ARMED-M

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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

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Sept 2002

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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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 .unless 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.''

Three cases illustrate the results of these measures:

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.

An iconoclastic, new brand of "individualist feminism"-ifeminism-suggests that abused women might do well to put their trust in Smith & Wesson. Richard W. Stevens, Hugo Teufel III, and Matthew Y. Biscan agree.  Since 1968 Americans who face criminal attack have been advised to "dial   911" and rely upon the emergency police response for protection. Indeed, according to a study of 911 calls, "the public has built up extraordinary levels of expectation and reliance on the [911] system's effectiveness." Meanwhile, a story in U. S. News & World Report magazine in 1996, headlined, "This is 911, please hold," reported that "in recent years, many law enforcement executives have questioned the entire foundation on which 911 is built-the idea that police can stop crimes by responding rapidly to citizens ' 'emergency' calls."

In practice, does dialing 911 actually protect crime victims? Fewer than 5 percent of all calls dispatched to police are made soon enough for officers to stop a crime or arrest a suspect. Even when it functions at its best, the 911 system cannot adequately protect crime victims. When citizens rely solely on 911 and police protection from imminent criminal attacks, their risks of harm increase because of slow police response times, clogged emergency telephone lines, and occasional partial or total 911 system outages. More striking is the position of the law in nearly every state: The police have no legal obligation to protect citizens from crime.

In one landmark California case, a woman separated from her husband, and he retaliated with threats and violence. Over a period of a year, Ruth Bunnell had called the San Jose police at least twenty times to report that her estranged husband, Mack, had violently assaulted her and her two daughters. Mack had even been arrested for one assault.

One day Mack called Ruth to say that he was coming to her house to kill her. Ruth called the police for immediate help. The police department, according to court documents, "refused to come to her aid at that time and asked that she call the department again when Mack Bunnell had arrived." Forty-five minutes later Mack arrived and stabbed Ruth to death. Responding to a neighbor's call, the police eventually came to Ruth's house-after she was dead.

Ruth's estate sued the police for negligently failing to protect her. The California appeals court held that the city of San Jose was shielded from the suit because of a state statute and because there was no "special relationship" between the police and Ruth-the police had not started to help her, and she had not relied on any promise that the police would help. Case dismissed.

In a particularly brutal Washington, D.C., case, three women discovered that the law promises them no protection against brutal attack by strangers. All three women were sleeping in their rooms during the early morning hours when two men broke down the back door of their three-floor house in northwest Washington. The men first entered the second-floor room and violently assaulted one woman there.

From the third-floor room they shared, the other two women heard the screams and commotion and called the police. The call was dispatched as "Code 2" priority, which has a lower priority than "Code 1" given to crimes in progress. Four police cruisers responded to the call within a few minutes. One of the police cars drove through the alley without stopping to check the back door and then went around to the front of the house. A second police officer knocked on the front door but left when he got no answer. All officers left the scene just five minutes after they had arrived.

The two women, who had escaped to an adjoining roof, then climbed back into their room and called the police a second time because they still heard screams. The duty officer assured them that help was on the way. That second call was logged as "investigate the trouble," but no officers were dispatched.

Minutes later, the women thought the police were in the house and called down for them. There were no policemen there, but the attackers heard the screams and came upstairs. All three women were kidnapped, taken to one of the attacker's houses, and raped, robbed, beaten, and sexually abused.  The three women sued the District of Columbia and the officers for negligently failing to provide police protection, but their complaint was dismissed. Under D.C. law, "official police personnel and the government employing them are not generally liable to victims of criminal acts for failure to provide adequate police protection." This rule "rests upon the fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen." Many state courts follow and apply this same rule. The city of Sonoma, California, recently settled a federal civil rights lawsuit by paying one million dollars to the children of a battered and murdered woman whom the police failed to protect against her violent ex-husband. This lawsuit alleged that the police denied the woman her civil rights by failing to protect her. Although this settlement does not create a legal precedent, it does signal that city governments may see holes forming in their legal immunity.  But the inadequacy of the 911 system (and also of the protective orders that many women seek against abusers) suggests that self-defense may be a better option for many women and other potential victims of crime.

On average, men are physically bigger and stronger than women are. Male batterers of women, for example, are on average forty-five pounds heavier and four to five inches taller than their female victims. With serious martial arts training, a woman can fight off an unarmed man in many cases, but she likely still faces a disadvantage if attacked by more than one man or an armed man.

A woman with a firearm, however, can credibly threaten and deter an attacker of any size, shape, or strength. Even though weaker and unskilled in the use of firearms, she can sometimes protect herself with a sidearm without firing a shot. In more than 92 percent of defensive gun uses, the defender succeeds by firing only a warning shot or never firing the gun at all.

A sidearm can "equalize" physical disparity between a woman and her attacker. For a battered woman, the equalization can make all the difference, because such a woman is likely to be prepared for an abuser's attack. Typically the battered woman can sense cues of impending violence from her male partner (in the home) more quickly and accurately than a person who has not been abused. Because she can prepare, she can more effectively use the sidearm to deter and prevent a looming violent episode.

Although a woman can overcome a male attacker's physical advantages with a firearm, social and psychological factors can weaken her willingness to prepare and defend herself by using force. Some argue that American women generally have a victim mentality because of sex-role stereotyping. In our society, nonaggressiveness is characteristic of what is supposed to be "normal" heterosexual femininity. Male rapists look for the weak and fearful "damsel in distress." The more stereotypically feminine and passive a woman is, the more likely that she will be a victim of aggression. The same nonaggressive woman is unlikely to learn self-defense techniques and obtain defense tools.

Self-defense instructors have reported seeing "physically strong women who are at first so frightened of violence and of fighting that they cower and cry uncontrollably even in a simulated self-defense situation." Even female police officers sometimes need extra training to be willing to fight back against aggressors. This apparently widespread fear of conflict makes women targets of rape and violence.

"Crime prevention" programs that teach only nonviolent resistance actually reinforce the weak/passive female stereotyping. The Maryland Community Crime Prevention Institute, for example, reportedly has told women that martial arts training would not decrease the chances of injuries in an attack. Instead, the institute has advised women to struggle, cry hysterically, and pretend to faint, be sick, pregnant, or insane. Sexual stereotyping that discourages women from defending themselves can be deadly. Studies have shown that women who resist and fight back are less likely to be harmed than those women who submit passively.

Some might admit that firearm ownership could have prevented the attacks discussed above, yet they may nevertheless oppose ownership of firearms in general because of their belief that gun ownership increases the total level of violence in society. We must ask, therefore, whether self-defense through firearms is beneficial not only for battered women or women under imminent threat of violence but also for society as a whole.

Opponents of the private possession and use of firearms for defense assert that greater numbers of firearms mean more unlawful killings. Put another way, they claim that any increase in gun ownership results in an increase in murders. The facts show otherwise: The overwhelming majority of gun owners never hurt anyone with their firearms. Increasing the number of firearms available to peaceable, nonviolent citizens-the vast majority of the population-will not convert these citizens into criminals.

Homicide studies dating back to the nineteenth century show that murderers, far from being normal people who "lost control," are extreme aberrants whose life histories feature prior felonies, substance abuse, and/or psychopathology. "The vast majority of persons involved in life-threatening violence," wrote Delbert S. Elliott in the University of Colorado Law Review, "have a long criminal record and many prior contacts with the justice system." These facts appear in homicide studies so consistently that, according to an article in Homicide Studies, they "have now become criminological axioms" about the "basic characteristics of homicide." In short, everyday people don't commit homicide-violent criminals do.

While gun ownership rates increased substantially and the number of privately owned guns nearly doubled between 1973 and 1992, the homicide rate in 1992 was 10 percent lower than the 1973 rate. It is even lower today despite an increase in gun ownership. The homicide rates over this period rose and fell with no correlation with gun ownership rates. Despite the increase in firearms, there was no correlation with homicide rates in general nor an increase in the percentage of murders committed specifically with firearms. In 1973, 68.2 percent of all murders were committed with guns. In 1992, the figure was 68.2 percent. Contrary to the gun control rhetoric, more guns do not equal more murders.

Some of the arguments for gun control and against armed self-defense play directly on sex-role stereotypes of women. One argument is that using a sidearm requires a lot of training, so the gun is more dangerous to the average citizen than a deterrent to the criminal.

This argument emphasizes incompetence and lack of training as a reason not to be armed. Women are more likely to be considered incompetent and untrained with firearms. Some women may also see themselves as incompetent and physically weak. This argument points to leaving the job of protecting women to the men (typically) in uniform who are experts. Yet Lee J. Hicks noted in Police Chief magazine that he found that civilian women with two hours of instruction could learn to shoot a gun as accurately as could police academy cadets in simulated real-life situations.

Another argument concerns fears of gun "take-away." According to this rationale, the criminal can wrest the gun out of the hands of the physically weaker woman. The armed woman can too easily be converted into an unarmed woman at the mercy of her now-armed attacker. The statistics that back up this argument come from cases where police officers in the line of duty have lost their guns to criminals. But the analogy is faulty. Police officers must approach, subdue, and take suspects into custody. The officers must therefore come close enough for the suspects to be able to grab the guns. Personal- and home-defense situations are quite different; they do not require the defender to get close to the attacker. Indeed, the opposite is true: The defender wants to keep the attacker at a distance, and that requires no special strength except the gun. A woman strong enough to shoot is strong enough to keep an attacker out of reach of her gun.

Sayoko Blodgett-Ford, author of an article headlined "Do Battered Women Have a Right to Bear Arms?" in the Yale Law and Policy Review, recounts the story of a California woman whose husband shattered her jaw while she held their baby. After she had her jaw rebuilt at the hospital, she tried to press charges against him, but police and county mental health workers persuaded her not to because the husband had agreed to get counseling. After two sessions, even the counselor refused to meet with him because of death threats.

Despite a restraining order, the estranged husband continued to prowl around his wife's house, sleeping in her yard and calling her constantly by phone. When the police refused to arrest him for violating the restraining order, she decided to buy a gun. While she waited the fifteen days required by California law to get the gun, he repeatedly assaulted her at home and at work. Once she obtained the sidearm, however, and her abuser knew she was armed, the assaults stopped. He continued lesser insults, such as stealing her mail and harassing her by phone, but the physical attacks stopped.

To decide whether to support or oppose private ownership of firearms, individualist feminists should consider the options for self-defense, particularly in the case of domestic violence. The data, logic, and human experience all show that potential crime victims who are in imminent danger of violence are better protected by individual self-defense options than by government laws and centralized police response. Individual women in peril quite frequently fare better when they develop skill and confidence in the carrying and using of defensive firearms. Victim disarmament ("gun control") laws that discourage women from developing the skills and using defensive firearms actually heighten the risks of criminal violence that women face. Such laws place women at a disadvantage against violent men and run against the feminist goal of equal treatment under the law.

~Richard W. Stevens is a lawyer who specializes in preparing legal briefs for trial and appellate court cases and is the author of Dial 911 and Die. Hugo Teufel III is an attorney in public practice. Matthew Y. Biscan is a lawyer in Denver, Colorado. This article is excerpted with permission from the new book from The Independent Institute (independent.org) Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-first Century edited by Wendy McElroy (Ivan R. Dee).

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Louisiana Governor Advises Women Scared of Serial Killer to Get a Gun Friday, August 02, 2002

BATON ROUGE, La.  - Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster reminded women Thursday that they can pack a gun to protect themselves from a serial killer who has slain three women in the capital in the past 10 months.

"You have the right to get a gun permit," Foster said. "Learn to use it."

Foster said during his weekly radio show that he has asked state police to ensure they are helping with the investigation to find the man who slashed Pam Kinamore's throat, strangled Gina Green and stabbed Charlotte Pace.

Kinamore's mother, Lynne Marino, called the "Live Mike" radio show to ask the governor to intervene.

"I'm asking you to call in all the agencies throughout the state to assist us in this search for evidence and for the serial killer," she said. "Not many towns know how to deal with a serial killer."

The families of the victims have refused to rely solely on the police, sharing information among themselves to see if there's some small connection between the victims.  Foster touted self-protection until the killer was found.

"Most people don't ever want to use a gun to protect themselves -- that's the last thing they want to do -- but if you know how and you have a situation with some fruitcake running around, like they've got right now, it sure can save you a lot of grief," he said.

Pace, 22, lived three doors down from Green when the 41-year-old nurse was found strangled in her home on Sept. 24. Pace was stabbed to death on May 31, two days after she moved to a townhouse in another neighborhood. It doesn't appear that the two women knew each other.

Kinamore, 44, was abducted from her home on July 12. The killer slit her throat and dumped her body along a highway 30 miles outside Baton Rouge.  Jobs at Fox News Channel. Internships at Fox News Channel. Terms of use.  Privacy Statement.  For FoxNews.com comments write to foxnewsonline@foxnews.com;  For Fox News Channel comments write to comments@foxnews.com For the latest in sports news, visit www.foxsports.com. ©Associated Press. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2002 Standard & Poor's This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Subject:  Guns & Crime -- the lesson from English history By Glenn Harlan Reynolds Thursday,

August 08, 2002

 The trouble with lessons from history is that they often involve little actual history.  Sometimes, the history was never there to begin with. Other times, lessons from history are wrong because nobody has bothered to look at the facts.

 Where guns are involved, people are beginning to look. Bentley College historian Joyce Malcolm looked deeply at the roots of America's right to arms in a 1994 book published by Harvard University Press, entitled To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right. That book explained that the right to arms enshrined in the Constitution's Second Amendment was not merely the product of a "frontier mentality," as some gun control proponents have suggested, but the outgrowth of a long and well-established English tradition favoring an armed citizenry as a defense against tyranny.

 Now professor Malcolm, and Harvard University Press, is back with a book entitled Guns and Violence: The English Experience, which addresses another English connection to American gun rights.

 It is a standard observation in American and English debates over gun control that England has strict gun controls and low crime rates, while America has  (comparatively) liberal gun laws and higher crime rates. It is usually assumed that there is a cause and effect relationship, with the low crime stemming from the strict gun controls in England, and vice versa in the United States.

 This turns out not to be the case. As Malcolm observes, violent crime rates in England, very high in the 14th century, fell more or less steadily for five hundred years, even as ownership of firearms became more common. By the late 19th century, England had gun laws that were far more liberal than are found anywhere in the United States today, yet almost no gun crime, and little violent crime of other sorts. (An 1870 act, which was seldom enforced, required the payment of a small tax for the privilege of carrying, not simply owning, a gun.)   Despite a well-armed populace, Malcolm reports, "statistics record an astonishingly low rate of gun-related violence in the late nineteenth century." How low?

 In the course of three years, according to hospital reports, there were only 59 fatalities from handguns in a population of nearly 30 million people. Of these, 19 were accidents, 35 were suicides, and only 3 were homicides 3 an average of one a year.

 Despite these rates, which Malcolm is right to call astonishingly low, the British government decided at the turn of the 20th century to begin a program of gun control that would ensure "that nobody except a soldier, sailor, or policeman, should have a pistol at all." The claimed justification was the "enormous" number of handgun injuries.

 This effort was initially frustrated by popular resistance, but the first regulatory law in this campaign was passed in 1903, requiring a license for the purchase of a pistol. Such licenses were freely available, though, and citizens remained well enough armed that when (unarmed) London Bobbies were chasing a group of armed robbers in 1909, they had no trouble borrowing pistols from passersby, while other armed citizens joined in the chase. Rates of gun violence remained low.

 After World War I, the English government got serious. Though fear of crime was  (again) claimed as a justification for much more intrusive gun controls despite no increases of any significance, the real motivation -- as historical records make very clear -- was the fear of armed labor unionists, and perhaps even Bolshevik revolution. Though Parliament in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries had seen an armed citizenry as a valuable check on tyranny, by the 20th century the government was determined to disarm the citizenry so as to eliminate any threats to its power.

 Because the 1903 act requiring firearm licensing had not resulted in strict limits on gun ownership, the populace was not much threatened by the 1920 Firearms Act. The act met with much less resistance than the early popular resistance to the 1903 law.  But the 1920 Firearms Act began the trend toward the near-complete disarmament of the formerly well-armed English citizenry. This disarmament continued by gradual sub silent changes in administrative policy. For example, in 1938 the government made the unannounced decision that pistol licenses would no longer be issued to individuals who wanted a gun to defend their homes. Additional legislation followed.  As Malcolm puts it:

 Parliament passed comprehensive firearms statute that eliminated the right of individuals to be armed. It was the culmination of fifty years of effort by British governments of every political stripe. The announced rationale by the ruling coalition government was, as usual, an increase in armed crime, yet statistics in London show no such increase. Private Cabinet papers make clear that the government was afraid not of crime but of disorder and even revolution, the same fears that had fuelled government control measures in the past.

 By 1953, the English were effectively disarmed - and compounding the insult, courts began prosecuting people for previously legal (and even encouraged) acts of violence in defense of persons and property. In the future, only the police were to use violence, and even they tended to be quite lenient toward violent criminals.

 In a "coincidence" that will surprise few readers who are familiar with the work of criminologists like John Lott and Gary Kleck, English crime rates almost immediately began a steady rise, for the first time in 500 years. The overall crime rate in England and Wales is now 60 percent higher than in the United States. And it wasn’t just crime in general: Gun crimes became far more common as well. As Malcolm notes:

 The peacefulness England used to enjoy was not the result of strict gun laws. When it had no firearms restrictions England had little violent crime, while the present extraordinarily stringent gun controls have not stopped the increase in violence or even the increase in armed violence. By opting to deprive law-abiding citizens of the right to keep guns or to carry any article for defense, English government policy may actually be contributing to the lawlessness and violence afflicting its people.

 Malcolm is commendably cautious when discussing the connection between stricter English gun laws and higher rates of crime. But at the very least, she has demonstrated that the history of English gun control does not support the commonly made claim that English crime rates were (formerly) lower in England because of stricter gun controls. The rise in English crime has coincided with the growth of governmental intrusiveness where firearms are concerned. The history is entirely consistent with the findings of Lott and Kleck: that disarming honest citizens produces more crime, not less.   What's more, the English experience provides a concrete example of American gun owners’ worst fear: A patient political establishment steadily whittling firearms rights away over a period of decades through means both open and covert as circumstances permitted, in order to bring the citizenry under more complete political control. These are lessons worth bearing in mind whenever the English experience is brought up as part of the American gun-control debate.