In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Views from the UK on the USA
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Freedom to hate, freedom to harm
With the supreme court to rule on the legality of racist cross burning, Julian Borger asks whether the US constitution remains a force for liberty
Wednesday May 29, 2002
The United States often appears peculiarly gripped by its history, perhaps because it is such a young country. Nowhere is this truer than in its celebrated constitution, which was written recently enough to embody the spirit of the modern age, but sufficiently long ago to emit the aura of a sacred text.
So it is that in recent weeks, the textual analysis of the second amendment has taken centre stage in the bitter political row about guns. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, reversed more than 60 years of official practice by arguing that the clause's disjointed phrasing - "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" - meant that every American has a constitutional right to own a gun. Not suprisingly, this triggered uproar among gun control advocates and renewed musing over what the "framers" of the constitution had in mind.
This week, it is the first amendment's turn. The supreme court has decided to consider an issue that most Americans and much of the rest of the world had considered dead and buried - whether there is a constitutional right to burn crosses in the manner made famous over a century ago by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan is still around, in a depleted and pathetic form, and there are still some people out there who choose to relive the "good old days" of overt and vicious racial bigotry by burning the odd cross. The court is to consider two cases from 1998, both from Virginia. In one incident, a Klansman lit a 30-foot cross on private land which, naturally enough, terrified passing blacks. In another case, a couple of drunken rednecks tried to burn a cross in a black neighbour's garden. When the cases went to trial, a conservative Virginia court reversed a 50-year-old law banning the practice, and brought some unpleasant history back to haunt the south.
The first amendment guarantees free speech. To be precise it prohibits Congress from making any laws concerning the "establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Arguably, there is nothing in there about burning crosses, but it has generally been judicial practice to treat the whole amendment as a general safeguard for freedom of expression, and you cannot get much more expressive than setting fire to a huge wooden cross as a traditional symbol of racial hatred.
However, way back in 1919, a famous supreme court justice, Wendell Holmes, argued that some words represent a "clear and present danger" of incitement to criminality, and were therefore not protected by the constitution. At that time the alleged incitement came from a socialist who had been distributing pamphlets condemning military conscription in world war one, but in later decades it migrated to matters of race.
The idea of incitement is a tricky one, as it concerns the link between words or gestures and physical action. In a 1969 ruling, also involving racial incitement by a Klansman, the supreme court ruled that the first amendment protected all manner of ranting unless it was likely to "produce imminent lawless action". But that in turn raises the question: At what point does burning a cross turn from being merely obnoxious to a true threat to harm others?
In Britain and much of Europe, this would be a "no-brainer". Many countries have laws on the books outlawing racial incitement. If a reasonable majority or the ruling party decides a particular form of behaviour is sufficiently antisocial, it is simply banned.
In Britain, of course, there is no written constitution, nor is there - for a country supposedly steeped in history - much reverence for what past leaders, kings and otherwise, had to say about how the British people should lead their lives today. Nor do the French have much time for the contemporary significance of the thoughts of Robespierre, Danton or Napoleon.
The US constitution is a uniquely powerful document, but whether it has really done anything for the cause of freedom is open to debate. It accommodated slavery for longer than European states, turned a blind eye to the Jim Crow segregation laws for decades, and did nothing to stop McCarthyism. Nowadays it is being used as a vehicle for the proliferation of guns and a shelter for racists. It clearly takes more than a document to negotiate the treacherous currents and eddies of human liberty.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,724076,00.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Edited by - Josey1 on 06/02/2002 06:24:26
With the supreme court to rule on the legality of racist cross burning, Julian Borger asks whether the US constitution remains a force for liberty
Wednesday May 29, 2002
The United States often appears peculiarly gripped by its history, perhaps because it is such a young country. Nowhere is this truer than in its celebrated constitution, which was written recently enough to embody the spirit of the modern age, but sufficiently long ago to emit the aura of a sacred text.
So it is that in recent weeks, the textual analysis of the second amendment has taken centre stage in the bitter political row about guns. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, reversed more than 60 years of official practice by arguing that the clause's disjointed phrasing - "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" - meant that every American has a constitutional right to own a gun. Not suprisingly, this triggered uproar among gun control advocates and renewed musing over what the "framers" of the constitution had in mind.
This week, it is the first amendment's turn. The supreme court has decided to consider an issue that most Americans and much of the rest of the world had considered dead and buried - whether there is a constitutional right to burn crosses in the manner made famous over a century ago by the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan is still around, in a depleted and pathetic form, and there are still some people out there who choose to relive the "good old days" of overt and vicious racial bigotry by burning the odd cross. The court is to consider two cases from 1998, both from Virginia. In one incident, a Klansman lit a 30-foot cross on private land which, naturally enough, terrified passing blacks. In another case, a couple of drunken rednecks tried to burn a cross in a black neighbour's garden. When the cases went to trial, a conservative Virginia court reversed a 50-year-old law banning the practice, and brought some unpleasant history back to haunt the south.
The first amendment guarantees free speech. To be precise it prohibits Congress from making any laws concerning the "establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Arguably, there is nothing in there about burning crosses, but it has generally been judicial practice to treat the whole amendment as a general safeguard for freedom of expression, and you cannot get much more expressive than setting fire to a huge wooden cross as a traditional symbol of racial hatred.
However, way back in 1919, a famous supreme court justice, Wendell Holmes, argued that some words represent a "clear and present danger" of incitement to criminality, and were therefore not protected by the constitution. At that time the alleged incitement came from a socialist who had been distributing pamphlets condemning military conscription in world war one, but in later decades it migrated to matters of race.
The idea of incitement is a tricky one, as it concerns the link between words or gestures and physical action. In a 1969 ruling, also involving racial incitement by a Klansman, the supreme court ruled that the first amendment protected all manner of ranting unless it was likely to "produce imminent lawless action". But that in turn raises the question: At what point does burning a cross turn from being merely obnoxious to a true threat to harm others?
In Britain and much of Europe, this would be a "no-brainer". Many countries have laws on the books outlawing racial incitement. If a reasonable majority or the ruling party decides a particular form of behaviour is sufficiently antisocial, it is simply banned.
In Britain, of course, there is no written constitution, nor is there - for a country supposedly steeped in history - much reverence for what past leaders, kings and otherwise, had to say about how the British people should lead their lives today. Nor do the French have much time for the contemporary significance of the thoughts of Robespierre, Danton or Napoleon.
The US constitution is a uniquely powerful document, but whether it has really done anything for the cause of freedom is open to debate. It accommodated slavery for longer than European states, turned a blind eye to the Jim Crow segregation laws for decades, and did nothing to stop McCarthyism. Nowadays it is being used as a vehicle for the proliferation of guns and a shelter for racists. It clearly takes more than a document to negotiate the treacherous currents and eddies of human liberty.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,724076,00.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
Edited by - Josey1 on 06/02/2002 06:24:26
Comments
Academics cast doubt on claims that early American pioneers were unarmed
Oliver Burkeman in New York
Saturday June 1, 2002
The Guardian
As befits a historian who studies 18th-century wills in the dusty backrooms of provincial courthouses, Michael Bellesiles hardly seems the confrontational type. But two years ago, the soft-spoken Atlanta professor - who prefers to take notes on yellow legal pads than on computers - found himself the target of a vicious fusillade when he wrote a book that shattered one of the US gun lobby's most cherished beliefs: that firearms had been central to the American way of life since pre-revolutionary times.
His astonishing thesis was that the rifle-toting pioneer was a modern concoction - in fact, almost no one had owned guns.
Spurred on by Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, gun-lovers bayed for Prof Bellesiles' blood. He received hundreds of hate-filled emails, phone-calls, even death threats, he said. Eventually, he was forced to move house to protect his family.
Now though, a growing chorus of reputable scholars at American universities is questioning Prof Bellesiles' prize-winning, 600-page tome, Arming America, accusing him of wildly misusing his sources, even fabricating data, in what is shaping up to be the most serious academic scandal in recent memory.
Records from the late 1700s, cited in his work and examined by the Guardian, suggest that gun ownership may have been far higher than claimed by Prof Bellesiles, who argues that even on the frontier, only 14% of households owned guns.
Challenged to detail his sources, Prof Bellesiles changed his story, first claiming to have examined records that were destroyed in an earthquake almost 100 years ago, then saying he could not remember what records he did use. He says his original notepads, which would have identified the libraries he visited, were turned into "an unreadable pulp" when water pipes burst and flooded his office at Emory University, Atlanta, in May 2000.
"The evidence is utterly devastating," said Albert Alschuler, a professor at the University of Chicago law school and author of a study favourable to advocates of firearms control. "We're hesitant to use the word fraud in our business, but it seems to me that there are smoking guns all over the place."
Second amendment
Last week, the National Endowment for the Humanities - part of the bedrock of America's academic establishment - joined the fray, ordering its name removed from a $30,000 fellowship Prof Bellesiles is completing in Chicago. An investigation under way at Emory could cost him his tenured position.
Arming America is crucial to the modern debate on gun violence because the second amendment - protecting the "right to bear arms" - was written in the 1700s. If firearms were widespread then, gun enthusiasts claim, the founding fathers must have meant to enshrine an individual right to carry weapons, not just the right of states to have armies - a position the US department of justice backed earlier this month, breaking with precedent and outraging anti-gun campaigners.
Prof Bellesiles argues that America's "shared and widespread culture idolising firearms" developed much later, in the civil war.
The book has been cited in a crucial gun-control case the supreme court is deciding whether to hear.
Prof Bellesiles claims that he trawled through probate records listing inventories of household possessions in the San Francisco courthouse and 40 other locations to calculate the prevalence of gun ownership. When it emerged that the courthouse's records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, he switched the location to an obscure historical society, across the San Francisco Bay in Contra Costa County.
"I assume they were there," Prof Bellesiles told the Guardian. "It doesn't seem to me that it matters which side of the bay they're from ... I have this habit of going into any courthouse, anywhere I am, and asking for their probate records. I come back to the misfortune of having lost those notes."
Emory confirms that the office flood occurred, but Dean McLeod, a director of the Contra Costa historical society, said the records Prof Bellesiles photocopied there were not household inventories. "They are creditors' claims [which would not mention guns]," said Mr McLeod.
"I was embarrassed for him ... I can't imagine how anyone could make such a mistake."
Prof Bellesiles placed some additional records on his website, but when errors were found in them he blamed a hacker.
More damning, though, was the conclusion reached by James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago who says he supports gun control, when he and other legal experts analysed records cited by Prof Bellesiles. Where Prof Bellesiles counted 14% of households owning guns in Vermont, they found 40%. "He's the only one ever to have found fewer than 40% in any published source I've ever seen," Prof Lindgren said.
"I do not know of any other work of history published in the last 30 years that approaches the level of error in Arming America," Prof Lindgren said.
Prof Bellesiles said: "If you believe someone is guilty, you will find evidence that they are guilty - look at the people on death row in the US who have been proven to be innocent by DNA ... there are those who for reasons of their own are determined to prove me guilty of something in three paragraphs of my book."
He added that Prof Lindgren's doubts about his counting of probate records could not be settled: "I don't have this documentation ... the main pipes flooded the [history department] building for at least six hours. The building was a soggy mess ... I was foolish not to be utterly modern and computerised. I'm an older guy, I do things in an old-fashioned way." Prof Bellesiles is 48.
It is a measure of the frenzy the controversy has generated that one retired law professor tested some legal notepads under his shower. "They remained intact and virtually unscathed," he reported on a website.
"The metaphors of unfriendly fire [and] people taking shots at you are, unfortunately, accurate," said Professor RB Bernstein, a Bellesiles supporter at New York law school.
Prof Bellesiles said he was looking forward to the conclusion of the Emory inquiry, due in the next few months, which he expects to clear his name. "I need to have a life again," he said.
The decision by his funders to remove their name from his fellowship, he added, reawakened the ghosts of McCarthyism. "It sends a message: that there are some topics which perhaps should not be addressed ... This is a dangerous environment to talk about firearms. I think that's rather obvious now."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,725750,00.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
This is interesting to me. Thank God this professor is being held accountable for his poor if not outright lies about His statistics.
I'm reading a book about the St. James massacre in South Africa.
written by Charl Van Wyk. Called; ShootingBack. The Right and Duty of Self-Defence. `He notes that following the hand gun confiscation in England, crimes commited with handguns jumped nearly 40% from 1999 to 2000. Violent crime in England now surpasses the US violent crime rates.
As far as legal incitement goes, how about the Protestant marchers in Ireland taunting the Catholics?