From: [Cam Woolverton] at [f10.n3801.z1.FIDONET.ORG] (Cam Woolverton) Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns Subject: FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1993 21:23:53 -0500 * Original to All of 1:3624/7, on * Forwarded on by Terry Buyers of 1:3624/[REDACTED] at [fidonet] --> Note: Copied (from: POLITICS) by Neal Atkins using timEd. Should citizens be allowed to defend themselves? By Randall Wright The right to self-defense is a principle so well established in human history, its rectitude is assumed. Nobody but the extreme pacifist will argue that a person under criminal attack does not have a right to fight back with appropriate force -- even deadly force, if necessary. Whenever personal safety is jeopardized, personal defense is justified, amid civil unrest, natural disaster or in a chance encounter on a darkened street. But while a right to self-defense is acknowledged in California law, preparing for self-defense by carrying a gun is a crime -- unless you are one of the handful of privileged elite to hold a permit. The state's contradictory gun-control laws include an express right to carry a loaded firearm if an individual "reasonably believes that the person or property of himself or herself or of another is in immediate, grave danger and that the carrying of th e weapon is necessary for the preservation of that person or property." A loaded firearm is also permitted to "any person while engaged in the act of making or attempting to make a lawful arrest," holding the criminal until police arrive. At the same time, however, two other sections of the code require that the State of California expects a person under criminal attack to politely ask the crook to wait until the boxcan be retrieved, unlocked and the weapon loaded. The obvious reality, of course, is that crimes are designed to occur without warning to the victim, and the window of opportunity for self-defense is small. Only the prepared individual with an accessible weapon of sufficient power is likely to prevail when avoidance is impractical. An unarmed woman is so disadvantaged against a 200-pound male mugger that she is unlikely to make a successful defense if she chooses to fight and he persists. A gun in her hand nstantly and dramatically alters the balance of power. Given the fact tha t three out of four women will be victims of at least one violent crime in their lifetimes, according to a Senate report*, the need for such equalization is apparent. A man retrieving cash from a banking machine, a woman heading for her car in a dark parking lot, people in any of a thousand situations sought out by thieves, murderers, rapists, drug addicts (and now violent carjackers) -- all have a right to a loaded gun under California law, once confronted with "immediate, grave danger." But being prepared to exercise that right by carrying a gun in purse, pocket or holster puts one in violation of the state's firearms code. The only gun to which there is legal access is under lock and key, in effect nullifying any practical right to its use. The contradiction should not be casually dismissed. People have powerful expectations about self-defense -- expectations based on a fundamental understanding of right and wrong, and of common law. Writing about defense in 1787, Alexander Hamilton pointed to "axioms as simple as they are universal; the means ought to be proportioned to the end; the persons from whose agency the attainment of any end is ought to possess the means by which it is to be attained." This principle "carries its own evidence along with it... and cannot be made plainer," he wrote. Put another way: Without the means to exercise them, rights don't exist. The principle is familiar to newspapers, whose First Amendment rights extend to distribution of the news, not merely the printing of it. Courts have ruled that cities cannot outlaw newsstands on the streets, since newsstands are the means by which free speech is exercised. Whether there ought to be a right to armed self-defense in the first place may be a question open to discussion. But once decided in the affirmative, it follows that citizens ought to be clothed with al the powers requisite to its fulfillment. While a n outright ban on the defensive use of weapons would be legally problematic, adopting back-handed legislation to accomplish the same thing is being dishonest. The current state of the law leads to an unsavory probability: Unlikely to be caught carrying a gun, many people may choose to break the law rather than accept the certainty of unpreparedness. It is a personal, and therefore powerful, imperative. Cons idering that five people, including a pregnant woman, died in the last seven weeks at the hands of carjackers in Southern California, the choice would be understandable. But it's wrong to make criminals of people simply for responding to legitimate fears in a society increasingly exposed to crime. The law should punish only the criminal use of guns, not the mere carrying of a weapon for defense -- especially when the d efensive act itself would be lawful in response to "immediate, grave danger." The "wild West" argument against gun accessibility (the belief that accidental shootings would increase, that misguided gunplay would arise more frequently and that crime would go up) is not supported by experience. Since 1930, the number of fatal firearms accidents decreased 53 percent, while the population doubled and the number of guns quadrupled. In Florida, where citizens were granted a statutory right to concealed weapons permits in 1987, homicides not only declined 20 percent over five years but robberies and assaults involving firearms are down sharply as well. Of 145,484 permits issued there between October 1987 and March 1993, only 16 were after licensing -- a microscopic ratio of .0001. A study at St. Louis University found that citizens nationwide actually have a better record for shooting the right person than the police -- by a factor of five. In the United States, the number of cases in which citizens have used firearms for defensive purposes -- an average of 691,000 time per year during 1985-90, by a recent survey -- approximates or exceeds the estimated number of gun crimes annually. Yet defense is overshadowed in the news media by an emphasis on gun crime, to the benefit of the gun control agenda. With nearly 50 percent of households in America possessing firearms, according to a New York Times poll, and a staggering 200 million guns estimated to be in civilian hands nationwide (the entire U. S. population is just 250 million), the alleged danger to society would appear to be overstated. If anything, those figures illustrate the non-violent nature of gun owners, the vast majority of whom are ordinary folks who exercise a high degree of responsibility. But if ordinary people are not allowed to resist crimes against their persons, who will? The police freely admit they can't stop crimes from happening. They can't be everywhere at once. It's their job to catch the bad guys only after a crime had been committed. And they are under no legal obligation to put themselves in hanger by interceding on a citizen's behalf. Nor do individuals have a statutory or constitutional right to expect the police to protect them. In 1982, the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that "there is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by crim inals or madmen," or to "even so elementary a (government) service as maintaining law and order." The California Government Code goes further, granting blanket immunity to state and local governments so that they are not liable for the failure to provide sufficient police protection. A victim of crime will find it impossible to collect damages from a city (as numerous plaintiffs discovered after the 1965 Watts riots) without an extraordinary showing of negligence or discrimination. Clearly, the first line of defense against crime is the individual citizen, not the police after the fact. This is the fundamental issue that California's current gun law fails to address squarely and honestly. Denying people their only realistic means of emergency defense is not rational or warranted in light of available data about the behavior of gun owners. And it's hard to take the alternatives seriously -- chemical sprays and karate, as suggested by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. The law ought to be corrected to provide a carefully regulated, non-discriminatory system of issuing gun-carry permits to people for general self-defense purposes. A law-abiding person's occasional desire for added personal security ought to be honored. California's existing permit system is unfairly exclusionary. Generally speaking, ordinary citizens cannot get gun-carry permits because law enforcement agencies, which are authorized by law to issue them, don't recognize general self-defense as a vali d justification. Even a substantiated death threat was not reason enough for the Los Angeles Police Commission to grant a gun permit to actor Edward James Olmos last month. Personal protection, on the whole, is reserved to a tiny, privileged class of Californians -- people who carry large amounts of money on the job, for example, or retired policemen, who are awarded permits as professional courtesy (not to mention other p ersons of prominence or influence). But isn't any person's life as important as any other? And shouldn't people be able to defend themselves against criminals if they choose? The calm, reflective answer to both questions is yes. To declare otherwise is to promote a distorted cultural view under which the state tells citizens they have no alternative but to be victims. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mr.Wright is assistant managing editor for graphics for The San Diego Union-Tribune. * Senate report referenced is Senator Beiden's Judiciary's report on Violence and Women. _ OLX 2.1 TD _ An Armed Society Is A Polite Society! 1:3801/10 * Origin: IJ-CR BBS (903)-723-7164 (1:3801/10)