Nov2001

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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@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 have been having problems with ATT Internet service. They put a sieve on e-mail limiting address to twenty-five. I couldn’t just split the mailing list because by anti virus does not like sending repeat messages. I think I have it all fixed.

On Thanksgiving I got a change to fire an AR50 rifle. It is a nice 40# 50 caliber single shot rifle. Lots of fun, very little recoil. It has a nuzzle brake that works well but you can really feel the blast even eight feet to the side.

By way of introduction I am a resident of Allegheny County who, in early 1996, was twice illegally subjected to brief mental health detentions under Section 302 of the PA Mental Health Act of 1976, in an outrageous and illegal manner.

My record is spotless, (I don't even have points on my traffic record). I was never alleged to have made any threat or public/private disturbance in either of the two detentions, I hold a responsible job as a senior member of management at the parent company of Allegheny General Hospital. I was committed without a warrant on both occasions by a local (within Allegheny County) police department, and in neither case was I ever subjected to any kind of hearing or other formal adjudication.

My case was heard in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas before Judge David Cercone. There were a total of four hearings utilizing three different members of the District Attorney's Office. Initially the Judge granted a motion to have my seized valuable gun collection returned. He then reversed himself and revoked the original order, without comment. Although I passed the original as well as court requested psychological examinations with flying colors!

In the final hearing, Assistant District Attorney, Dan Fitzimmons stated that the 2nd amendment only pertained to the National Guard. He then cited the provisions of Title 18 of the Pennsylvania Crimes Code governing firearms. Stating that once an Act 302 has been initiated, regardless of outcome the individual is barred from owning or possessing a firearm for life! All guns are confiscated without due process or financial compensation.

Mr. Fitzimmons further argued that even if he upheld my claim that the provisions of Act 17/66 were overruled that this brief psychiatric detention of less than five days (Section 302) never involving any adjudication (such as a warrant or a hearing before a judge, mental health officer or other lawful authority) may, nonetheless, constitute being "involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution" and therefore preclude firearm ownership under FEDERAL firearms law.

Both detentions have not only violated Pennsylvania mental health laws but also my Constitutional Rights to Due Process and unlawful search and seizure.

To continue my fight, I have retained a second attorney to file a case seeking to have the local police either justify their actions in subjecting me to a psychiatric detention, or else have both "commitments" overturned. In the 2nd episode, the local version of Barney Fife and company surrounded my home for some 40 minutes with their guns drawn. They then stormed into my house to find me sleeping in my bedroom-and all this without a warrant or any other permission from anyone to enter my home! I feel that I have been in a Stephen King version of "Andy of Mayberry."

President Bush yesterday unveiled a plan to tighten airline security, ranging from employing the National Guard at airports to place more marshals on flights. Those are important steps, but they won't be enough, especially since no one knows where the terrorists will strike next. The only adequate response is to encourage more ordinary, responsible citizens to carry guns, as Israel has done. Screening at airports, while important, will always be inadequate; terrorists will always figure some way to circumvent the controls-- for instance, by bribing airport employees. Strengthening cockpit doors is probably a good idea, but given current airline design it may create dangerous differences in air pressure between the cockpit and cabin. In any case, the door must be opened sometime, to allow pilots to go to the bathroom or get food.

The marshals program is more promising. Empirical research by Bill Landes at the University of Chicago found that between a third and a half of the drop in airplane hijackings during the 1970s could be attributed to the introduction of armed U.S. marshals on planes and an increased ability to catch and punish hijackers.

But to put just one marshal aboard every daily flight in the U.S. would require at least 35,000 officers--far more than currently work for the FBI, Secret Service and U.S. marshals combined (17,000). And one marshal might not be enough to foil a whole gang of hijackers, of the kind used by Osama bin Laden. Clearly it will take a long time to deploy enough marshals.

There are things we can do in the meantime. There are about 600,000 active state and local law enforcement officers in the U.S. today. They are currently forbidden from bringing their guns on airplanes. That should change. They should even be given discount fares if they fly with their guns. Most pilots have also had military experience. The request of their union to arm pilots should be granted; this is what El Al has done for a long time.

Fears of having guns on planes are misplaced. The special, high- velocity handgun ammunition used on planes packs quite a wallop but is designed not to penetrate the aluminum skin of the plane. Even with regular bullets, the worst-case outcome would simply be to force the plane to fly at a lower altitude, where the air pressure is higher.

The use of guns to stop terrorists shouldn't be limited to airplanes. We should encourage off-duty police, and responsible citizens, to carry guns in most public places. Cops can't be everywhere. In Israel, about 10% of Jewish adults have permits to carry concealed handguns. To reach Israel's rate of permit holding, Americans would have to increase the number of permits from 3.5 million to almost 21 million. Thirty-three states currently have "right-to-carry" laws, which allow the law-abiding to obtain a permit if they are above a certain age and pay a fee. Half of these states require some training. We should encourage more states to pass such law, and possibly even subsidize firearms training.

States that pass concealed handgun laws experience drops in violent crimes, especially in multiple victim shootings--the type of attack most associated with terrorism. Bill Landes and I found that deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell by 80% after states passed right-to-carry laws.

Passing right-to-carry laws might even deter terrorist attacks. True, some terrorists are suicidal, but they still want to cause maximum carnage. They know the "return" on their terrorism would rapidly diminish to the vanishing point if faced with gun-wielding "victims."

Mr. Lott is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "More Guns, Less Crime" (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

ban is not on the transfer of information, but on the creation of certain kinds of electronic records. You still have the right to communicate the same information if you acquire it in other ways.

"Automatic face recognition stops crime. Police say they want it. And if it prevents one child from being killed then I support it."

A free society is a society in which there are limits on what the police can do. If we want to remain a free society then we need to make a decision. Once a new surveillance technology is installed, it is nearly impossible to stop the slippery slope toward ever broader law enforcement use of it. The case of automatic toll collection makes this clear. Absent clear legal protections, then, we should assume from the beginning that any technology that captures personal information will be used for law enforcement purposes, and not only in cases where lives are immediately at stake. The potential for abuse should then be figured into our decision about whether the technology should be deployed at all. That said, it is hardly proven that face recognition stops crime, when face recognition is being added to a world that already contains many other crime-fighting technologies. The range of crime detection technologies available to the police has grown immensely in recent years, and even if one encountered a case where a crime was solved using a given technology it by no means follows that the crime would not have been solved equally well using some other technology.

"Privacy prevents the marketplace from functioning efficiently. When a company knows more about you, it can tailor its offerings more specifically to your needs. Of course if you ask people whether scary face recognition systems should be banned then they'll say yes. But you're asking the wrong question. The right question is whether people are willing to give up information in exchange for something of value, and most people are."

This is a non sequitur. Few proposals for privacy protection prevent people from voluntarily handing information about themselves to companies with which they wish to do business. The problem arises when information is transferred without the individual's knowledge, and in ways that might well cause upset or harm if they became known. What distinguishes automatic face recognition from many other equally good identification technologies is that it can be used without the individual's permission (and therefore without the individual having agreed to any exchange). That is why it should be banned.

"A preoccupation with privacy is corrosive. Democracy requires people to have public personae, and excessive secrecy is unhealthy."

Privacy does not equal secrecy. Privacy means that an individual has reasonable control over what information is made public, and what is not. Any decent social order requires that individuals be entrusted with this judgement. Even if particular individuals choose to become secretive in a pathological way, forcing them to change will not help the situation and is intrinsincally wrong anyway. As to the value of public personae, we should encourage the development of technologies that give people the option to appear publicly where and how they want.

This line is used against nearly every attempt to protect personal privacy, and the response in each case is the same. People have lots of valid reasons, personal safety for example, to prevent particular others from knowing particular information about them. Democracy only works if groups can organize and develop their political strategies in seclusion from the government, and from any established interests they might be opposing. This includes, for example, the identities of people who might travel through public places to gather for a private political meeting. In its normal use, the question "What do you have to hide?" stigmatizes all personal autonomy as anti-social. As such it is an authoritarian demand, and has no place in a free society.

For more responses to bad arguments against privacy, see: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/arguments.html

Facial-Recognition System Gets Millions in Federal Funds http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/016044.htm

For years, Americans hoping to travel peacefully between major cities have suffered the indignity of being run through metal detectors, being made to empty our pockets and our purses, remove our belt buckles and our steel-insoled boots, answer rote questions about whether we've stupidly let some guy in a turban insert in our bags a "gift for my sister in Boston."

All of this has cost us millions of productive hours wasted, not to mention billions in salaries for these laughably ineffective goons, all dutifully passed on to us in the price of our airline tickets.

I have long warned the only reason no plane was hijacked in this country in the past decade was because no serious terrorist had tried. "The Fred and Ethel Mertz security system" would have zero impact on anyone serious enough to plan ahead and plant a "mole" among the minimum wage employees who load soda pop and TV dinners aboard our aircraft.

Tuesday, I hoped I was wrong. As it quickly became clear terrorists had placed several agents aboard each of four transcontinental flights taking off from Eastern airports with an aim to using those fueled-up jets as flying bombs, I waited to hear in how many cases our crack security operatives had polished off the would-be terrorists before they ever made it to the plane.

Had all the metal detectors and bomb-sniffing wands and random bag checks and "may I see your travel papers please" stopped even one terrorist team?

Nope. The Fred and Ethel Mertz security system stopped not even one in four. The only reason one of the four planes failed to hit its target – it now appears from passenger cell phone calls made from the plane which crashed near Pittsburgh - is that some brave American men decided to "do something," counterattacking their captors.

So what will Congress and the FAA and the airlines - the ones that manage to avoid immediate bankruptcy - do in the months to come?

Will the Powers That Be conclude, "Well, we tried disarming law-abiding Americans and running the metal detectors and scanning the bags; that obviously didn't work. So, we might as well try the Archie Bunker plan"?

(Decades ago, leftist series creator Norman Lear had Carroll O'Connor's lead character in the TV show "All in the Family" propose the best way to prevent airline hijackings was to issue loaded firearms to the passengers upon boarding, collecting them again as the travelers disembarked. "Norman Lear obviously thought the notion represented the very height of right-wing absurdity," my friend, novelist L. Neil Smith, wrote to me last week. "But somebody tell me -- now -- how an aircraft full of well-armed people could be hijacked and used against civilization the way four were today.")

No, there will be no restoration of the Second Amendment in once free and fearless America. Instead, fulfilling a pretty good definition of insanity, what they'll do is a whole lot more of what already hasn't worked.

Now we're going to make our law-abiding disarmed victims-to-be wait in even more interminable lines while we search their bags and their persons really, really, really well.

"That's not gonna do any good, it's the minimum wage employee comin' in the back door who did this," exclaims my friend Pete the pilot (he didn't want me to use his real name.) Pete flies 757s and 767s - precisely the models that were hijacked - for a major airline back East.

Today's commercial aircraft swarm with people in the hours before they take off, Pete explained to me last Tuesday. From the janitors who vacuum out the planes to the employees of the contract catering firms that load the TV dinners and the soda pop into the pantries, these tend to be minimum-wage employees, often recent immigrants in high-turnover jobs. Background checks on these workers are minimal to nonexistent, Pete explains. A mail-order driver's license would get Osama bin Laden's nephew one of these jobs, whereupon all he would have to do is wait to be told which night to leave the knives and box-cutters - or the full-auto Uzi, for that matter - in with the ice cubes or under the cushion of seat 11-C.

But that won't be fixed, Pete says. Instead, he (and all of us) will be banned from carrying even his little Schrade Old-Timer pocketknife with the under-four-inch blade. "It'll all be, as it always has been, public-relations sort of stuff; they'll make it appear that they're doing something. ... I worry they'll impose more Draconian restrictions on our liberties that aren't gonna make us any more secure.

"It's company policy that the pilots can't be armed on the airplane," Pete says. "Now we've seen from recent events that that makes us sitting ducks."

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V.Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

"They that would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin 1759

Pentagon Unveils 'Smart' ID Cards By D. Ian Hopper AP Technology Writer Monday, Oct. 29, 2001

WASHINGTON –– The nation's increasingly high-tech soldiers are getting another computer in their arsenal – this one wallet-sized.

The Pentagon began arming four million troops and civilians on Monday with "smart" ID cards that will allow them to open secure doors, get cash, buy food – and soon check out weapons and other military hardware.

The cards, about the size of a credit card, will replace the standard green ID cards now used by Defense employees.

They include a bar code, circuit chip and magnetic stripe to store personal information about its holder. With it, soldiers can access secure Defense Web sites, log into their computers and digitally encrypt and sign their e-mail. "It is their passport to the electronic world," Defense personnel chief David S.C. Chu said after receiving his card.

Through the Internet at more than 900 issuance sites worldwide, a soldier gets his digital picture taken and his fingerprint stored and picks a personal identification number. In about 10 to 15 minutes, he gets his card.

John P. Stenbit, the Pentagon's chief information officer, said the card will help solve the "hurry up and wait" syndrome in the military, where paperwork can bog down processes.

If a card is lost, officials said its digital signatures will be deactivated once it is reported, and the employee will get a new card. The government has had a tough time tracking credit cards, The Associated Press reported in August, with at least 15 agencies reporting that they have more issued cards than employees. The smart cards cost the government about $8 each. The cards also offer an added security benefit, he said, in an attack similar to the Pentagon crash. "It's not just 'Gee, that's really neat,'" Stenbit said, "but if you have an incident, you can tell who's gotten out of the building and who’s still stuck in there."

At a computer terminal, soldiers will swipe the card and type in their numerical password. The password provides an extra level of security.

"There is something she has and something she knows," said Rob Cobb, a software developer at military contractor Electronic Data Systems. "It's an important separation." Within months, a soldier will be able to swipe his card to check out a weapon or ammunition, and the card can store his sharp shooting score.

There are about 3 billion smart cards worldwide, according to industry analyst Frost & Sullivan, but the vast majority are tiny cards used to activate cellular phones on the network most common to Europe. Smart cards are also used extensively in South Africa and Argentina.

Credit-card sized smart cards have taken longer to catch on in the United States. Some large companies, like Sun Microsystems, use them for employee identification. Perhaps the best-known smart card is the "Blue" credit card by American Express.

"We don't seem to have adopted as quickly to this technology, and I’m glad to see us moving forward," Stenbit said.

The slow pace is partly due to privacy concerns. A plan for a national identification card, proposed by Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and briefly considered by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, fizzled several weeks ago after privacy groups raised concerns the cards would allow the government to monitor citizens' activities.

The military is also worried about packing too much information into the card. There is little encoded on the smart chip – like a fingerprint – that isn't visible on the card's face. There's only so much that can be packed into the chip's tiny memory, as well. "There's a very limited amount of intrusion into anyone's privacy," Stenbit said. While officials are considering whether encode medical data onto it, they said that step is very far off.