Victim disarmament forces in disarray

Josey1

Victim disarmament forces in disarray Since Sept. 11, Michelle Cottle of The New Republic has quoted women on the street to the effect that, "I think all women oughta carry a cell phone and a three-fifty-seven. Loaded." "After the terrorist attacks I've been rethinking gun possession," wrote Mark L. Helm, an M.D. from Steamboat Springs, Colo., in an Oct. 3 letter to the Wall Street Journal. "Long a staunch anti-gun supporter, I'm preparing to buy a handgun and get the training necessary to legally conceal it. ... A few stories of thwarted terror attacks by armed citizens might change the mind-set of the lawless who perpetrate such acts." Does anyone else sense a tidal shift in public consciousness, here? Such statements "seem to sum up the post-Sept. 11 attitude toward gun control," reports University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, in a recent article headlined "Terrorists Attacked Gun Control Movement." Things were already not going well for the rape enablers, professor Reynolds notes. Convinced that Al Gore's strong anti-gun stance cost the Democratic Party the 2000 election, the Democratic Leadership Council had already called for a "softer line" on victim disarmament. "Meanwhile, product-liability suits brought against gun manufacturers were failing miserably in courts from New York to California. These, however, were all tactical defeats. The gun-control movement could still boast ... favorable treatment from the courts on Second Amendment cases ... and a new book by a celebrated historian that claimed guns weren't important to the framers of the U.S. Constitution. ..." Now even that has changed. The aforementioned book, Michael Bellesiles' "Arming America," lost "most of its resonance when legal historians and reporters at the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, and National Review concluded that it was based on false, and possibly fraudulent, evidence," professor Reynolds notes. On Dec. 8, Robert F. Worth of The New York Times weighed in on the Bellesiles scandal, and it was not pretty. "Only a year ago, Michael A. Bellesiles was well on his way to becoming an academic superstar," Mr. Worth reports. "He had just published a book with a startling thesis: very few people owned working guns in colonial America." Mr. Bellesiles claimed to draw from this evidence the conclusion that America's "gun culture is ... an invented tradition." Statists (who would prefer to see only the camp guards bearing arms) whooped it up. But, "Now many of Mr. Bellesiles's defenders have gone silent," Mr. Worth reports. "Over the past year a number of scholars who have examined his sources say he has seriously misused historical records and possibly fabricated them. They say the outcome, when all the evidence is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in years." Claiming to have studied more than 11,000 probate records in 40 counties across the country, Bellesiles reported that between 1765 and 1790, only 14 percent of estate inventories listed guns, and "over half (53 percent) of these guns were listed as broken or otherwise defective." But those seeking to confirm Mr. Bellesiles' research now report he understated the number of guns in these records (when they can be found at all) by factors of two or three, while multiplying the number of broken guns by a factor of six. "The number and scope of the errors in Bellesiles's work are extraordinary," Randolph Roth, history professor at Ohio State University, told the Times. "Those who have pressed him hardest for details say they have been led on a bizarre scholarly car chase, with Mr. Bellesiles offering new memories about where he got his records as soon as the old ones were discredited," the Times reports. Bellesiles told professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University Law School that he examined probate records from the 1850s at the San Francisco Superior Court. "Mr. Lindgren ... called the courthouse and was told that all the records for that decade were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire. ... Mr. Bellesiles now says he must have done the research somewhere else and cannot remember where." The Bellesiles scandal and the recent ruling of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Emerson case -- a scholarly, well-researched finding that the Second Amendment does indeed protect an individual right to own a gun -- were serious setbacks for the victim disarmament crowd, professor Reynolds concludes. But, "It is the change in the culture since Sept. 11 that has probably been the most damaging to the gun control movement's project of removing guns from the hands of ordinary Americans. "Americans have learned that being harmless does not guarantee that they will not be harmed: in fact, it seems that terrorists (like ordinary criminals) actually prefer victims who cannot strike back." So, will all those congresscritters (including our own Shelley Berkley) who have been assuring us for years that they "respect the Second Amendment" now seize this opportunity, boldly striding forth and demanding a repeal of each and every law and FAA regulation which disarmed and thus doomed heroic passengers such as Jeremy Glick and Todd Beamer on Sept. 11, reducing them to storming the cockpit of hijacked Flight 93 somewhere over western Pennsylvania armed with nothing but their little plastic butter knives from breakfast? In our dreams. For to do that, our Washington masters (who themselves often travel with armed bodyguards) would have to acknowledge that an armed civilian populace is somehow "necessary to the security of a free state." And who would ever say anything as silly as that? Vin Suprynowicz, the Review-Journal's assistant editorial page editor, is author of "Send in the Waco Killers." His column appears Sunday. http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Dec-16-Sun-2001/opinion/17674003.html