of specialized gun magazines or newspapers sold by subscription or on newsstands you can see mail-order advertisements for these guns', which therefore soon find their way to almost every part of our country.

But doesn't the Gun Control Act prohibit the interstate mail-order sale of these and other guns? Yes, an individual on his own cannot purchase or sell a gun across state lines. But there are no federal restrictions on gun shipments between licensed dealers in different states. Hence, if a person who lives in one state wishes to buy a gun available in another state, he can place an order for it through a federally licensed dealer in his home state. The dealer who has the gun then sends it to the dealer in the purchaser's state of residence. The purchaser can then pick up the gun from the dealer in his home state.

Under the act, any resident of a state can purchase a gun anywhere in his state provided he meets specified minimum age requirements (twenty-one for handguns and eighteen for long guns) and is not under indictment or has not been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year's imprisonment. Nor can he be a fugitive from justice, a narcotics addict or unlawful user of drugs, an adjudged or committed mental incompetent, or anyone else otherwise disqualified from gun ownership by state or local law. However, the federal law provides no foolproof way for gun dealers to check the background of a would-be purchaser or, for that matter, even to determine whether the person they are selling to is just who he says he is. A driver's license is usually considered sufficient identification to establish a person's name, address, and age. And so, any proscribed person can easily get a gun, as well as ammunition for it, by presenting false credentials or by simply lying. Another gaping loophole in the 1968 law is that any legal purchaser of a gun can, with virtually no risk of federal prosecution, resell or give it in his own state to virtually any other individual—a friend, a neighbor, even a total stranger, no matter how unsavory his background.

Aren't there state laws to screen out such persons? Unfortunately, most state gun laws are inadequate, nonexistent, or unenforceable. No states have any licensing laws that really restrict the purchase and possession of rifles or shotguns, and few states have any meaningful laws that apply to handguns. In fact, eight states have no law against felons buying firearms, and in thirty-five states lunatics can legally own guns. The National Commission on Violence rated New York, Massachusetts, and perhaps New Jersey as the only states with restrictive handgun licensing laws that are strictly enforced. The commission also noted that of the estimated twenty-four million handguns in this country, only about three to five million were covered by records maintained by the states. Yet, the new federal law has left it largely to the states to carry the burden of dealing with the menace of the handgun.

To safeguard themselves against the shortcomings of our ineffectual fed-eral and state laws, a number of municipalities, during the past few years, have enacted laws of their own aimed at restricting the sale of firearms and ammunition to their residents. For example, in 1965 Philadelphia passed an ordinance much stricter than the permissive Pennsylvania handgun licensing law. The tolerant state law imposed on would-be handgun purchasers only the minor inconvenience of having to wait forty-eight hours for delivery after filling out a perfunctory application form. But applicants were not required to furnish fingerprints or photographs; thus, no meaningful check could be made for a criminal record. On the other hand, under the city ordinance, those wishing to purchase any type of gun—shotguns and rifles as well as handguns—would have to apply for a police permit, furnishing fingerprints, photographs, and the firearm's serial number.

What effect has the ordinance had? From 1965 to 1969, criminal homicides in Philadelphia increased 32 per cent. However, this was far below the 47 per cent rise across the nation as a whole during the same period. Significantly, only 44 per cent of Philadelphia's murders in 1969 involved guns, slightly above the 43 per cent in 1965, whereas the average for the nation increased from 57 per cent in 1965 to 65 per cent in 1969. Perhaps even more noteworthy is the fact that during the six years the ordinance has been in effect permits have been denied to 779 persons out of a total of 27,858 would-be gun purchasers. Among the 779 prevented from purchasing guns locally have been 123 burglars, 48 robbers, 121 persons with convictions for aggravated assault and battery, 16 rapists, 7 habitual drunks, 15 narcotics addicts, 96 people with previous records for illegally carrying concealed and deadly weapons, 27 persons convicted of intent to kill—and 12 murderers.

The experience of Toledo, Ohio, has been equally dramatic. Only a few years ago, that city of 375,000 was known as the gun capital of the Midwest. Firearms of all kinds could be bought there not only at gun shops but at jewelry stores, supermarkets, and gasoline stations—with no questions asked—in contrast to the situation in Michigan, which requires a permit of sorts for the purchase of handguns. It is no wonder that the great majority of the guns used in the 1967 Detroit

riots came from nearby cities in such neighboring states as Ohio; indeed, many of the guns came from Toledo, only an hour away. A 1968 survey showed that of the 13,000 handguns sold by one Toledo dealer during a nine-month period no fewer than 5,448 went to Michigan residents.

In spite of repeated appeals from Toledo officials, the Ohio Legislature for years refused to enact a law that would control the unrestricted traffic in firearms. Finally, in August 1968, the Toledo City Council enacted an ordi-ance of its own that had been drafted by the city's chief counsel, John J. Burk-hart. Aimed especially at the Saturday night specials, the ordinance requires anyone in the city who owns or wishes to obtain a handgun to have an ID card (cost: $3). The cards, which are valid for three years, are issued to all applicants except minors under twenty-one, known fugitives, certified mental cases, narcotics addicts, habitual drunkards, and those with serious felony records.

In the twelve-month period prior to the passage of the ordinance, thirty-four murders were committed in Toledo, twenty-two of them, or 61 per cent, with handguns. Two years later, during the twelve-month period ending July 1970, the number of murders had dropped to twenty-six, fourteen of them, or 53 per cent, with handguns, this in the face of a sharp increase in the number of murders across the nation. Robberies and aggravated assaults involving handguns showed an equally dramatic drop. While crediting these decreases to all of the city's recently intensified efforts to reduce crime, Chief Counsel Burkhart, noting that half the gun outlets in town have gone out of business, observes, "The new gun law and the resultant greater unavailability of guns locally cannot help but be a big factor."

Since Louisville, Kentucky, enacted its ordinance requiring an eight-day waiting period to buy a handgun, armed robberies in that city have declined 9.5 per cent and assaults with firearms have also decreased. However, in other cities—such as Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami Beach—that have also enacted firearms ordinances of various kinds during the past few years, the effect of the laws is not yet so readily apparent, for one thing, because of the absence of equally stringent laws in surrounding or other nearby jurisdictions. For example, in commenting on Washington's strict law, which requires the registration of all firearms and limits ammunition purchases only to holders of registration certificates, Chief of Police Jerry V. Wilson says, "The only effect that this ordinance has had is that it has forced people to buy firearms in the suburbs."

Evidence to this effect comes from a 1969 Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee study of 177 sales of ammunition to District of Columbia residents—by gun dealers in nearby Maryland. An FBI check showed that at least sixty-six, or 37 per cent, of the ammunition purchasers had criminal arrest records. The study showed that ammunition was sold to persons convicted of such crimes as murder, armed robbery, assault, assault with a dangerous weapon, grand larceny, rape, and housebreaking, as well as to persons with a total of 203 arrests for misdemeanors—136 of them drunk charges.

Speaking for New York, Mayor John V. Lindsay says, "Our city is proud of its significant role in enacting firearms control legislation. But we are only one city, and the problem of gun trafficking is one that cuts across city and state boundaries." And a New York City police captain comments, "Hell, you can drive to Virginia, only two-hundred and fifty miles away, and see signs in hardware stores that say 'Hand-guns for sale; no restrictions.'"

In New York City, 83 per cent of a sample of handguns confiscated by the police were found to have been acquired outside the state. Similarly, in Massachusetts, where there are also strict gun controls, a ten-year study by the state police traced 87 per cent of the guns used in crimes in that state to purchases in other states.

Even today, it is quite simple for a Toledo resident—or anyone who says he is a Toledo resident—to circumvent his city's ordinance. To prove this for myself, I recently visited a large shopping center just one mile outside of Toledo's city limits. On display there, in addition to the customary food, clothing, furniture, and other usual household sundries, was a showcase filled with an array of glittering handguns. I selected a Harrington & Richardson Model 622 six-shot revolver, which was priced at $32.82. Before writing up the sale, the clerk, in accordance with the requirements of the 1968 federal law, asked me to show identification establishing that I was an Ohio resident and over twenty-one. I pulled out a driver's license that I had borrowed from a Toledo friend.

(It could just as well have been stolen.) The physical description on it bore no resemblance whatever to me. Had I decided to complete the transaction, I could have walked out and performed whatever mischief I wished.

Yet, it is reasonable to assume that any law, no matter how limited in scope, that prevents or makes it more difficult for dangerous or potentially dangerous persons to acquire firearms must have at least some effect. Belying charges, too, that gun laws are generally ineffective because criminals who want guns badly enough will go outside the law to get them anyway is the experience not only of Philadelphia but of New Jersey, which, hi August 1966, enacted a unique statewide law comparable to the Philadelphia ordinance. During the first two years the New Jersey law was in effect, approximately 7 per cent of the applicants for permits were found to have criminal records. In California, in a single year, police checks of gun dealer records thwarted 806 would-be purchasers—697 of them ex-convicts, seventy-four narcotics addicts, twenty-seven aliens, and eight minors.

Every reliable study indicates that where gun control laws are most stringent, the murder rate, as well as the percentage of murders involving firearms, is lower than in areas where gun laws are weak or non-existent and which, hence, have a greater number of guns per capita. Contrary to popular belief, New York City, despite its rising incidence of crime, actually ranked only tenth among the nation's fifteen largest metropolitan areas in 1969 in number of homicides per 100,000 population, according to FBI data. Philadelphia, also with a strict gun law, ranked eleventh, and Chicago seventh. Even the District of Columbia ranked as far down as sixth. At a rate of 9.4 violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, New York stood far behind Houston's 16.8, St. Louis's 14.3, Cleveland's 13.8, Baltimore's 13.4, and the 13.0 rate for Detroit —all cities with weak, if any, gun laws.

There is a similar correlation between state gun laws and homicides. New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, which have the strictest gun laws in the nation, are also among our most densely populated states (ranking among the top five) and have a high ethnic mix as well as other of the factors that, according to the FBI, should make for a high incidence of crime. Yet, in terms of murder rates, all three states rank fairly low, New York twenty-third in the nation. As to the percentage of murders committed by firearms, the three states are among the five lowest of our fifty states. On the other hand, Alaska, our most sparsely populated state and with no controls on the purchase of guns, has the nation's highest murder rate. Nevada, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina—all with a minimum of controls—are among the ten states with the highest murder rate and also have a relatively high percentage of murders committed with firearms. In Alaska and Texas, for example, the percentages are 71.4 and 68.7 respectively, compared to 31.8 in New York.

In spite of its shortcomings, even the federal 1968 Gun Control Act has had some salutary effects. During the first eighteen months the act was in force, the Internal Revenue Service, which polices the act, made 2,522 arrests for violations of it—more than four times the 599 arrests made during the previous eighteen months under the old and weaker federal firearms laws. Many of the violations were for failing to disclose criminal records or for using fictitious names when purchasing a gun.

Limited as it is, the new federal law also was responsible for the indictment of Angela Davis—until recently, one of the nation's ten "most wanted" fugitives—on charges of murder and kidnapping in connection with the celebrated San Rafael, California, courthouse shoot-out last August that took the lives of four persons, including a judge. Through records required by the Gun Control Act, four of the guns used in the shoot-out were traced to purchases made by Miss Davis.

With the number of federal prosecutions for violations of the law having tripled since 1968, even the Justice Department has conceded the usefulness of the new federal statute in bringing various offenders to book. Clearly, the inescapable conclusion again is that gun legislation that makes it easier to charge violations of the law must play a role in the prevention and detection of crime.

Who could possibly object to such legislation? Strangely enough, among those who do is none other than the administration itself, in spite of its vaunted concern over law and order and crime in the streets. The administration has hardly bothered to conceal its distaste for the 1968 statute—not because it is too weak, but rather because of the fanciful notion that it is too strong. Consequently, the administration has proposed no legislation whatever to plug the many loopholes in the law, not even the obviously needed measure to prohibit the escalating manufacture and sale of the cheap domestically produced handguns of the sort that, if foreign-made, would not meet the statute's present standards for importation.

In opposing gun registration and persisting in the fiction that gun control should be left a matter primarily for local and state regulation, President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell are apparently still of the view that their administration's political strength lies where the guns are: 59 per cent of Southerners own guns (which accounts for 72 per cent of their region's homicides), whereas only 34 per cent of Easterners are gun owners.

Thus, in April, at the centennial convention of the National Rifle Association, where the featured speaker was Senator Barry Goldwater, it was not surprising to hear NRA President Woodson Scott tell the assemblage that the NRA had been assured by "important members of the administration" that there would be no increased effort to curb the traffic in guns. This assurance presumably stemmed from a little-publicized mid-January White House meeting at which three top NRA officials met with administration staff members and various representatives of the gun lobby in a room across from President Nixon's office.

The gun lobby's ability to reach into the halls of the high and mighty is also indicated by the fact that a gun club, affiliated with the NRA, now operates right out of Defense Secretary Melvin Laird's office, which, among other things, also serves as a focal point in the nation's capital for lobbying against gun controls.

Indeed, the administration has played a not inconsequential role in the relentless efforts of the gun lobby to emasculate the 1968 act through the stratagem of having its provisions repealed bit by bit. So successful have these efforts been that in November 1969—less than a year after the act went into effect—Congress, in a move supported by the administration and without a minute of hearings, repealed the act's requirement that a person buying shotgun shells and high-power rifle ammunition go through the minor inconvenience of furnishing the dealer with his name, address, age, and verifying identification. In protesting the repeal, Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, who had guided the act through the House, noted that, in the previous year, shotgun and rifle ammunition had been responsible for the murder of 1,600 Americans. Also pointed out was the fact that ammunition controls had been included in the act only after thirty-five days of public hearings at which 154 witnesses had appeared, and that the full Senate had approved the controls after six weeks of debate.

The campaign this year is to exempt 22 caliber rim-fire ammunition, too, with no fewer than seventeen bills already introduced in the 92nd Congress to this effect. This is in spite of the fact that millions of revolvers and pistols, including many of the Saturday night specials, as well as most rifles, use this kind of ammunition, which accounts for about 70 per cent of the ammunition produced and sold in America, yet is rarely used for hunting. On the other hand, it is the most criminally abused ammunition, the kind most often used in armed robberies, as well as in no less than 3,300 murders in 1968, one of the victims having been Senator Robert F. Kennedy. At least half a dozen bills have also been introduced in the 92nd Congress to repeal the 1968 act entirely.

In contrast to these efforts to nibble the 1968 act to death, none of the many bills introduced during the past few years to strengthen the federal law has met with any success, although repeated polls have shown that an overwhelming majority of the public favors a law far more stringent. Two-thirds to 81 per cent of the American people, according to the Harris and the Gallup polls, approve of the registration of all firearms and the licensing of all gun owners. The majority polled by Gallup is also in favor of a law requiring a person to obtain a police permit before he or she may buy a gun.

Provisions of this sort have been incorporated into a bill by Senator Edward M. Kennedy that would require the registration of all firearms and the licensing of all gun owners. In addition, the bill would ban the domestic production, sale, and possession of all handguns not designed for sporting use—that is, the kind commonly used in holdups and other crimes. Going even further, a bill introduced by Representative Abner J. Mikva of Illinois would ban handguns of any kind for virtually all but law enforcement officers and the military.

Essentially, the same proposals have been included in the various recommendations of a procession of four prestigious Presidential commissions in the past four years. Serving on or heading up these commissions has been a bipartisan array of some of the nation's most distinguished and knowledgeable citizens, including two Attorneys General under Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson, and Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of the late President and president emeritus of Johns Hopkins University. However, the findings of the commissions have been generally ignored. Last November Dr. Eisenhower, who headed the National Commission on Violence, declared that

the United States held "the distinction of being the clear leader in violent crime among modern stable nations," as well as of having the highest gun-to-population ratio in the world, and stated, "I continue to be perplexed by the blind, emotional resistance that greets any proposal to bring this senseless excess under control." And as recently as May 26, 1971, he warned a Senate subcommittee that "there are arsenals being built up by the extreme Right and the extreme Left," and sadly concluded, "but from the Executive Branch, which brought us [the commission] into being, there has been almost total silence."

The hypocritical attitude of the administration was exemplified by the White House conference of law enforcement officers held on June 3 to discuss means of coping with the recent rash of killings of policemen. Conspicuously missing from the invitation list, which included police chiefs and sheriffs from such places as Brighton, Colorado, Toms River, New Jersey, and Oneida, New York, was the head of the nation's largest police force, New York City Police Commissioner Patrick V. Murphy, although of the fifty-one policemen killed so far this year, most of them with handguns, seven were on the New York force. As a frequent and outspoken advocate of strong federal gun control legislation, Murphy by his vigorous presence would have been embarrassing to President Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell, who at the meeting reiterated their opposition to further gun controls and, as their only solution to the problem of police killings, called for legislation to provide $50,000 to the family of any policeman unfortunate enough as to be slain in the future.

Certainly, there can be no question that the overwhelming public majorities that say they favor strict firearms controls, qf_the sort long in practice in twenty-nine European countries, also seem unwilling to compel the national commitment necessary to implement such controls via political pressure and ultimately the ballot. As David Steinberg, executive director of the National Council for a Responsible Firearms Policy, has put it, "They seem to be waiting for a White House initiative that will not come soon—or another shock to the national conscience."

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Even today, it is quite simple for a Toledo resident—or anyone who says he is a Toledo resident—to circumvent his city's ordinance. To prove this for myself, I recently visited a large shopping center just one mile outside of Toledo's city limits. On display there, in addition to the customary food, clothing, furniture, and other usual household sundries, was a showcase filled with an array of glittering handguns. I selected a Harrington & Richardson Model 622 six-shot revolver, which was priced at $32.82. Before writing up the sale, the clerk, in accordance with the requirements of the 1968 federal law, asked me to show identification establishing that I was an Ohio resident and over twenty-one. I pulled out a driver's license that I had borrowed from a Toledo friend. (It could just as well have been stolen.) The physical description on it bore no resemblance whatever to me. Had I decided to complete the transaction, I could have walked out and performed whatever mischief I wished.

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GUN WEEK
DECEMBER 15, 1967
Vol. 2, Issue No. 56

Illinois-Type Law May Be Presented To Ohio Assembly

The Ohio Legislature may be asked to vote on a gun control bill similar to that of Illinois in which the gun owner, rather than the guns, are registered, according to a Dayton, Ohio, newspaper report.

An article by Richard Zimmerman, the same writer who joined the NRA under the name of a convicted murderer, said a legislative committee studying riot control legislation will likely ask the General Assembly to consider the Illinois-type approach to gun controls.

The article quoted Rep. Robert Levitt, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, as saying gun control legislation is not dead in the state.

It was the House Judiciary Committee which last session killed a proposed gun control bill presented by former Rep. Carl Stokes, now mayor of Cleveland.

Levitt said the Illinois – type law provides that anyone possessing a gun be required to obtain a $5 identification card. The law prohibits certain undesirables from being eligible to obtain or keep the gun buyers' ID card.

The article said new legislation probably would not be permitted to be introduced when the session reopens in January, but since there are three gun control bills still pending, any one of them could be amended to include the concept contained in the Illinois bill.

A hearing on gun control legislation was slated to be held in Toledo on Dec. 8 by the Judiciary Committee.

The committee is holding hearings in cities around the state on advisability of enacting stricter "law and order" statutes, according to Rep. John Galbraith, a sponsor of one of the bills favoring strict firearms controls.

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GUN WEEK
Friday, December 15, 1967
Page Sixteen

New York City Rally Set To Fight State Proposal

A newly - formed group known as the " Citizens League for Honest Government" is planning to stage a rally on Dec. 16 at the New York City Hall in its first step to fight the statewide gun registration bill to be introduced in the next session of the New York State Legislature (Gun Week, Dec. 1).

The rally, the second held by the group, will begin at 11 a.m. at the City Hall Plaza.

A news release by the new organization said the group was formed in the "disgusted lack of success by citizens in the past in making our legislators aware of the lawful citizens who will be hurt by the unreasonableness of the newly acquired gun control legislation in New York."

"We have decided to change our tactics" a spokesman for the group said.

The spokesman added, "We are hindered by the press and television. Any time we make an intelligent presentation, it ends up on the cutting room floor, or else, no mention of our presentation is seen in print.

"To say we are disenchanted is an understatement. The previous efforts to play the game by the rules, which are bent and twisted to make the gun owner and sportsman seem to be irrational adolescents and 'weirdos,' has caused the Citizens League for Honest Government to duly authorize the 'Sportsmen's Political Action Committee' to demonstrate the voting power of aggrieved sportsmen in ways which can't be misrepresented or concealed or ignored by the politicians."

"There's nothing like looking at thousands of irate citizens to know that we're not the kooks and powder puff punks that some politicians say we are," the spokesman concluded.

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GUN WEEK
Friday, December 15, 1967
Page Nine

Caseless Cartridge Photos Shown
By Gun Week Staff

Additional details and photographs of Smith & Wesson's closely guarded caseless cartridge, which was test-fired for a group of financial writers Nov. 2, (Gun Week, Nov. 24) have been obtained from the company.

The electrically fired caseless round, which consists of plug of solid propellant moulded to a bullet, was fired in a modified S&W 9 mm. submachinegun at a cyclic rate of 640 rounds per minute, slightly below the gun's published cyclic rate with conventional 9 mm. Luger ammo.

Velocity is reported to equal that of the standard ammunition.

Ignition is supplied by small dry cell batteries which were contained in a box between the trigger guard and magazine on the test gun.

According to a press release, the caseless cartridge "produces less recoil . . . because the caseless propellant burns more slowly, imparting a rocket- like action to the projectile."

The statement said the development offers "prospects of much lower costs for both military and recreational small arms ammunition, as well as greatly improved, almost foolproof performance of small arms."

Although details of the system are not known, the propellant is fired by electrical contact through the center of the face of the bolt, perhaps by heating high-resistance wires imbedded in the propellant.

A photograph of the bolt face shows a projecting stud of approximately bullet diameter which apparently extends about 3/4-inch into the chamber. No gas control devices are visible, although a slight flare can be seen where the bolt stud joins the bolt proper.

An insulated electrode, which does not appear to project beyond the smooth bolt face, can be seen on the "firing head" in the photo.

However, a photograph of the test gun with the bolt partially open does not indicate a projecting stud of the same type.

Smith & Wesson personnel have given no other information about the system or the propellant, other than to say, "It works."

This Smith & Wesson Model 76 9 mm. submachinegun has been modified to fire the company's new electrically fired caseless cartridge. The only apparent external differences are an on-off safety switch on the left pistol grip, a battery box forward of the trigger guard, and conduit leading to an electrical terminal on the receiver tube above the magazine.

The bolt of the S&W caseless cartridge prototype submachine-gun has a projecting stud, termed the "electrical firing head," on which an insulated electrode is visible where a firing pin would normally be. Notice that there is no provision for extraction of an unfired round, although extraction would be needed only in case of a misfire since the Model 76 submachinegun fires from an open bolt position. On standard models the bolt is back when the trigger is pulled, causing the bolt to move forward, stripping a round from the magazine, and firing as the round is chambered.

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GUN WEEK
1 DECEMBER 1967
PAGES 1 & 2

Rockefeller Calls For Licensing Of Long Guns In New York State

New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called for uniform statewide registration and licensing requirements for possession and sale of rifles and shotguns in a speech in New York City on Nov. 13.

Speaking at the opening session of a two-day conference organized by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Rockefeller said he would make the proposal to the New York State legislature as part of a planned anti-crime program.

The governor, frequently mentioned as a presidential candidate, said he would also ask for "statewide uniformity and more effective control over licenses for pistols, including the requirement for periodic renewal of permits."

Rockefeller added that he will ask for "safety education and safety certificates as a prerequisite to the issuance of pistol permits and a basic safety test for those who want to possess other weapons.

"And I will ask the legislature to memorialize Congress to strengthen interstate controls over the sale and shipment of guns.

"We need federal protection because no state or city can control gun traffic alone.

"For example, in a few weeks before the riots broke out in Newark, almost 700 New Jersey residents side-stepped the state's law and bought guns in four adjoining states."

Discussing the consolidation of some of the state's 600 separate police departments, the governor said that while this force represents the "backbone of our effort to control crime . . . we cannot be content with the fragmented approach it now offers."

Rockefeller said he would recommend the legislature provide state funds to help departments consolidate or to share such essential services as detective bureaus.

The governor also said he plans to recommend providing direct financial aid for the capital equipment of consolidated departments.

Other recommendations which the governor said he plans to submit to the legislature include:

Authorization of a state study to consider the use of non-lethal weapons by law enforcement agencies.

Legislation authorizing the use of 'wiretapping and electronic surveillance to combat organized crime.

Revision of the new penal law, to "clarify and improve" a controversial section dealing with the use of deadly force by law enforcement officials and private citizens.

The governor said he would "recommend amendments broadening the authority for a police officer to use force, as is necessary and appropriate, to defend himself or apprehend a dangerous criminal and for the citizen to defend himself or his family."

Under the present penal law, which went into effect Sept. 1, a policeman generally may use his gun only when he believes a criminal is employing a deadly force or is endangering the life of a victim.

The old penal law authorized a policeman to use his gun, if necessary, against a criminal involved in the commission of any felony.

When asked if he considered crime a national emergency, Rockefeller answered, "It is not a national emergency, but it is a number one concern of the American people — fear for their safety in the home and on the streets."

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GUN WEEK Vol 2 Issue 55
DECEMBER 1, 1967

New York Gun License Law Signed; Mayor Plans Fee Hike Up To $25
…
Permit Needed After Feb. 12

New York City Mayor John Lindsay on Nov. 14 signed into law the toughest gun control regulation in the nation, an ordinance requiring the licensing and registration of all rifles and shotguns in the city.

He immediately announced plans to increase the council-approved $3 licensing fee, possibly to as much as $25 for the three-year license, before the law goes into effect Feb. 12.

At a 90-minute public hearing prior to the signing, 10 opponents of the bill asked him to veto the measure. Laurence Miscall Jr., counsel for the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, predicted that the fee, which he said should be called a tax, "would be increased to the point of confiscation."

A few minutes later Mayor Lindsay said his budget director had told him that the cost of processing the estimated 300,000 to 500,000 firearms owners in the city would cost as much as $25 each.

"Therefore, I've requested that the corporation counsel prepare legislation for prompt introduction into the City Council which would have the effect of increasing the proposed $3 application fee to a figure bearing a more reasonable relationship to the expected cost."

Although a license will be required to purchase a rifle or shotgun after Feb. 12, gun owners will have an additional six-month grace period to obtain the license and register rifles and shotguns previously purchased.

"This is the most comprehensive long gun control law ever enacted. It is urgently needed and long overdue." Mayor Lindsay said.

He added that he believed citizens "with a competence to own arms have a right to buy rifles or shotguns. I also believe that the right should be qualified, as this law would qualify it. so as to recognize the dangers inherent in such weapons and the need for increased protection of the public in an urban society."

Mayor Lindsay said the "relatively inconsequential inconveniences to the present and future owners of rifles and shotguns, which this bill undoubtedly imposes, will be more than offset by its advantages to the city as a whole."

The bill, introduced in the city council by its president. Frank O'Connor, in late September as Intro. 485, was co-sponsored by a majority of the council.

It represented an amalgamation of several different approaches to firearms control, including the proposals of advocates of an identification card - license system entitling ownership of numerous guns, registration of each gun. controls upon the sale of ammunition, and variations of these basic themes.

By lumping all the approaches into a single bill, the firearms control advocates were able to present a united front. After public hearings, on Oct. 24 the Committee on City Affairs approved the bill with minor changes, including the elimination of a provision which would have prohibited the sale of any publications containing advertisements for guns which could be purchased by mall.

The bill was approved Nov. 2 by a 26-10 vote which unleashed a series of attacks by jubilant council members upon the bill's opponents. One council member, Theodore Weiss, said "The behavior of the leadership of the National Rifle Association was that of high-class punks."

The only NRA official to testify was Vice President Woodson Scott, who said he was representing local groups and not the NRA.

There were reports that immediately after the vote some 10,000 copies of the bill were sent to officials in other cities in the state in an attempt to promote the passage of similar local ordinances.

Under the new ordinance, no firearms dealer or individual may sell a rifle or shotgun after Feb. 12 to any resident who does not hold a firearms owner license. Non-residents may buy guns but they must be shipped to the buyer's home.

After Aug. 12, no resident may possess a gun without having applied for the license and registration certificates for each firearm. During the hearings city officials estimated the flood of applications may require more than a year to process.

After Feb. 12, 1969, no ammunition may be sold or given to any person who does not present a license and certificate of registration for a gun using that type of ammunition.

The certificates of registration and gun License must be carried whenever the gun is carried.

The licenses may be obtained by making an application to the new Firearms Control Board including the applicant's name, birth date, residence, physical condition, occupation, a statement that he complies with all requirements for gun ownership, duplicate photographs taken within 30 days, two affidavits "setting forth his good character and repute in the community," three sets of fingerprints, and "any other information required by the Control Board to process the application."

Licenses will be denied to convicted felons, persons under 18, mental defectives, habitual drunkards, narcotics addicts; or persons who have been confined to a hospital or institution for treatment of mental illness, alcoholism or drug addiction, unless he has a written statement from a psychiatrist "that the applicant is a sound person to possess a rifle or shotgun without danger of harm to himself or any other person."

Licenses would also be denied to a person who "suffers from a physical defect or sickness which which would make it unsafe for him to handle firearms" unless the applicant had a statement from a physician that the defect would not interfere with the use of a firearm.

Finally, denial would be allowed where a permit "would not be in the interests of public health, safety or welfare."

The ordinance calls for issuance or denial within 30 days of submission of the application, with rejections subject to appeal to a special review board which would include two representatives of sportsmen's organizations, two city law enforcement officers and two non-shooters.

However, according to testimony of city officials during the hearings, it may take a year or more to process the expected flood of applications.

Among the exemptions to the law are provisions for transients to carry firearms through the city, provided they do not remain more than 48 hours; authorization for club or school rifle team members to possess DCM target rifles without a permit; and minors under 16 [or 18? -- not sure, OCRer] to use firearms under supervision of licensed persons.

Dealers in rifles and shotguns will be required to obtain licenses at a fee of $50 per year, maintain records of all firearms and ammunition sales, and store and display arms in accordance with city regulations.

Firearms incapable of being fired, or which do not use fixed ammunition, or of a design produced prior to 1894 for which ammunition is not commercially available, are excluded from the law.

During the month of June each year unlicensed and unregistered firearms may be voluntarily surrendered without penalty by complying with certain requirements.

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The Washington Post
Nov 18, 1969
Page A2

House Seen Voting To Revise Gun Act
By Richard L. Lyons Washington Post Staff Writer

The House indicated yesterday that it will go along with a Senate action exempting rifle and shotgun ammunition from the record-keeping provisions of the 1968 Gun Control Act.

It did so by agreeing to a conference with the Senate on a bill extending the interest equalization tax, even though the House was given notice that its conferees will almost certainly accept the nongermane ammunition amendment added to the bill, by the Senate.

The 313-to-36 vote to go to conference was not a clear test of strength on the issue. The motion was worded in the traditional fashion that the conferees would try to maintain the House version, which made no mention of ammunition.

But Rep. Wilbur D. Mills (D-Ark.), who will head, the House conferees, had already said he expected his group would accept the Senate provision. The fact that gun control supporters made no effort to instruct Mills to stand fast indicated they had no hope of winning.

When the Gun Control Act was before Congress last year, the House voted to exempt long-gun ammunition from the record-keeping requirements. But the Senate voted to require that records be kept of all ammunition sales and its version was accepted in conference.

Since then, Congress has received heavy mail from sportsmen and dealers arguing that the Treasury regulation requiring that eight points of identifying information be listed whenever a box of shells is sold is an unreasonable, burden.

The Treasury Department told Sen. Wallace Bennett (R-Utah), who sponsored the exemption in the Senate, that keeping records of rifle and shotgun ammunition sales had proved of little help in law enforcement.

But Sen. Thomas J. Dodd (D-Conn.), leading Senate advocate of gun control, said a survey made by his staff within a few hours showed record keeping could help law enforcement.

He said a check of nearby Maryland gun stores showed that 37 per cent of 177 ammunition sales to District residents were made to persons with criminal records. Policing the records could lead to convictions for illegal purchases —where it is a crime for felons to buy ammunition—and help reduce it, he said.

Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.), chief House sponsor of gun-control legislation, warned that the Senate "may contemplate piecemeal destruction" of the Gun Control Act. Bennett has said he will next try to exempt .22 caliber rimfire ammunition, which is used by both rifles and handguns. This is still covered by the law.

Celler said that 1,600 persons were murdered in this country last year by rifles and shotguns. Another 3,000 were killed by .22 caliber rimfire bullets out of a total of 8,900 homicides by gunfire.

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