Lies the government told you (15 page)

Unbeknownst to them—and to the joy of the agents—the shotgun was required to be registered under the new “revenue-raising” National Firearms Act. The two men therefore faced substantial fines and up to five years in jail, all for driving across a state border
without
an extra two inches of steel. They faced a long prison sentence for carrying a gun that was
slightly too short
. Of course, even if they had known about the legislation, it is doubtful that Miller and Layton would have registered their weapon, as the price of registration, as we have seen, was astronomical.

The implications of this case and the National Firearms Act on the Second Amendment were not lost on the federal district judge presiding over the criminal case against Miller and Layton in
United States v. Miller
. Dismissing all charges, the judge noted that charging a $200 tax on a $6.95 firearm was so expensive that it was in effect a direct infringement on the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Miller and Layton were freed and continued with their lives, content in the knowledge that their fundamental rights were protected by the courts.

Unfortunately, the federal government was not willing to accept this condemnation of its convoluted legislation and appealed to the United States Supreme Court. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Miller and Layton were not available, while their counsel, having represented them for free, could
not spare the expense of further litigation. The result was that neither briefs nor oral arguments were presented on their behalf. This was in itself a shocking result as it is unheard-of for the Supreme Court to hear and consider only one side of a case. But hear it and consider it the Court did.

Undisputed, uncontested, and undeterred, the government was able to argue that firearms with a barrel shorter than sixteen inches were not used in the military, that the Second Amendment only granted protection to arms that were used by the militia, and that the militia could only be armed with weapons used by the military. The government remembered its earlier lesson well, and knew that as long as it lied and lied well, the Court could be seduced. And that is exactly what occurred. The Supreme Court of the United States did not investigate the truth of the statements and accepted each false claim by the government with no scrutiny.
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Justice McReynolds simply stated that “certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.” Of course it was not within judicial notice; how could it have been, when the only people providing information to the Court were lawyers for the federal government? Typically, in order to have a fact be taken into judicial notice, it must be so notoriously well-known that it is almost irrefutable. Yet here, the Court chose to turn the rule on its head, and accept something as fact because no other evidence had been brought to the Court to refute it. The Supreme Court in essence chose to ignore basic rules of evidence and accept an assertion to be fact with no evidentiary presentation and only the contention of the government. And unfortunately, there was no one to object or complain.

With little fanfare, the Supreme Court held that since there was “
no evidence tending to show
the possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument.” Neither providing a historical analysis of the right to bear arms nor acknowledging that a militia historically consisted of a citizenry armed with their own guns rather than those of the military, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the National Firearms Act of 1934. Sadly, the Court’s flawed and convoluted reasoning was the precedent that would govern Second Amendment jurisprudence and legislation for almost seventy years.
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A Rose by Any Other Name
Would Not Smell as Sweet

The reign of
United States v. Miller
allowed both the state and federal governments to infringe continuously upon the fundamental right of the people to keep and bear arms. In 1968 came the Gun Control Act and the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which prohibited firearm ownership by certain individuals, including those under eighteen years of age, and most importantly prohibited the private sales of guns between the residents of different states, as well as establishing a national gun licensing system. Of course, the Acts were aptly named, the government having incorporated the most beneficent of motives in the title. Who would not want the streets of their neighborhoods to be safer?

The Acts also created the “sporting use” test, which required that any imported firearms “be generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes, excluding surplus military firearms.” The subjectivity of such a test permitted the government to choose what was sport and resulted in a ban on firearms used for popular gun sports not recognized by the law enforcement agencies. Eerily enough, large portions of the Gun Control Act were almost identical to those of the Control Acts of Nazi Germany, which resulted in the disarming of an entire population of Jews.
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The Gun Control Act of 1968 spawned a variety of similar state regulations, which resulted in an increasing frequency of rebellious grumblings from those who believed that Second Amendment rights guaranteed to the people were being trampled. As a result, the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary formed a Subcommittee on the Constitution, which was to examine the rights granted by the Second Amendment.
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The committee at the time consisted of some very familiar names, including Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, Ted Kennedy, and Arlen Specter, as well as the current vice president, Joe Biden. In February 1982, after extensive historical research and hearings, the subcommittee issued its report, and stated that

the conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half of the century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an
individual right of a private citizen to own or carry firearms
in a peaceful manner. [emphases added]

Partially as a result of the remarkable findings of the subcommittee, Congress enacted and President Reagan signed into law the Firearm Owner’s Protection Act of 1986, which was billed as an attempt to return back to the people their Second Amendment rights. But of course, as in the past, the claim made by the title of the Act was a falsity. Instead of protecting personal rights, the Act banned the manufacture, transfer, and civilian use of machine guns not manufactured as of the date of the Act; except, of course, for law enforcement officials. The justification was once again that this was for the prevention of violent crime. Even Ronald Reagan, who claimed he believed in the original meaning of the Second Amendment as articulated by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, fell for this.

Of the 175,000 licensed automatic firearms in existence at the time,
none
had been used to commit a violent crime.
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Considering this information, maybe Reagan should have thought to name the Act more appropriately, rather than being complicit in pulling the wool over the eyes of the people and assaulting their Second Amendment rights.

Federal regulations became more frequent, including an Executive Order by President George H. W. Bush banning the importation of machine guns. Then the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act followed five years later, creating a national background check system and requiring a waiting period before a gun could be purchased. Though the Act mandates that all paperwork received by the BATF be automatically destroyed, quite often the BATF will find excuses to keep the records on file for extended periods.
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Of course, this was another well-crafted title by the government, continuing the deception that its actions were all for our own good, even though no evidence was ever found to illustrate the effectiveness of gun control on violence prevention. Maybe a name like “Make It So Difficult to Get a Gun That No One Does” Act would have been more truthful.

Finally, the federal government gave us the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994, which it actually subtitled with some truth as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. In essence, this Act was a prohibition on the sale to civilians of specified semiautomatic firearms, which were defined as “assault weapons.” The Act designated nineteen weapons by name as assault weapons and then provided a definition of assault weapons that was based on certain combinations of a senseless variety of features.

Especially interesting to note is the fact that while the term “assault weapon” sounds threatening and brings to mind rapid-fire machine guns, in reality “the weapons outlawed by the ban function the same as any semiautomatic and legal hunting rifle. They fire the same bullets at the same speed and produce the same damage. They are simply regular deer rifles that look on the outside like AK-47s.”
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These guns do not fire multiple rounds; only one bullet is ejected each time the trigger is pulled.

The federal government chose to ban weapons on appearance rather than utility and all under its ever-popular guise of crime control. When the ban was set to expire in 2004, there was a hue and cry by politicians that its expiration would facilitate a bloodbath in the streets. Thankfully, the Act was not extended, and, not surprisingly, nothing happened. The lifting of the ban was heralded by no increase in crime. Rather, a study on the assault weapon ban by the federal government’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was unable to find sufficient evidence to illustrate the effectiveness of the ban on violence prevention.

Six months after the ban
ended, the FBI reported a 3.6 percent
drop
in violent crime, the first in five years. And those states that continued to have assault weapons bans actually saw the lowest drops in murder rates.
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Of course, the public is never made aware of these statistics, and the government still claims that we were safer with the ban.

The reason the government continues to get away with these lies and deceptions is the absurd willingness of the people to believe that by disarming the general public and law-abiding persons, we will also effectively disarm criminals. Rational thought dictates the opposite effect: By disarming law-abiding persons, the government effectively gives criminals more firepower for their crimes. Yet a study that cross-referenced the FBI uniform crime report with concealed weapons laws in every state found a very high correlation between laws banning concealed weapons and high crime rates. But it was a different correlation than the government expected, because rather than having lower crime in those areas where gun control was most stringent, there was the opposite effect: The states with the most lawfully concealed weapons had the lowest rates of crime.
¹⁶

Vermont is the state most famous for its permissive gun carry laws, and it has one of the lowest crime rates in the Union. Compare the District of Columbia, with the highest gun murder rate, at almost 57 out of 100,000 persons to a city across the river, Arlington, Virginia. Arlington has much more permissive guns law, but its gun murder rate is 1.6 per every 100,000 persons. One could argue that this is due to a different city landscape, but if it does not prove that access to guns lowers crime, it at least illustrates that gun control does not help lessen crime and violence. And if it cannot do that, then what is its use? Might it have something to do with the lust of those in power to dominate us?

Fewer than 2 percent of handguns and 1 percent of all guns in this country will ever be used to commit a violent crime, so the all-encompassing gun laws aimed at the entire population, when only a small subset of it is involved in crime, is like burning a haystack to get at a needle.
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On the other hand, it is law-abiding citizens who are often successful in warding off crime, and studies have shown that assailants armed with guns will typically flee when their victim draws a weapon.
¹⁸

Guns are used defensively more than two million times per year, which means that more armed citizens successfully defend themselves and reduce criminal activity each year.
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Benjamin Franklin once stated that democracy is two wolves and one lamb voting on what to have for dinner, while liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting that vote. Slowly but surely, the lambs are being disarmed while the wolves continue to sharpen their teeth.
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But of Course Law Enforcement Officers
Deserve to Be Armed

But then we should consider who the wolves in the scenario are. The government looks us in the eyes and tells us that it is acting with our best intentions at heart. There is one name, Ken Ballew, that is not familiar to many of us; but it should be. He is just one example of the atrocities that have been perpetrated during the fraud that is gun control.

On a balmy night in June 1971, Ballew was in the middle of his shower when he heard a banging on his back door as if someone was trying to break it down. Worried about the safety of his live-in girlfriend, who was sleeping in bed, he ran and grabbed his gun and whirled toward the door. At the same time, about twelve men spilled into his home, dressed in ratty clothes and carrying weapons. Naked and terrified, Ballew instinctively drew his weapon up, ready to protect his home and loved one. At that moment, one of the men breaking into his home yelled
“Gun!
” The next thing Ballew knew, he was lying on the ground, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head while his girlfriend was being dragged from her bed, naked, and thrown into a hallway. Ballew managed to survive but was paralyzed for the rest of his life.
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