July2002

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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 Smith705@Juno.com. 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 will be using Juno who lets me do 50 at a time. Juno doesn’t give me opportunity to do to hide recipient so you will lose some of your privacy. Sorry about that

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Today, I was refused medical treatment on a routine office visit because I do not have, and could not provide, a photo ID.

My appointment, which had been scheduled for six weeks in advance, was with Dermatologist Patricia L. Wilson (of Dermatology Associates, Huntsville, Alabama, 539-2741). When I arrived at the office the attendant asked me to fill out the necessary forms and submit a photo ID. I told her I would be paying with cash and there would be no need to file with any insurance company. I then asked why a photo ID needed. I was told that it was office policy. When I explained that I do not have a photo ID, the office manager, Martin Beck, said the doctor would not provide the requested service unless I submitted a photo ID. I left without treatment.

I'm sending this out primarily for the benefit of those readers who still don't understand the far-reaching implications of President Bush's Homeland Security initiative which includes proposed federal standards for nationalized driver's licenses incorporating biometric identification linked to personal data and other identifying information stored on an imbedded microchip.

Some people still have the false notion that they can simply "erase" the chip or render it inoperable to avoid undesirable consequences. To those, I would say that a simpler solution would be to just throw the card away altogether. The result will be the same: You will be denied access to, and use of all goods, services and rights dependant upon possession and display of the "voluntary" IDs.

As most readers know, I was denied renewal of my Alabama driver's license due to my religious objections with regard to mandatory submission of a social security number. I subsequently filed suit and we are currently awaiting reply from the Alabama Supreme Court on our Petition for Certiorari in that matter. (The state will not issue a "non-driver" photo ID to anyone eligible for a driver's license, and they demand an SSN from applicants for non-driver IDs anyway. So that is not an option.)

For the Fully Informed Jury Association Published 04. 28. 02 at 23:25 Sierra Time

America's Founders worried that the government they created might someday grow too powerful, and begin to pass laws which would violate the rights of the very people it was intended to protect: ordinary, peaceful, productive folks. But they kept an "ace in the hole", a trump card they believed citizens could use to hold this new, experimental government in check. That ace was the right to a trial by a jury of one's peers.

How a jury can restrain a government? The key is that juries can say "no" to bad laws and to arbitrary and unjust prosecutions. It's true!

The Founders realized that the temptations of power and corruption would eventually prove to be too much for any of the three branches of our government to resist, let alone check and balance the other branches. They knew that government "of, by and for the people" meant that the people would every so often have to roll up their sleeves and exert their authority, to act as the final check and balance on the whole system. Since law is the main tool by which a government exerts its control, trusting juries of ordinary citizens to veto the use of bad law was the logical choice.

So they provided for trial by jury--once in the Constitution, and twice more in the Bill of Rights. In those days, it was part of the definition of the word "jury" that its members could judge the law as well as the evidence, and the judge would often remind them of this power. For example, if jurors found the law to be unjust or misapplied, or that the defendant's rights had been violated in bringing the him or her to trial, they would acquit for those reasons, despite good evidence.

In addition to veto power, our common law legal traditions also provide that if a jury decides to acquit, its decision is final. A verdict of "not guilty" cannot be overturned, nor can the judge harass the jurors for voting for acquittal, or punish them for voting their consciences, even after making them swear to follow the law as given by the judge! And jurors may be asked, but cannot be obliged, to explain their verdicts.

These principles were subject to contention for centuries in England and the British Empire as citizen jurors fought to assert their rights against the power interests of the crown.

In 1670, William Penn was arrested in London for preaching a Quaker sermon, which broke a law establishing the Church of England as the only legal church. His jurors, led by Edward Bushell, refused to convict him, despite being held for days without food, water, and tobacco or toilet facilities--and then fined. The most defiant four of them refused to pay the fine and were then put in prison for nine weeks.

The highest court of England, upon releasing them, both acknowledged and established that trial jurors could not be punished for their verdicts. Recognition of our freedoms of religion, peaceable assembly and speech thus all trace to the exercise of jury power, wielded by a jury unintimidated by government judges.

In colonial America, the sedition trial of John Peter Zenger established another landmark case. Zenger, a publisher, was arrested for printing news critical of the Royal Governor of New York Colony and his cronies, accusing them of corruption. His accusations were all true, but the court informed his jury that under the law, "...truth is no defense".

"Philadelphia lawyer" Andrew Hamilton then told the jurors the story of William Penn, and argued that as judges of the merits of the law, they should not in good conscience convict Zenger of violating such a bad law. The jurors agreed. Zenger was acquitted in about fifteen minutes, and his case spawned recognition of our right to a free press.

Cases like these therefore were part of the political heritage of the Founders, which may explain why they so appreciated jury power.

John Adams said it so well in 1771 that the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) put his words on a coffee mug: "It is not only...[the juror's] right, but his duty... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."

First U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, writing in Georgia v. Brailsford, 1794, concluded: "The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy".

President Thomas Jefferson in 1789 told Thomas Paine: "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."

And Noah Webster, who wrote his original 1828 dictionary in order to preserve the integrity of the language of the Constitution, defined "petty jury" as "...consisting usually of twelve men [who]...attend courts to decide both the law and the fact in criminal prosecutions".

A detailed historical analysis of jury veto power, also called jury nullification of law, appeared in the Yale Law Review in 1964. It held that "The right of the jury to decide questions of law was widely recognized in the colonies. In 1771, John Adams stated unequivocally that a juror should ignore a judge's instruction on the law if it violates fundamental principles: There is much evidence of the general acceptance of this principle in the period immediately after the Constitution was adopted."

However, during the next century, judges began chipping away at this vital and fundamental right of free citizens, thereby transferring citizen power to themselves. The biggest "chip" or usurpation took place in 1895, when in Sparf and Hansen v. U.S., a bitterly split decision by our Supreme Court held that failure of the judge to remind the jurors of their powers was not a basis for mistrial or appeal. That was the green light for trial judges to go mum on the topic, and they did.

That is why very few lawyers or law professors, only some judges, and practically no schoolteachers know about jury veto power: it's "not part of the curriculum". Few history books give juries the credit they're due--for stopping the Salem witch trials, for overturning slavery in state after state before the Civil War, and for ending Prohibition--all by refusing to convict because they thought the law itself was wrong.

These days, trial by jury often doesn't accomplish all that it should. And the usurpation continues: trial judges now falsely tell jurors that their only job is to decide if the "facts" are sufficient to convict, and that if so, they "should" or "must" convict. Defense attorneys can face contempt of court charges if they urge jurors to acquit if they think the law is unconstitutional or unjust. And self-defenders are usually stopped and rebuked if they even mention their motives, or why they disagree with the law, to the jury.

Yet to this day, trial jurors retain the right to veto, or "nullify" bad laws, though they are rarely told this by the courts. Prosecutors and judges try to exclude people from serving on juries who admit knowing they can judge the law, or who have doubts about the justice of the law. This destroys the protections jurors were supposed to be able to invoke on behalf of fellow citizens against unjust prosecutions: how can our right to a trial by an impartial jury be met if those with any qualms about the law are excluded from serving?

The fact is, it cannot. Jury selection has degenerated into a jury-stacking contest between the attorneys and judge involved. And then, if those who survive the selection process bring in a verdict that the community does not like, who gets the blame?

Worse, after enough verdicts have disappointed or angered enough people, the politicians move in for the kill, arguing that the "jury system needs reform". By that they mean stripping even more power from the jury, using juries in fewer and fewer kinds of cases, allowing verdicts to be reached by a super-majority instead of a unanimous vote, replacing ordinary citizens with government-licensed professional jurors, etc.

Beware! All such reforms will lead only to a still more powerful government, and a less powerful citizenry. Justice would come to mean whatever the government says it means, and the people would be left with no peaceful method of controlling government tyranny.

That is why it is time to act. It is time to share what you now know about the real role and power of the jury, especially with someone who has been summoned for jury duty. Show that person this article, or invite him/her to visit the Jury Power Page--before visiting the courthouse.

If you want to speed up this vital national educational effort, download one or more of the camera-ready documents available from the Jury Power Page, duplicate them, and get them into the hands of prospective jurors. This can be done by handing them out in front of your local courthouse on jury selection days. Or, they can be mailed to the local jury pool.

Or, you can focus all your effort on one day--the jury selection day nearest to September 5. Several state governors have already proclaimed this date to be "Jury Rights Day", in honor of the jury acquittal of William Penn. And you can join the organization which started the modern jury power movement, the Fully Informed Jury Association [FIJA], by phoning its toll-free information line, 1-800-TELL-JURY.

If you really want to get active, post one or more trials on the Jury Power Page Trial Directory. List the trial or trials that you know about in which you think the jury is going to need to know about its veto power if justice is to be served. When a trial is posted, others will learn about it, and perhaps show up to leaflet, or help you with a mailing, or demonstrate, or?

The farther and faster the truth about jury veto power spreads, the more likely are you and your children to enjoy the American promise of "liberty and justice for all".

GUN CRIMES ARE UP 40 PERCENT SINCE BRITAIN'S GUN BAN, and all over Europe similar gun control laws have backfired....AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE/WALL STREET JOURNAL

Sixteen people were killed last week in Germany's school shooting. This follows the killing of 14 regional legislators in a Swiss canton in September, and the massacre of eight city council members in a Paris suburb last month. Yet Europe has the kind of gun laws gun control advocates admire.

Germans seeking a hunting rifle, for example, must undergo checks that can last a year -- and the French must obtain gun permits, which are granted only after a similar exhaustive check.

Swiss federal law now grants gun permits only to those who can demonstrate the need for a weapon.

In 1996, Britain banned handguns; since then, gun crimes have risen by 40 percent.

Australia also passed severe gun restrictions in 1996 and made it a crime to use a gun defensively. In the subsequent four years, armed robberies rose 51 percent, unarmed robberies by 37 percent, assaults by 24 percent and kidnappings by 43 percent.

The problem with these harsh gun laws, experts say, is that they take guns away from law-abiding citizens, while would-be criminals ignore them, leaving potential victims defenseless. The U.S. has shown that making guns more available is actually a better formula for law and order.

In the U.S., 33 states have right-to-carry laws. In those states, deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings fell on average by 78 percent.

Source: John R. Lott Jr. (American Enterprise Institute), "Gun Control Misfires in Europe," Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2002.

On May 25, 2002, the George Mason School of Law's (GMUSL) Law Students for the Second Amendment (LS2A) tripled the number of students on their membership roster by using the Second Amendment's most potent weapon -- a Day at the Range.

Over 30 law students and their guests were treated by LS2A to a firearms safety course and familiarization live-fire training at the NRA's newly remodeled indoor shooting range in Fairfax, Virginia. NRA Range Safety officers issued twenty-two new range safety cards to, for the most part, people who had never previously so much as touched a firearm. New shooters were trained on 9mm handguns such as the Ruger P89 and .22 caliber High Standards, while the more experienced shooters fired rounds from a German MG-34 machine gun.

"We signed up almost twenty new student members," said third-year law student, retired U.S. Air Force aviator, and LS2A President, Orest J. (OJ) Jowyk. "In one day, we grew from eight members to 27! This gives us much greater credibility when going to the school's student government for event funding."

LS2A, founded at the George Mason University School of Law, is one of the nation's few gun-rights organizations made up of law students and faculty. Devoted to presenting and defending the individual rights interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, the organization has hosted a debate between attorneys from the NRA and (the then-named) HCI, and speakers such as scholar John R. Lott and attorney and author Stephen P. Halbrook. This was the first time the organization had opened its twice-yearly Range Day to non-members, "and the payoff was huge -- a Range Day is an extremely effective built-in recruiting tool we Second Amendment supporters have that we don't use nearly enough," said Jowyk. "We will certainly do something like this again, soon after the incoming class arrives in August."

In addition to another Range Day, LS2A will shoot a match against Harvard Law School's Target Shooting Club in July, and will host speaker Rep. Ron Paul at GMUSL in September to help commemorate the one-year anniversary of 9-11. For more information about LS2A, contact Orest J. (OJ) Jowyk at ojowyk@gmu.edu.

The evidence suggests that gun control has not made England a safer, fairer society By Joyce Lee Malcolm Column: Crime, 5/26/2002

Americans who believe that more guns mean more crime awakened earlier this month to find, to their dismay, that the Justice Department and the federal courts had affirmed their constitutional right to be armed. Presumably, they would have preferred restrictions based on the English model, where the toughest firearms regulations of any democracy have been credited by gun control advocates with producing a low rate of violent crime.

But there are two problems with that model. When guns were freely available, England had an astonishingly low level of violent crime. A government study for the years 1890-1892, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million. In 1904 there were only four armed robberies in London, then the largest city in the world. One century and many gun laws later, the British Broadcasting Corp. reports that England's firearms restrictions and 1997 ban on handguns ''have had little impact in the criminal underworld.'' Guns are virtually outlawed, and, as the old slogan predicted, only outlaws have guns. And what is worse, they are increasingly ready to use them.

Five centuries of growing civility in England ended in 1954. Violent crime there has been climbing ever since, and armed crime - with banned handguns the weapon of choice - is described as rocketing. Between April and November 2001, the number of people robbed at gunpoint in London rose by 53 percent. Last summer, in the course of a few days, gun-toting men burst into an English court and freed two defendants; a shooting outside a London nightclub left five women and three men wounded; and two men were machine-gunned to death in a residential neighborhood of North London.

Gun crime is just part of an increasingly lawless environment. Your chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York. England's rates of robbery and burglary are far higher than America's, and 53 percent of burglaries in England occur while occupants are at home, compared with 13 percent in the United States, where burglars admit to fearing armed homeowners more than the police.

This sea change in English crime is indicative of government policies that have gone badly wrong. Gun regulations have been only part of a more general disarmament based on the premise that people shouldn't need to protect themselves because society will protect them. It will also protect their neighbors. Citizens who witness a crime are advised to ''walk on by'' and let the professionals handle it. First, government clamped down on private possession of guns; then it forbade people carrying any article that might be used for self-defense; lastly the vigor of that self-defense was to be judged by what, in hindsight, seemed ''reasonable in the circumstances.''

The 1920 Firearms Act, the first serious British restriction on guns, required a local chief of police to certify that the potential gun owner had a good reason for owning a weapon and was a fit person to have it. All very sensible. Yet over the years a series of secret Home Office instructions to police - classified until 1989 - narrowed both criteria until, in 1969, police were instructed that ''it should never be necessary for anyone to possess a firearm for the protection of his house or person.'' Since 1997, handguns have been banned. Proposed exemptions for handicapped shooters and the British Olympic team were rejected.

Far more sweeping was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act that made it illegal to carry any article in a public place ''made, adapted, or intended'' for an offensive purpose ''without lawful authority or excuse.'' Carrying something to protect yourself was branded antisocial. Any item carried for possible defense automatically became an offensive weapon. Individuals stopped by the police and found with such items were guilty until proven innocent. As a concerned member of the House of Commons pointed out, while ''society ought to undertake the defense of its members, nevertheless one has to remember that there are many places where society cannot get, or cannot get there in time. On those occasions a man has to defend himself and those whom he is escorting. It is not very much consolation that society will come forward a great deal later, pick up the bits, and punish the violent offender.''

In the House of Lords, Lord Saltoun argued that the object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and this bill was ''framed to destroy.'' He added that he did not think governments ''have the right ... though they may very well have the power ... to deprive people for whom they are responsible of the right to defend themselves ... [u]nless there is not only a right but also a fundamental willingness amongst the people to defend themselves, no police force, however large, can do it.''

But at government insistence the law passed and became permanent. A broad 1967 revision of criminal law altered the common law standard for self-defense so that everything turns on what appears ''reasonable'' force against an assailant, considered after the fact. As the author of a leading British legal textbook pointed out, that requirement is ''now stated in such mitigated terms as to cast doubt on whether it [self-defense] still forms part of the law.''

In 1987, two men assaulted Eric Butler, a 56-year-old British Petroleum executive, in a London subway car, trying to strangle him and smashing his head against the door. No one came to his aid. He later testified, ''My air supply was being cut off, my eyes became blurred, and I feared for my life.'' In desperation he unsheathed an ornamental sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of his attackers, stabbing the man in the stomach. The assailants were charged with wounding. Butler was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.

In August 1999, Tony Martin, a 55-year-old Norfolk farmer living alone in a shabby farmhouse, awakened to the sound of breaking glass as two professional burglars burst into his home. He had been robbed six times before but, like 70 percent of rural English villages, his had no police presence. He sneaked downstairs with a shotgun and shot at the intruders. Martin received life in prison for killing one burglar, 10 years for wounding the second, and 12 months for having an illegal shotgun.

In 1994, an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house, while he called the police. When the officers arrived they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to put someone in fear. Parliament is now considering making imitation guns illegal.

This is a cautionary tale. America's founders like their English forebears, regarded personal security as one of the three great and primary rights of mankind. That was their main reason for including a right for individuals to be armed. Everyone doesn't need to avail himself of that right. It is a dangerous right. But leaving personal protection to the police is also dangerous.

The English government has come perilously close to depriving its people of the ability to protect themselves at all, and the result is a more, not less, dangerous society. ''It is implicit in a genuine right,'' an English judge pointed out, ''that its exercise may work against (some facet of) the public interest: a right to speak only where its exercise advanced the public welfare or public policy ... would be a hollow guarantee against repression.''

Public safety is not enhanced by depriving individuals of their right to personal safety.

Joyce Lee Malcolm is a history professor at Bentley College and author of "Guns and Violence: The English Experience."