Speeches and Q & A with Dr. Gary Kleck and David Kopel on gun issues....

[2aguy]

This is a find I just made.....Gary Kleck and David Kopel were together and gave speeches on guns and followed up with a Q & A session.......interesting reading...especially when David Kopel talks about the slow steps of gun control that are used to eventually ban guns.....

Gun Control: Separating Fact from Myth: Events: The Independent Institute

A couple years ago, I guess in ’98 or ’99, I co-write an article called “All The Way Down the Slippery Slope.” And it’s about gun prohibition in England and how they got it. And it was in the Hamline Law Review, it’s also available on the World Wide Web at our website and other places. What you see in England; where they’ve prohibited handguns entirely (confiscated them, and have an extremely repressive licensing system for the remaining long guns that are legal); and what’s going on in Australia where they’ve confiscated all semi-automatic, self-loading long guns, moving to a very strict registration system, outlawing gun possession for self-defense there; and in Canada, where they have outlawed 58% of handguns, although they’re grandfathered in. Current possessors can keep them, they just have to turn them into the government when the current possessor dies. And that are also imposing a nationwide registration system for all long guns that’s costing billions and billions of dollars and is a total failure and the bureaucrats are in favor, it makes them like it all the more.

What you see in all those cases is there’s a tremendous instability on the gun issue. Back in March, 1968, President Johnson spoke in favor of national gun registration in the United States. And in an address to the American people after the assassinations and the violence that had been racking American 1968 and previous years, he said, “look in these other countries they’ve got reasonable gun laws, and there the hunter and the sportsman thrive.” And he was absolutely right. You could point to England or Canada, or Australia or lots of other countries, and say, “they do have more gun laws than we do in the United States, but people are still going out hunting and shooting and fishing, and all those kinds of things. And so what’s the big problem?”

It was an accurate statement for President Johnson to say in 1968, it is no longer true in those countries. Very clearly, gun ownership had been targeted by those governments for extinction. You have the Prime Minister of Canada, the head of Canada’s Department of Justice, saying the only people who should have guns are the military and police. And transparently in all those countries, where greater controls are being imposed, they are only way stations towards prohibition.

 

[2aguy]

Here is the slippery slope paper written by David Kopel on how Britain went about banning guns...and the slow steps they took...

ALL THE WAY DOWN THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

[paste:font size="5"][3] In response, proponents of today's reasonable restrictions argue that the jeremiads about slippery slopes are unrealistic or even paranoid.[4]

This Essay aims to refine the understanding of slippery slopes by examining a particular nation that did slide all the way down the slippery slope.(p.400)

When the twentieth century began, the right to arms in Great Britain was robust, and subject to virtually no restrictions. As the century closes, the right has been almost obliterated. I

n studying the destruction of the British right to arms, this Essay draws conclusions about how slippery slopes operate in real life, and about what kinds of conditions increase or decrease the risk that the first steps down a hill will turn into a slide down a slippery slope.

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[paste:font size="4"][41]

The Pistols Act attracted only slight opposition, and passed easily. The law had no discernible statistical effect on crime or accidents. Firearms suicides did fall, but the decline was more than matched by an increase in suicide by poisons and knives.[42]

The homicide rate rose after the Pistols Act became law, but it is impossible to attribute this rise to the new law with any certainty. The bill defined pistols as guns having a barrel of nine inches or less, and thus pistols with nine-and-a-half inch barrels were soon popular.

While the Act was, in the short run, harmless to gun owners, the Act was of considerable long-term importance.

By allowing the Act to pass, British gun owners had accepted the proposition that the government could set the terms and conditions for gun ownership by law-abiding subjects.[43]

As Frederick Schauer points out, for a government body to decide "X and not Y" means that the government body has implicitly asserted a jurisdiction to decide between X and Y. Hence, to decide "X not Y" is to assert, indirectly, an authority in the future to choose "Y not X."[44] Thus, for Parliament to choose very mild gun controls versus strict controls was to assert Parliament's authority to decide the nature of gun control.[45]


As this Essay shall discuss in regards to the granting of police authority over gun licensing, establishing the proposition that a government entity has any authority over a subject is an essential, but not sufficient, element for a trip down the slippery slope.

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As is typical with many gun control laws, the shotgun certificate system was enforced in a moderate and reasonable way by the government in the law's first years. Similarly, the rifle and handgun licensing system, introduced in 1920, had been enforced in a generally moderate way in the 1920s (p.422)and 1930s.

However, as the public grew accustomed to the idea of rifles and handguns being licensed, it became possible to begin to enforce the licensing requirements with greater and greater stringency.

Severe enforcement of the rifle and handgun licensing system would not have worked in 1922. Too many gun owners would have been outraged by the rapid move from a free society to one of repressive controls.

By initially enforcing the 1920 legislation with moderation, and then with gradually increasing severity, the British government acclimated British gun owners to higher and higher levels of control. The British government used the same principle as do people who are cooking frogs. If a cook throws a frog in a pot of boiling water, he will jump out, but if the cook puts a frog in a pot of moderately warm water, and gradually raises the temperature, the frog will slowly lose consciousness, and be unable to escape by the time the water gets to a boil.

 

[2aguy]

And to all of those people out there who think that Safe storage laws are simply a good idea.......you are again mistaken.....they are just different baby steps to confiscation...

When the safe storage requirement was introduced for rifles and handguns in the 1930s, it was enforced in a reasonable manner by the police. Leaving one's handgun on the front porch was not acceptable; keeping it on a dark closet shelf was perfectly fine. Similarly, in the few United States jurisdictions that have imposed storage requirements in recent years, the law is usually enforced in a reasonable manner--at least for now.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the security requirement simply meant that Firearms Certificate holders were told of their responsibility for secure storage. Starting in the early 1970s, the police began performing home inspections as part of the Firearms Certificate issuance in order to assess the applicant's security.[108] After the 1996 Dunblane shootings, some police forces began performing spot checks on persons who already held Firearms Certificates. Apparently the home searches were done to make sure that the firearms really were locked up.

Parliament never granted the police home inspection authority, nor did Parliament enact legislation saying that a hardened safe is the only acceptable storage method. However, that is what the police in many jurisdictions require anyway.

In fact, many gun owners who bought safes that the police said were acceptable are now being forced to buy new safes because the local police have arbitrarily changed the standards. In many districts, an "acceptable safe" is now one that can withstand a half-hour attack by a burglar who arrives with a full set of safe-opening tools.

Sometimes the police require the purchase of two safes: the first one for the gun and the second one for separate storage of ammunition. A Briton (p.424)buying a low-powered, £5 rimfire rifle may have to spend £100 on a safe. Likewise, a person with five handguns (before the 1997 ban) might have been ordered to add a £1000 electronic security system.[109]

Added to the cost of the illegal requirement for hardened safes is the escalating cost of Firearms or Shotgun Certificates. Home inspections are expensive for the police, and thus the cost of Firearms Certificates or Shotgun Certificates has been raised again and again, far above the rate of inflation, in order to cover the costs of the intrusive inspections, as well as the cost of many gross inefficiencies in police processing of applications.[110] The net effect of the heavy security costs is to reduce legal gun ownership by the less wealthy classes, as in the days of Henry VIII, Charles I, who was later beheaded during the English Civil War, and James II, who was driven out of the country by the Glorious Revolution.

The increasing severity of the application of the gun licensing system is no accident. A 1970 internal government document, the McKay Report was turned into a 1973 British government Green Paper, which proposed a host of new controls.[111] The British shooting lobbies, however, mobilized and the Green Paper was withdrawn.[112] Law professor Richard Harding, Australia's then-leading academic advocate of gun control, criticized the Green Paper as "statistically defective ... [and] ... scientifically quite useless."[113] Harding was looking at whether the proposed laws would reduce gun crime, gun suicide, or other gun misuse.

The proponents of the Green Paper, on the other hand, did not care whether more gun control would reduce gun misuse. The earlier, secret draft of the Green Paper (the McKay Report) had stated that "a reduction in the number of firearms in private hands is a desirable end in itself."[114]