Month: November 2009

From Dave Kopel’s book, Aiming for Liberty: The Past, Present, And Future of Freedom and Self-Defense, Chapter Four, “Some Deceptions and Errors Used to Promote Anti-Gun Laws”:

The story of the nonexistent “cop-killer” bullet begins in 1976 in Massachusetts, when a handgun-confiscation initiative was defeated in a landslide. Then in 1982 in California, a handgun “Freeze” initiative also lost overwhelmingly. The gun-pohibitiation lobbies began to realize that they wold have to work more incrementally, rather than pushing for prohibition outright.

The prohibition lobbies also realized that the police were one of their worst problems. Wile a few police chiefs or sheriffs could always be found to support prohibition, the vast majority of police — both commanders and line officers — were extremely skeptical of gun control. Something had to be done to turn the police (or at least their Washington lobbyists) against the National Rifle Association.

The something, ironically, was an obscure type of ammunition invented by police officers two decades before. These bullets were known as KTW bullets, after the initials of the three persons who invented them: Dr. Paul Kopsch, and police officers Daniel Turcus and Don Ward.

The chapter goes on to describe what these so-called cop-killer bullets were actually created for, which was shooting through barriers. It also mentions their appearance in the Lethal Weapon series of movies, which is probably responsible for driving public misconceptions about guns during the late 80s and early 90s than a lot of others.

The problem with this gambit is that it worked, at least for a while. The anti-gun groups’ ability to drive misconceptions and public opinion on the gun issue used to be a powerful weapon against us, but it’s diminished quite a bit in the past decade. As much as I’d like to give new media the credit, I think it comes down to a lot of factors, one of which is changes in the shooting culture from the sporting orientation of older generations, to a more self-defense oriented mindset that started with the baby boomers in the 80s and 90s. There was a lot of changes in policing in the 80s and 90s as well, which may have helped the gun prohibition movement to drive divisions there as well.

Remember the case of that guy who got caught at LAX because he was picking up a friend to go shooting with a trunk for of so-called “assault weapons?” He plead guilty to Misdemeanor CCW and had his guns returned. Good work on the part of his attorneys. It’s a travesty that he was guilty of anything, but at least this lets him go on with life, and he won’t be a prohibited person. You’ll notice in the memo that the LAPD were trying to consider multiple firearms, including a Broomhandle Mauser, “assault weapons”, when they were no such thing according to the legal definition.

Saul Cornell’s Joyce funded center is no more. Apparently Professor Joe Olson got a rather hilarious e-mail about the same. We continue to rack up victory while detractors among us continue to claim Heller was really a defeat. Their prattle gets more and more ridiculous by the day.

From a chapter two in Dave Kopel’s book Aiming for Liberty: The Past, Present, And Future of Freedom and Self-Defense, called the same as my title:

Michigan’s law requiring a government permit in order to buy a handgun was enacted after Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black man, shot and killed a person in a mob that was attacking his house because he had just moved into an all-white neighborhood. The Detroit Police stood nearby, refusing to restrain the angry crowd.

Indicted for first degree murder, Sweet was acquitted after a lengthy trial at which Clarence Darrow served as his attorney. Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Herald vigorously defended blacks’ right to use deadly force in self-defense against a mob.

Darrow summed up for the jury: “eleven of them go into a house, gentlemen, with no police protection, in the face of a mob, and the hatred of a community, and take guns and ammunition and fight for their rights, and for your rights and for mine, and for the rights of every being that lives. They went in and faced a mob seeking to tear them to bits. Call them something besides cowards.”

The name Clarence Darrow should ring a bell. Even progressives have historically supported the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense. The opposition it received from the modern left for the latter part of the 20th century is largely an anomaly, quite possibly a result of history largely ignoring the role the right to keep and bear arms had in the Civil Rights movement. Kopel’s chapter continues:

Black and civil rights workers armed for self-defense. Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas NAACP and publisher of the Arkansas State Press during the Little Rock High School desegregation case, recalls that three crosses were burned on her lawn and gunshots fired into her home. Her husband, L.C. Bates, stayed up to guard their house with a .45 semi-automatic pistol. Some of their friends organized a volunteer patrol.

After the Bates’s front lawn was bombed, Mrs. Bates telegrammed Attorney General Herbert Brownell in Washington. He replied there was no federal jurisdiction, and told them to go to the local police. “Of course that wasn’t going to protect us,” Mrs. Bates remembered.

State or federal assistance sometimes did come — not when disorder began, but when blacks reacted by arming themselves. In North Carolina, Governor Terry Sanford (who later served as an anti-gun US Senator) refused to command state police to protect a civil rights march from Klan attacks — until he was warned that if there were no police, the marchers would be armed for self-defense.

There was a time when even the NAACP recognized the importance of the right to bear arms in protecting other civil rights. I will continue to bring other choice quotes from Dave Kopel’s book as I make my way through it.