ARMED-M

__________________________________________________________________________________________

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

===============================================================================

DEC, 2001

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. 

 

The lies about guns are in many ways similar to the lies about smoking so I thought this article might be appropriate.

 

CENTER-RIGHT, a free weeklyish e-newsletter of centrist, conservative, and libertarian ideas Issue 62, May 24, 1999

 

"The Granddaddy of All Tobacco Lies" (by Jeff Jacoby, from the Boston Globe, May 10, 1999)

 

A newspaper ad, full-page.  Stark background.  Large type.  "Cigarettes kill more Americans every year than car wrecks, plane crashes, AIDS, alcohol, drugs, suicides and homicides combined."

 

It's a terrifying statistic.  Good thing it's not true.

 

Of all the falsehoods hammered home in the War on Tobacco, none is more pervasive than the one about the body count:  400,000 deaths from smoking per year.  Over and over we have been told that smoking is not just unhealthy, but massively and catastrophically lethal. Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Health and Science:   "If every single day two filled-to-capacity jumbo jets crashed -- killing all on board -- the death toll would not approach that accounted for each year by cigarette smoking."  Bill Novelli, founder of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids:  "If you want to draw a hierarchy of harms or social problems, you'd probably end up putting tobacco on top.  Tobacco is like an atomic bomb on the horizon."  William Foege, former director of the Centers for Disease Control:  "It is quite predictable that in the coming years the annual global death toll of tobacco will equal the total death toll of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany."

 

Ghastly as such rhetoric is, worse is on the way.  The $246 billion tobacco settlement will be used, in part, to fund even more antismoking propaganda.  From print ads, from billboards, from radio and TV, the message will be pounded at you:  Tobacco, the worst of all killers, slaughters 400,000 Americans every year.

 

Except that it doesn't.

 

"To be blunt," write Robert Levy and Rosalind Marimont, "there is no credible evidence that 400,000 deaths per year -- or any number remotely close to 400,000 -- are caused by tobacco.  The damage from cigarettes is far less than it is made out to be."

 

Levy is an expert in law and finance who teaches statistics at Georgetown University Law Center.  Marimont is a mathematician and scientist who spent 37 years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Institute of Health.  If you read nothing else about smoking this year, read their article Lies, Damned Lies, & 400,000 Smoking-Related Deaths in the new issue of Regulation, a quarterly journal published by the Cato Institute.

 

What Levy and Marimont call "the granddaddy of all tobacco lies" comes from a 1993 report of the Centers for Disease Control, which estimated that 419,000 Americans had died in 1990 of diseases attributable to smoking.  A disease was attributed to smoking if the risk of dying from it was greater for smokers than for nonsmokers.  But here's the rub -- one of several rubs, actually:  the CDC included in its death toll diseases for which the relative risk to smokers was statistically insignificant.

 

It is reasonable to claim that a smoker's lung cancer death was smoking-related, inasmuch as a smoker is 23 times more likely to die of that disease than a nonsmoker.  But it is not reasonable to make the same claim for cancer of the pancreas, since the relative risk of that disease for smokers is minuscule -- between 1.1 and 1.8.  (I.e., a smoker isn't even twice as likely as a nonsmoker to contract pancreatic cancer.)  The National Cancer Institute, in guidelines quoted by Levy and Marimont, cautions against relying on relative risks of less than 2.  "Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or effects of confounding factors not evident."

 

Apply that rule to the CDC's 419,000 tobacco-related deaths, and 39 percent of them -- 164,000 -- disappear.  A smoker who dies from pancreatic cancer (or a dozen other diseases on the CDC list with relative risks of less than 2), is not a victim of tobacco.  To call him one is to engage in sophistry, not science.

 

Another statistical trick built into the smoking body count is the failure to correct for other variables.  Tobacco use is not the only difference between Americans who smoke and Americans who don't.  Levy and Marimont note that smokers tend to be people, who also drink too much, exercise too little, eat fewer green vegetables, and have less money.  "Each of those factors can be a `cause´ of death from a so-called smoking-related disease," they write, "and each must be statistically controlled for if the impact of a single factor, like smoking, is to be reliably determined."

 

Controlling for just two of those differences -- income and alcohol consumption -- reduces the tobacco toll by another 53,000.  Take the other factors into account and it would go lower still.  But the CDC and the surgeon general treat those factors as irrelevant.  "If a smoker who is obese; has a family history of high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart problems; and never exercises dies of a heart attack, the government attributes his death to smoking alone."

 

By that logic, one could just as easily show that 504,000 Americans die yearly from failure to exercise, or that 649,000 die from bad nutrition.  Like the supposed 400,000 smoking-related victims, say Levy and Marimont, these are "computer-generated phantom deaths, not real deaths."

 

There's more.  For all the talk of protecting children, the average age of death from a smoking-related illness is 72.  Measured by years of life lost, smoking is a much smaller problem than alcohol consumption.  The number of young people killed by smoking is -- zero.  All this and more Levy and Marimont calmly explain.  Their lucid article provides a fine corrective to the ever more hysterical tone of the antitobacco crusade.  You may wish to lay in a copy.  

 

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe. 

 

CENTER-RIGHT is edited by Eugene Volokh, who teaches constitutional law, copyright law, and a seminar on firearms regulation at UCLA Law School (http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh), and organized with the help of Terry Wynn and the Federalist Society (http://www.fed-soc.org).

 

"Neither Nationalist nor Socialist:  How the Swiss Kept Their Freedom in World War II"

(by Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute, from Reason Magazine)

An "island of liberty and harmony in a sea of dictatorship and discord" and "a citadel of peace through stormy centuries," to quote a 1938 New York Times analysis; "it is a land of hard work and frugal habits, of justice and cleanness and tolerance, of the very essence of live-and-let-live" -- and, not incidentally, the bulwark of free-market capitalism in Europe.  To say that Switzerland enjoyed a favorable reputation in America until recently would be to understate matters.  Today, after a relentless and astonishingly one-sided media campaign, there is scarcely a horror tale about the Swiss too extreme or absurd to be picked up in the press.

 

The assault began with widely circulated allegations -- the truth is less clear-cut than news reports have made it sound -- that Swiss banks swallowed great sums deposited in private accounts by victims of the Holocaust.  (At press time, Swiss banks had reached a tentative agreement to settle those allegations, and avert threatened sanctions, by paying more than $1 billion.)

Picking up its own momentum, the indictment soon expanded into a depiction of the Swiss as a nation of heartless profiteers, "Hitler's silent partners," working to advance the Nazi cause without being shot at.  In June the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center made worldwide headlines by issuing a report claiming that pro-Nazi activity "thoroughly saturated...the core of Swiss society."  Teenagers now grow up hearing that the Swiss spent World War II rooting for the Axis powers.

Now Stephen Halbrook, an attorney and well-known Second Amendment expert (he's the author of 1984's That Every Man Be Armed), has taken a much-needed look at the Swiss wartime record in a new book titled "Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II."  The book not only provides a starting point for all future discussions of Switzerland's military role in the war, but also makes an interesting contribution to the literature on both federalism and gun rights; according to Halbrook, Switzerland's traditions of extreme decentralization and of a well-armed populace played a key role in preserving its freedom in an hour of peril.

As Halbrook reminds us, the American Founders often cited Switzerland as an example of the kind of nation they hoped to build on these shores.  They admired its survival for centuries as a democracy amid tyrannies of every kind, following its birth in 1291 as the result of a peasant revolt in the remote fastnesses of the Alps.

In 1774, during an unsuccessful attempt to urge Quebec to join the colonists' cause, the Continental Congress pointed to the Swiss federalist model, under which an unassuming central government let diverse cantons go their own way, with religious differences set aside:  "Their union is composed of Roman Catholic and Protestant States, living in the utmost concord and peace with one another and thereby enabled, ever since they bravely vindicated their freedom, to defy and defeat every tyrant that has invaded them."  Said Patrick Henry:  "Let us follow their example, and be happy".

Switzerland virtually invented the policy of "armed neutrality":  It started no wars and sought no empire, but defended itself with ferocity when attacked.  This policy committed it to staying out of other nation's quarrels and trading with all belligerents to the extent permitted by circumstance.

The rise of modern nationalism, with its presumption that national boundaries should reflect commonalities of language and lineage, posed a direct challenge to the reasons for Switzerland's existence.  Only historical accident, it seemed to nationalist thinkers, separated Swiss Germans (the majority) from the mass of Germans.  By the same logic Swiss French clearly belonged with their fellow French-speakers and Swiss Italians with Italy.

By the late 1930s, Nazi cartographers were provocatively including German-speaking Swiss cantons in their maps of Grossdeutschland.  The Swiss Federal Council replied as follows: "we reject the concept of race or common descent as the basis of a state and as the factor determining political frontiers."  The Swiss "national idea", said the council, rests instead on a "spiritual decision" to commit to certain values, of which the most important, it added pointedly, were federalism, democracy, and "respect for the dignity of the individual."

Anti-Semitism, rife in much of Europe, found Helvetic soil far less friendly.  In 1941 Contemporary Jewish Record, a publication of the American Jewish Committee, observed that "there is no anti-Jewish movement in Switzerland worthy of such designation."  "Anti-Semitism is simply intolerance," declared an official 1943 pamphlet issued by the Swiss Army, terming it a form of "foreign propaganda" that "tears at the roots of our democratic way of thinking."

Swiss authorities prosecuted and suppressed numerous Nazi-front organizations, arresting or deporting their leadership, who were often German nationals resident in Switzerland.  The "bulk of news reporting in [Swiss] broadcasting and the press is anti-German," lamented one high Nazi official.  "Germany has no good press in Switzerland."               Dependent on coal from Germany, Switzerland went on trading with the Germans long after Hitler's evil had become apparent -- as indeed did the United States until Pearl Harbor.  Much to the scandal of today's retroactive moralists, Switzerland also traded extensively in gold with both Axis and Allies.  That led to some strange results, since in many cases the two sides were aware that, once the role of the Swiss as middlemen was stripped out, they were in effect trading with each other.               Matters worsened when France fell in 1940 and Switzerland found itself entirely surrounded by the Axis, which exercised veto power on its exports and imports.  Today's revisionists presumably blame the Swiss for not launching a futile attack on the surrounding Axis, or -- what is much the same thing -- pompously proclaiming sanctions against it.

Yet the Allies had ample reason to be glad of Swiss neutrality, which provided many advantages for them -- especially given the alternative of simply letting the Axis occupy and plunder the Swiss economy, as it had done with so many small countries'.  Switzerland never let the Germans use its roads or rails for military transport, which deprived Hitler of natural logistic routes for his Italian campaign.  Luftwaffe planes intruding on Swiss air space could expect dogfights, and many were downed.

The Nazis developed a full ideological critique of Swiss obstinacy.  Nazi theorist Ewald Banse accused the German Swiss of "calculating materialism" and "unlimited self-reliance" and said their aloofness from their fellow ethnic Germans arose from a "belief, doubtless justified in the Middle Ages but long since obsolete, that liberty and equality -- those most sacred of human possessions -- are at stake."  Hitler himself denounced the Swiss repeatedly as "despicable and wretched", "misbegotten", "renegades", "repugnant", "a pimple on the face of Europe" which "cannot be allowed to continue".  (Stalin couldn't stand them either.)

The Fuehrer despised their purely defensive military philosophy:  "An army whose only goal is to secure peace" is craven, he said.  "In addition to all the other characteristics of the Swiss that Hitler disliked," Halbrook adds, "he hated them because of their free market capitalism, which he associated with Judaism."  The ever-abusive Voelkischer Beobachter resorted to the epithet "Berg-Semiten": mountain Jews.

Again and again, Hitler ordered his generals to draw up plans to invade Switzerland -- but never followed through.  Why didn't he?  One reason was that military crises elsewhere kept intervening.  But another was Switzerland's convincing, if purely defensive, military posture.  German troops referred to Switzerland as a porcupine (Stachelschwein); the Swiss air force comprised 250 planes, none of them bombers.  The most famous element of Swiss defense were the sabotage plans:  At the moment of German invasion the Simplon and St. Gotthard tunnels would be blown up, as well as all bridges over the Rhine, power stations and air fields.  Avalanches and landslides would be set off to block armor and infantry movement. 

Another key deterrent factor, Halbrook suggests, was Switzerland's tradition of a popular army -- "the people in arms."  At one point an astonishing 20 percent of the Swiss population was under arms, a figure unheard of in a modern country officially at peace -- or even most countries at war.

Every Swiss home had a rifle.  Sharpshooting was and is the national sport; each weekend the hills are alive with the sound of gunfire, with fathers delighting in instructing their kids in proper technique.  Swiss youths were trained to shoot at 300 meters, Germans at 100.  German generals had to consider the example of the Finns, another small nation of skiers and riflemen who had recently held off a Russian invasion far more tenaciously than outsiders expected. 

Finally, Swiss defensive preparations drew strength from an unrivaled display of the spirit of resistance.  Soldiers were ordered to hold their positions to the last cartridge and then fight on with bayonets.  Secret munitions caches were distributed through the countryside, and the populace was trained in how to organize partisan warfare.

Unlike any other country in Europe, Halbrook says, Switzerland proclaimed that any reports that the federal council or army high command had agreed to surrender were to be ignored as inventions of enemy propaganda.  This remarkable policy tied the leadership's own hands for the sake of maximum deterrent effect, and was thinkable only in a nation where long decentralization had distributed the spirit of initiative far and wide.

By way of contrast, "Hitler was able to conquer much of Europe by bluffing the central authority of various countries into capitulation," as when the Belgian king surrendered at a point where many of his countrymen would have preferred to fight on.  "Switzerland was the only country in Europe that had no political leader with the authority to surrender the people to the Nazis."

Halbrook's is not the only voice being raised to correct recent misreporting.  When the Wiesenthal Center's report came out in June, Switzerland's own Jewish community dismissed it as outrageous and ridden with errors.  The Basel-based Juedische Rundschau criticized its "exaggerations and falsifications", while the head of the Swiss Confederation of Hebrew Congregations found the report "one-sided and exaggerated."  "The Swiss Nazis were weak in numbers," pointed out Zurich's Israelitisches Wochenblatt.  "In the parliament in Bern they had exactly one seat for four years."  Most embarrassingly, Simon Wiesenthal himself, the famed Nazi-hunter after whom the center was named, disavowed the report as biased and inaccurate. 

The book doesn't take up the controversy over wartime bank deposits, which deserves its own book (and column).  And no one would deny that there are serious dark spots in the Swiss wartime record, including the actions of a wartime Justice Minister who tilted refugee-acceptance policy away from fleeing German Jews, and some defeatist pronouncements by the (fortunately, mostly ceremonial) Swiss federal President. 

But the more balanced view remains Winston Churchill's.  "I put this down for the record," wrote Churchill to Anthony Eden in a December 1944 memo reprinted in Triumph and Tragedy.  "Of all the neutrals Switzerland has the greatest right to distinction.  What does it matter whether she has been able to give us the commercial advantages we desire or has given too many to the Germans to keep herself alive?  She has been a democratic State, standing for freedom in self-defense among her mountains, and in thought, in spite of race, largely on our side."

 CENTER-RIGHT is edited by Eugene Volokh, who teaches constitutional law, copyright law, and a seminar on firearms regulation at UCLA Law School (http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh), and organized
with the help of Terry Wynn and the Federalist Society (http://www.fed-soc.org/).

 

Division Overview

 

Division of Licensing       Florida Department of State      Katherine Harris, Secretary of State

                  News & Reports                                 HOME                                NEWSLETTERS                                MEETINGS                                REPORTS                                NOTICES

 

"Concealed Carry" States Updated November 1, 2001   The Division of Licensing has been seeking confirmation from the licensing authorities and attorneys general in the other 49 states to determine which states will acknowledge the validity of Florida Concealed Weapon/Firearm licenses, thereby allowing mutual recognition of licenses under Florida's new law. The following states have acknowledged our inquiry. This mutual recognition applies only to licenses issued under Section 790.06, F.S. and does not apply to Florida Statewide Firearm Licenses, Class "G", issued under Section 493.6115, F.S.           

 

That WILL HONOR Florida Licenses

 

  Alabama    (1,5)

  Alaska    (1)

  Arkansas    (1)

  Georgia   (1)

  Idaho   (1)

  Indiana   (1)

  Kentucky   

  Louisiana   (1)

  Michigan   (1,4)

  Mississippi   (1)

  Montana   

  New Hampshire   (1,4)

  North Dakota   (1,3)

  Pennsylvania   (1,6)

  Tennessee   (1)

  Texas   (1)

  Utah   (1)

  Vermont   (1,2)

  Wyoming   (1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THOSE WILL not HONOR Florida Licenses:

                    Arizona

                    California

                    Colorado

                    Connecticut

                    Delaware

                    Hawaii

                    Illinois

                    Iowa

                    Kansas

                    Maine

                    Maryland

                    Massachusetts

                    Minnesota

                    Missouri

                    Nebraska

                    Nevada

                    New Jersey

                    New Mexico

                    New York

                    North Carolina

                    Ohio

                    Oklahoma

                    Oregon

                    Rhode Island

                    South Carolina

                    South Dakota

                    Virginia

                    Washington

                    West Virginia

                    Wisconsin

 

 

SPECIAL NOTES

1) These states' laws allow for concealed carry of handguns only, NOT "WEAPONS" IN GENERAL.

 

(2) The State of VERMONT does not issue weapons/firearms licenses. The law in Florida, however, is quite clear: an out-of-state resident must have in his or her immediate possession a valid license to carry a concealed weapon or concealed firearm issued to the nonresident in his or her state esidence. Therefore, residents from Vermont do not have the right to carry their concealed weapons/firearms in Florida, while Florida citizens do have that right in Vermont.

 

(3) Under NORTH DAKOTA law a citizen 18 years of age or older may possess a concealed weapons permit. While Florida will recognize the validity of North Dakota licenses, it will not extend the right to carry to North Dakota citizens under the age of 21. Licensing officials in North Dakota have notified their licensees of this exception in order to avoid the possibility of criminal charges being filed against underage violators.

 

(4) MICHIGAN and NEW HAMPSHIRE will not honor non-resident Florida licenses.                

 

(5) The Attorney General's Office of the State of ALABAMA has indicated that its "unofficial opinion" is that Alabama will honor non-resident concealed permits from Florida at this time.  However, he notes that there is some uncertainty as to the limits of Alabama's reciprocity law as it pertains to non-resident licenses. Pending clarification by the Alabama Legislature or a decision by an Alabama court, he urges non-resident licensees to exercise caution. Refer to the Alabama AG's Web page for the latest information.

 

(6) The PENNSYLVANIA Attorney General's Office has notified the Florida Department of State that it will honor non-resident Florida licenses. However, because of the restrictive language of Florida's reciprocity law,

WE CANNOT HONOR NON-RESIDENT PENNSYLVANIA LICENSES.  PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING PROVISIONS! ! !

 

Citizens from ONLY those states that have acknowledged our inquiry and have agreed to honor Florida licenses will be accorded the right of carrying a concealed weapon/firearm in Florida. Links to these states' firearm statutes have been provided so that interested citizens can familiarize themselves with the specific provisions of these laws. Those states identified above under the heading "States That WILL NOT HONOR Florida Licenses" are the only states that have responded to the Division's inquiry for confirmation and declined to honor Florida licenses. HOWEVER, CITIZENS FROM STATES THAT HAVE NOT ACKNOWLEDGED OUR INQUIRY ALSO DO NOT HAVE CONCEALED-CARRY RIGHTS.

 

In some states, licenses are issued by local governments, municipalities, or boards. FLORIDA WILL NOT HONOR THESE LICENSES UNLESS THE STATE IN WHICH THOSE LOCAL GOVERNMENTS, MUNICIPALITIES, OR BOARDS ARE LOCATED ACKNOWLEDGES RESPONSIBILITY FOR RECOGNIZING FLORIDA LICENSES. EXAMPLE: State statutes in Michigan, Indiana, and New Hampshire delegate the responsibility of concealed weapon/firearm permit issuance to local government entities. However, state law provides for the recognition of out-of-state licenses.  Florida law will honor ONLY those out of state licenses issued to a non-resident by his or her state of residence.  EXAMPLE: If a resident of New York possesses a license issued in New Hampshire, that resident cannot carry a concealed weapon/firearm in Florida, (unless, of course, he possesses or obtains a Florida license.) The Division of Licensing is continuing its efforts to reach those states that have not responded to our initial inquiry.  We will update this Web page and continue to notify local law enforcement in Florida as future developments warrant.