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The Armed M is a publication of the 2nd Amendment SIG, a special interest group of American Mensa Ltd. Opinions expressed herein are the opinions of the writers, and not of American Mensa, Ltd. which has no opinions. This newsletter is linked to the Mensa web page WWW.Mensa.org as WWW.webcatt.com/2ndAmend_SIG

I have moved and am now in Wilmington North Carolina. My e-mail address is Smith13@Worldnet.att.net. I can always use contributions to the newsletter. If you write something or find something e-mail it to me I'll put it in the newsletter as space and theme allows.. Bob Smith

I need some help. I am running for county commissioner locally as a Libertarian. I need some funds so I was thinking of raffling off a class three weapon. It should get good resources and national coverage. Have any of you any experience in obtaining legally a class three weapon?

There's a reason the Founding Fathers considered the right to bear arms fundamental in a free society. A couple of recent unrelated incidents should bring this home to all of us.

In Seattle last week, the local government, faced with widespread civil disobedience over the city's hosting of the World Trade Organization conference declared a state of emergency, a curfew and even went so far as to ban the use of gas masks by anyone except police.

Now, in case you hadn't considered this before, gas masks are not weapons. They can only be used to defend oneself, usually from tear gas fired by government police. Now imagine you lived in Seattle and had some urgent business. Perhaps you have an asthmatic son or daughter with a doctor's appointment. You live outside the immediate area of protests, but as a precaution against what could be a life-threatening attack to your child, you feel compelled to break out the gas mask collecting dust in the basement.

It's arbitrary. It's capricious. And I say it's unconstitutional. And the Constitution doesn't even explicitly guarantee the right to bear strictly defensive tools such as a gas mask. I think many, if not most, people -- left and right -- would agree with me.

Nevertheless, there is still, somehow broad debate in this country about whether the Constitution really means what it says about firearms. I don't get it.

Some of the anti-gun, anti-Constitution, anti-freedom crowd looks at it this way: "Yeah, it's in the Constitution. But the Constitution is outdated and in need of changes -- especially the Second Amendment. Our first priority needs to be to protect people from violence. If we take the guns away from ordinary people, they will be safer and more secure. They can rest easy knowing the government will protect them."

Of course, the facts, the statistics, the evidence just doesn't bear out any such theory. On the contrary, the only cold, calculating, objective, scientific research conducted in this area, by Dr. John Lott, shows just the opposite to be the case -- more guns mean less crime.

But put that aside for a moment and consider a recent development in a police shooting case in Claremont, Calif. Last January, Irvin Landrum Jr., 18, was stopped for a traffic violation. The cops say Landrum pulled a gun on them, so they shot him and killed him. The family never bought the story and filed a lawsuit suggesting the police shot the kid and planted a gun on him.

It turns out ballistics tests showed the gun was not fired that night. It had no fingerprints on it. And the last traceable owner was the late police chief of a neighboring town.

I don't know about you, but I believe the kid was shot three times by the cops and the .45 was dropped on him. It happens. You see, some cops are crooked. Some cops are dishonest. Some cops are even unbalanced, untrustworthy and unqualified to carry a gun. And even more of them are unsuited to that role if and when the police hold a monopoly on firepower.

When some nut climbs a tower somewhere and shoots innocent people, too many Americans begin clamoring to take away guns from perfectly law-abiding citizens who need them to protect themselves as well as to protect our own liberty from the creeping police state. When a nutty cop goes berserk and kills innocent people -- and it happens -- I never hear anyone suggesting we disarm all police.

True self-government requires an armed citizenry. If the government holds a monopoly on force, tyranny is only a shot away.

Nor can we ever tolerate American City governments, state governments or federal government suspending the constitutional rights of free people. The WTO be damned. Let the organization meet in China. Let it hire its own private security force to protect Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton. We shouldn't suspend the Constitution to protect people who would like to shred it permanently.

Remember, gas masks don't kill people. Overbearing, unchecked, heavily armed governments kill people.

I will tell you, my son, that the government of the United States, your country, has evolved in some very unhealthy ways. Most of the politicians are not religious and have taken up worshiping the government. Regardless of party, power over your life is their objective. They wish to control your future and the future of your grandchildren. The image they hold of the future is one in which you and your grand children are dependent on the government for your personal security. They know you will begin to resent this sooner or later. Therefore they want you to have as little power to resist them as possible. This means they want you to have no firearms. The have confiscated firearms in your country in New York City, Cleveland, Connecticut and California. Under various pretexts they confiscate firearms whenever they can use every excuse. They plan to do this across the whole country. My father foresaw this.

When he died he did not mention any firearms in his will. I and my brothers and sisters sat down at a table and parceled out guns and ammunition to each of us. If the government wants to know about my father's guns they can try asking him. Of course, once you are dead the government cannot get answers out of you. And you can no longer be prosecuted or imprisoned.

I will parcel out my guns to all of you, my children, provided you promise never to voluntary or involuntarily register them with any government local, state, or federal. I will leave you a thousand rounds of ammunition for each firearm.

As each of you goes through life I would like you to keep any record of firearm ownership out of the hands of the government. Avoid registration any way you can. When you trade firearms with your friends make sure they are indeed your friends. You should know your friends very well, which means having only a few good ones. Having bad friends is the most dangerous thing you can do in life.

When you trade a firearm for a similar firearm—say a .38 S&W for a .38 S&W, you have effectively changed the serial number on the .38 you own. So it is more difficult for the government to know who has what gun.

When you obtain a firearm from another person do not keep any record of the transaction. Then store that firearm away from your residence for a long period of time. In case you were set up, the evidence will not be in your possession.

Store your firearms securely. I have a cousin named Francis Drake who is a little bit on the wicked side. He stores his firearms protected by a 2000-volt electrical charge. Fran has done some things to politicians who are anti-gun that I of course would never do. One of his representatives kept introducing gun bills. Fran had all kinds of things delivered to his house, like gravel, sand, and lumber. He had a call girl go to the representative's house at 3 AM. Fran made sure the politician never knew who did these things and never knew why they were done. Soon the other politicians began to notice that the politician had started to behave strangely. And he was a lot less effective in doing anything, including waging his anti-gun crusade. With anonymous phone calls, Fran set up another anti-gun politician to be investigated on gun charges. When Fran's police chief called him a "Neanderthal", Fran got back at him by not saying things that would have helped the chief in his official duties with the chief's enemies.

My children, in all areas of your life you must follow a strategy of resisting government power of any kind. So you must vote in every election, and you must support those politicians who will reduce the government's power over your life by helping to finance and run their campaigns for political office. If you can bear the company, become useful to the political party in your area. Get a hold of their supporter’s list and try to meet these people. Every once in a while you can get a politician's attention by talking to his supporters.

You should serve on a jury every chance you get. In any case where the government is trying to prosecute someone for a paper crime, such as failing to fill our a firearms registration form, say nothing but vote not guilty regardless of the judge's instructions. Judging the correctness of the law as well as the actions of the accused is your moral duty, and it is an established principle in American jurisprudence. All judges say you have to do as they say, but you don't. You are the real judge in a trial, and you should never convict anyone who is simply trying to live free.

You should exercise your rights every chance you get, regardless of whether you have done any thing illegal or not, and regardless of how you have to do it. One time a policeman asked me to let him search the trunk of my car. I told him the lock fell out and he would need a screwdriver. He did not search the trunk.

Finally, my children, you should serve on any boards or commissions you can get appointed to. And always, always in everyday life, as a voter, or as an official of any kind speak up for, and work toward, more freedom. If you do this, your own children--and they're children, and theirs—will thank you and bless your memory.

Greetings. We've recently seen a tirade of stories about "hidden" identification codes and what many would consider to be surreptitious centralized information flowing from various popular Internet products and packages. These have tended to highlight an important truth--whether or not users really would be concerned about the particular identifiers or data involved, they tend to get the most upset when they feel that an effort was made to perform such functions "behind their backs." While it can be argued how routine, intrusive, or even mundane and innocent a particular case may be, it's certainly true that people feel a lot better when they know what's going on.

This issue isn't restricted only to the Internet world. A case in point-- the recurring rumors floating around regarding the presence or absence of identification codes in color copies (or color prints xerographically generated from computer output systems).

A recent story involved a customer who was refused permission to make a color copy of his driver's license (to deal with an identification problem with his local telephone company). A Kinko's (copying center) worker reportedly told him that such a copy was "illegal," and could be traced back to the store through a "hidden ID."

Regardless of whether or not the Kinko's employee was being overzealous in his interpretation of the rules, what's really going on here regarding a so-called hidden ID code?

In fact, rumors about this, often chalked up as an "urban legend," have been circulating for a long time. This is a bit ironic, given that in the copier/printer industry it's been well known for years--no secret--that "invisible" IDs *are* imprinted on virtually all color xerographic output, from (apparently) all of the manufacturers. But for persons outside of "the trade," this hasn't been as widely known (even though the issue goes back to the early 90's, and the topic has appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal). However, it does not appear that the privacy-related aspects of this technology have ever been subject to significant public discussion.

In an effort to pin down the current state of the art in this area, I had a long and pleasant chat with one of Xerox's anti-counterfeiting experts, who is the technical product manager for several of their color-copying products. The conversation was quite illuminating. Please note that the details apply only to Xerox products, though we can safely assume similar systems from competing manufacturers, although their specific policies may differ.

Years ago, when the potential for counterfeiting of valuable documents on color copiers/xerographic printers became apparent in Japan (where such machines first appeared) manufacturers were concerned about negative governmental reaction to such technology. In an effort to stave off legislative efforts to restrict such devices, various ID systems began being implemented at that point. At one stage for at least one U.S. manufacturer, this was as crude as a serial number etched on the underside of the imaging area glass!

Modern systems, which are now reportedly implemented universally, use much more sophisticated methods, encoding the ID effectively as "noise" repeatedly throughout the image, making it impossible to circumvent the system through copying or printing over a small portion of the image area, or by cutting off portions of printed documents. Effectively, I'd term this as sort of the printing equivalent of "spread spectrum" in radio technology.

To read these IDs, the document in question is scanned and the "noise" decoded via a secret and proprietary algorithm. In the case of Xerox-manufactured equipment, only Xerox has the means to do this, and they require a court order to do so (except for some specific government agencies, for which they no longer require court authorizations). I'm told that the number of requests Xerox receives for this service is on the order of a couple a weeks from within the U.S.

The ID is encoded in all color copies/prints from the Xerox color copier/printer line. It does not appear in black and white copies. The technology has continued to evolve, and it is possible that it might be implemented within other printing technologies as well (e.g. inkjet). At one time there were efforts made to also include date/time stamps within the encoded data, but these were dropped by Xerox (at least for now) due to inconsistencies such as the printer clocks not being set properly by their operators, rendering their value questionable.

It's interesting to note that these machines also include other anti-counterfeiting measures, such as dumping extra cyan toner onto images when the unit believes it has detected an attempt to specifically copy currency. These techniques have all apparently been fairly successful--the Secret Service has reported something on the order of a 30% drop in color copying counterfeiting attempts since word of such measures has been circulating in the industry. The average person might wonder who the blazes would ever accept a xerographic copy of money in any case... but apparently many persons is not very discerning. I'm told that the Secret Service has examples in their files of counterfeit currency successfully passed that was printed on *dot matrix* printers. So counterfeiting is certainly a genuine problem.

OK, so now you know--the IDs are there. The next question is, what does this really mean? Obviously the vast majority of uses for color copies are completely innocuous or even directly beneficial to the public good (e.g. whistleblowers attempting to expose a fraud against the public). Is it acceptable for an ID to be embedded in all color copies just to catch those cases? The answer seems to be, it depends.

In some cases, even having an ID number doesn't necessarily tell you who currently owns the machine. While some countries (e.g. China) do keep tight reign on the ownership and transfer of such equipment, there is no "registration" requirement for such devices in the U.S. (though the routine servicing realities of large units might well create something of a de-facto registration in many situations).

Xerox points out that non-color copies (at least on their machines) have no IDs, and that most copying applications don't need color. It is however also true that as the prices of color copiers and printers continue to fall, it seems only a matter of time before they become the "standard" even for home copying, at which time the presence of IDs could cover a much vaster range of documents and become increasingly significant from a routine privacy standpoint.

It's also the case that we need to be watchful for the "spread" of this technology, intended for one purpose, into other areas or broader applications (what I call "technology creep"). We've seen this effect repeatedly with other technologies over the years, from automated toll collection to cell phone location tracking. While there is currently no U.S. legislative requirement that manufacturers of copier technology include IDs on color copies, it is also the case that these manufacturers have the clear impression that if they do not include such IDs, legislation to require them would be immediately forthcoming.

It is important to be vigilant to avoid such perceived or real pressures from causing possibly intrusive technology creep in this area. In the copier case, that ID technology being used for color copies *could* be adapted to black and white copies and prints as well. The addition of cheap GPS units to copiers could provide not only valid date/time stamps, but also the physical *locations* of the units, all of which could be invisibly encoded within the printed images.

Pressures to extend the surveillance of commercial copyright enforcement take such concepts out of the realm of science fiction, and into the range of actual future possibilities. What many would consider to be currently acceptable anti-counterfeiting technology could be easily extended into the realm of serious privacy invasions. It would only require, as Dr. Strangelove once said, "The will to do so."

Perhaps the most important point is that unless we as a society actively stay aware of these technologies, however laudable their initial applications may often be, we will be unable to participate in the debate that is crucial to determining their future evolution. And it's in the vacuum of technology evolving without meaningful input from society that the most serious abuses, be they related to the Internet or that copy machine over on your desk, are the most likely to occur.

Every 13 seconds an American gun owner uses a firearm in defense against a criminal. Criminal Attacks Stopped By Guns This Year: 1082312

Among 15.7% of gun defenders interviewed nationwide during The National Self Defense Survey conducted by Florida State University criminologists in 1994, the defender believed that someone "almost certainly" would have died had the gun not been used for protection -- a life saved by a privately held gun about once every 1.3 minutes. (In another 14.2% cases, the defender believed someone "probably" would have died if the gun hadn't been used in defense.)

In 83.5% of these successful gun defenses, the attacker either threatened or used force first -- disproving the myth that having a gun available for defense wouldn't make any difference.

In 91.7% of these incidents the defensive use of a gun did not wound or kill the criminal attacker (and the gun defense wouldn't be called "newsworthy" by newspaper or TV news editors). In 64.2% of these gun-defense cases, the police learned of the defense, which means that the media could also find out and report on them if they chose to.

In 73.4% of these gun-defense incidents, the attacker was a stranger to the intended victim. (Defenses against a family member or intimate were rare -- well under 10%.) This disproves the myth that a gun kept for defense will most likely be used against a family member or someone you love.

In over half of these gun defense incidents, the defender was facing two or more attackers -- and three or more attackers in over a quarter of these cases. (No means of defense other than a firearm -- martial arts, pepper spray, or stun guns -- gives a potential victim a decent chance of getting away uninjured when facing multiple attackers.)

In 79.7% of these gun defenses, the defender used a cancelable handgun. A quarter of the gun defenses occurred in places away from the defender's home.

Source: "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of self-defense with a Gun," by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, Volume 86, Number 1, Fall, 1995

Marvin Wolfgang, Director of the Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law at the University of Pennsylvania, considered by many to be the foremost criminologist in the country, wrote in that same issue, "I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. If I were Mustapha Mond of Brave New World, I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police ... What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. ...I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence. The National Crime Victim Survey does not directly contravene this latest survey, nor do the Mauser and Hart Studies. ... the methodological soundness of the current Kleck and Gertz study is clear. I cannot further debate it. ... The Kleck and Gertz study impresses me for the caution the authors exercise and the elaborate nuances they examine methodologically. I do not like their conclusions that having a gun can be useful, but I cannot fault their methodology. They have tried earnestly to meet all objections in advance and have done exceedingly well."

So this data has been peer-reviewed by a top criminologist in this country who was prejudiced in advance against its results, and even he found the scientific evidence overwhelmingly convincing.

A fatal accident involving a firearm occurs in the United States only about once every 6 hours. For victims age 14 or under, it's fewer than one a day -- but still enough for the news media to have a case to tell you about in every day's edition.

A criminal homicide involving a firearm occurs in the United States about once every half-hour -- but two-thirds of the fatalities are not completely innocent victims but themselves have criminal records.

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports and Murder Analysis by the Chicago Police Department

Kids and guns? Here's what a 1995 federal study investigating juvenile crime found after looking at 20,000 randomly selected households:

Relationship between type of gun owned and percent committing street, drug and gun crimes.

"The socialization into gun ownership is also vastly different for legal and illegal gunners. Those who own legal guns have fathers who own guns for sport and hunting. On the other hand, those who own illegal guns have friends who own illegal guns and are far more likely to be gang members. For legal gunners, socialization appears to take place in the family; for illegal gunners, it appears to take place 'on the street.'"

"Boys who own legal firearms have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than non owners of guns."

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, NCJ-143454, "Urban Delinquency and Substance Abuse," August 1995.

Making it legally possible for civilians to carry concealed weapons does not make society more violent or result in shootouts at traffic accidents. The rate of criminal misuse of firearms by the hundreds of thousands of persons licensed to carry concealed firearms in Florida is so low as to be statistically zero. In fact, homicide, assault, rape, and robbery are dramatically lower in areas of the United States where the public is allowed easy access to carrying concealed firearms in public.

Sources: Florida Department of State, Concealed Weapons/ Firearms License Statistical Report and "Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns," by John R. Lott, Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School and David B. Mustard, graduate student, Department of Economics, Journal of Legal Studies, January 1997.

Making guns less available does not reduce suicide but merely causes the person seeking death to use another means. While gun-related suicides were reduced by Canada's handgun ban of 1976, the overall suicide rate did not go down at all: the gun-related suicides were replaced 100% by an increase in other types of suicide -- mostly jumping off bridges.

Source: Rich, Young, Fowler, Wagner, and Black, The American Journal of Psychiatry March, 1990

Read "Gun Rights Forces Outgunned on TV: Networks Use First Amendment Rights to Promote Opponents of Second Amendment Rights" from the July 1997 MediaWatch Study.