The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the Parker / Heller cases on DC's gun law on March 18, 2008. Parker began in DC federal district court in February, 2003. It has been five years and the case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court as Heller. This has happened in Diane Rehm's immediate neighborhood, but she has yet to devote a program to it. She only conducts civilized discussions. She does not know how to conduct a civilized discussion on the unravelling of civilization. The correspondence goes back to 1991. Usually by the time an issue gets to the Supreme Court people start paying attention. The gun rights ideologies have been in the federal courts since the 1970s. The first case was US v. Francis J. Warin (1976).
Other cases have been:
Silveira, 2002
Nordyke, 2003
Emerson, 1999
There is still no real enlightenment anywhere on what is really at stake.

NPR, Diane Rehm, WAMU; Or, Why there is a crisis in Gun Violence

Henry Kissinger made this observation on Gerald Ford in Washington Post's obituary of Ford, December 27, 2006. A similar observation could be made on our news "stars":

"The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar," he wrote. "Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values, stars by consensus. When a candidate's views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchorpersons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital. Radicalism replaces liberalism, and populism masquerades as conservatism."

Of course, we don't know where Kissinger himself fits into this characterization.

December 26, 2007

Diane Rehm
WAMU-FM
American University
Washington, DC 20016

Dear Ms. Rehm:

As you certainly know, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari in Parker et al. v. DC Gov. It will be heard as DC Gov. v. Heller, Sup. Ct. Case no. 07-290.

Nov 20 2007 Petition GRANTED limited to the following question: Whether the following provisions — D.C. Code 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02 — violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?

[In 1917 when the US entered WWI and Russia had been just beset by a revolution, Allen Dulles who was later Director of the CIA was a low level diplomat in Switzerland. He receive a call from a crank who said he was a Russian Revolutionary and wanted to talk. Dulles blew off the caller. The caller was Lenin and six months later he was running the show in Russia. Dulles said he never passed up the opportunity again to talk to a crank who said he was a revolutionary. Our shallow, lazy purveyors of public enlightenment need to learn a simple lesson.]

I filed an amicus brief to the Appeals Court in Parker in 2006, http://www.potowmack.org/parkarg.pdf. I will file again to the Supreme Court and raise again the most vital and fundamental issues of political life. We should not have to wait until vital issues get to the Supreme Court before we can have public discourse. The gun rights ideologies have been in the Appeals Courts for more than thirty years. All last summer I proposed with no results to the Tavis Smiley Group that it pose simple questions to Republican candidates for president at its September 27 forum:

**************

The DC Court of Appeals released an opinion on March 9 in Parker et al. v. DC Government. After many pages in which the court fabricated an individual right to be privately armed and struck down DC's gun control law, Judge Silberman arrived at these conclusions:

Reasonable restrictions also might be thought consistent with a "well regulated Militia." The registration of firearms gives the government information as to how many people would be armed for militia service if called up. Reasonable firearm proficiency testing would both promote public safety and produce better candidates for military service. Personal characteristics, such as insanity or felonious conduct, that make gun ownership dangerous to society also make someone unsuitable for service in the militia.

*********************

Judge Silberman's conclusions are not just the basis of a firearms policy: they are also a devastating repudiation of the gun lobby's core doctrine that the purpose of all those guns in private hands is to maintain an anarchic balance of power between a privately armed populace and any and all government. Some people have a very difficult time accommodating to a governing authority. Others have a very difficult time with political and intellectual leadership. The individual right the gun lobby claims and Judge Silberman seeks to invent becomes, in Judge Silberman's conclusions, perfectly meaningless. There is no indication that Judge Silberman read my brief in Parker but his conclusions are what I arrived at— and what have graced Diane Rehm's trash can too many times since 1991— when I first starting thinking about this national absurdity twenty years ago. The gun lobby, led by the NRA, would fight viciously any legislative attempts to implement Judge Silberman's conclusions. The simple questions would turn the whole of American politics upside down. But, if the people who are suffering the collateral damage in a much larger political struggle don't care enough to take responsibility for their lives and their communities, they cannot expect anyone else to care. The "rabidly antigun Washington Post" does not care. The bankrupt Democratic Party does not care. AirAmerica Radio does not care. National Public Radio does not care. Diane Rehm does not care.

The reason there is a claim for a fundamental right to be privately armed for self-defense is because the gun lobby, led by the NRA, works very hard and successfully to defeat legislation that would apply laws against the lawless because the same laws would apply against those with the anarchic and insurrectionist fantasies that are at the core of gun rights ideologies. The NRA has always been in a very difficult position. It has to maintain its respectability and at the same time contain the extremists in its own ranks who really believe and want a constitutional right to the anarchic, insurrectionist nonsense. There is a reason why the NRA worked hard to sabotage the Cato Institute lawyers' Parker case. It does not want these cases in court.

But more than that the gun vote is not about guns. It is about controlling political outcomes in a much larger political struggle over the modern state and the political economy of capitalism. An AFL-CIO memorandum from 2002 makes this clear. "The Right Wing Attack on the American Labor Movement," http://www.wisaflcio.org/political_action/rightwing.htm.

This is an internal document. It is not part of any public arguments. The NRA is not a civil rights organization as it proclaims but a right wing political lobby with a very malignant and cynical vision of social and political life that parallels the malignant, cynical vision of unregulated capitalism now in resurgence. Gun rights will remain a pernicious and obstructionist factor in American politics until they are addressed on their proper terms and neutralized. The time is now. Judge Silberman in his Appeals Court opinion in Parker has given the opportunity.

Political leadership begins with asking simple questions. There are eleven months left in the overdone foolishness of the election season. Just pose the pair of questions to the candidates. It only takes a clear mind and clear purpose. Everything else changes. The Framers of the Constitution understood very well the difference between rights that are fundamental to political liberty and those that are less than fundamental. They did not want to confuse and pervert deliberative interpretations with marginal rights. It is completely missing from present public knowledge that the original militia concept was all about conscription. There are no individual rights in a conscript military organization. The right of the people manifest in the original militia concept was the republican right of the people to participate as conscript citizen soldiers in the military functions of the state rather than leave those functions up to a mercenary army whether the mercenary British Army recently removed or the US Army which, as created in the Constitution, was explicitly modeled after the British Army. The First Congress removed conscientious objector protections from James Madison's original Second Amendment draft, because it was then said: "It is extremely injudicious to intermix matters of doubt with fundamentals". Those are what are now before the Supreme Court.

Any hint of a fundamental or procedural right to be privately armed for private purposes would validate an anarchic doctrine and would confuse and pervert the opinions of the courts for decades. Such recognition and protection from the Supreme Court would be political not legal or constitutional and most certainly not historical. The politically appointed judges on the Supreme Court could become a constitutional loose cannon. Vincent Bugliosi is not reserved in proclaiming that in Bush v. Gore they were criminal and worthy of jail time--But, they got away with it. When the courts become politicized— and very ignorant— the people have to become energized and vigilant. The gun rights militants are energized. They follow these cases with intense interest. Their time has finally arrived. The courts are responding to them--sort of. Where is anyone else? Will the Supreme Court get away with it again?

Where does that leave the DC Government? The DC Government's objective should be to solve its problem. If the Supreme Court preserves constitution government by not validating the anarchic gun rights doctrine and lets DC's absurd, failed, counterproductive gun law stand, it will, in one sense, do DC a great disservice. DC will have no incentive to follow Judge Silberman's formula for a firearms policy that just might be effective and with which no one can take credible issue.

I should not have to work on this alone against constant, ugly repudiation and humiliation. I don't make any money at it. I don't make friends. But, there is constitutional government to save from destruction. Diane Rehm has credibility of intellect and political consciousness to establish to say nothing of basic civility.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

PS. Look for this at http://www.potowmack.org/196rehm.html. "196" stands for January, 1996. That is how long it has been. But, don't worry. Less than 5 viewers show up there per day.

A package of clippings with comments accompanied the Dec. 22, 2006, letter. Those are not included here.

December 22, 2006

Diane Rehm
The Diane Rehm Show
WAMU-FM
American University
Washington, DC 20016

Dear Ms. Rehm:

James Madison, who was the principle author of the amendment, wrote in the Federalist Papers— he referred to the advantage of Americans being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation

James Madison was NOT describing a civil right of private individuals.

The Constitution as it currently stands and as it is currently interpreted allows the private ownership of weapons— Um, So— the question becomes don't those 140 countries— They're disappointed that the United States has certain laws, certain rights guaranteed and if those rights are guaranteed in this country why should the United States then step on those very laws to proclaim itself in favor of rules applying to the rest of the world that it does not apply to itself.

1. The Federal Reserve is our central bank. A central bank, nowhere enumerated in the Constitution, had been controversial from the beginning of the Republic. Andrew Jackson vetoed extension of the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s. The Federal Reserve was created after the Panic of 1907. England had had a central bank since 1694. Even the late Milton Friedman, the most prestigious of our Libertarian Delivers, thought the Federal Reserve should be abolished.

2. The Sixteenth Amendment is the only actual constitutional amendment in these transformations. It gave the modern state its most important source of revenue. No one likes taxation. The tax code is certainly eligible for revision and reform, but there are those who think the Sixteenth Amendment was fraudulently ratified and should be repealed which means they think the modern state should be repealed.

3. The Selective Service Act of 1917, of these transformations, was the most radical departure from original design and intent. Throughout the nineteenth century, dating from a speech by Daniel Webster during the War of 1812 (.../dwebcons.html), national conscription was regarded as unconstitutional. Chief Justice Taney prepared an opinion during the Civil War to declare the 1863 national conscription law unconstitutional, but, because the draft was so unpopular during the Civil War, the law was never vigorously enforced and a case never came up for him to issue his opinion. It is on conscription that the latent authoritarianism of the Libertarian Right is most conflicted. (.../conscri1.html) [I did not appreciate when I wrote this in Dec. 2006 the significance of abandoment of conscription in 1973. National conscription was an important part of the civil culture of the mid-twentieth century. From the end of the Korean War till the beginning of the Vietnam War, there was a ten year period of peace time conscription. Every young man went down to his draft board and registered for the draft without thinking too much about it. The US in the mid-twentieth century became a national republic and the US Army became a national militia in the sense of the state militias of the early Republic. Eighty percent of military age men served. It was also a complete anomaly in American history, politically impossible in previous history and politically impossible now. It was not Newt Gingrich's "counter culture McGovernicks" or anti-Vietnam War protestors who abolished the civic obligation of military service. It was the same Milton Friedman who was the guiding light and driving force on Nixon's all volunteer army commission, http://www.reason.com/news/show/118494.html. The conversion to the all-volunteer army was another radical departure, this time from the civic culture of the twentieth century. Friedman's motivation was libertarianism's political cynicism. Nixon's motives were a different political cynicism. He wanted to take the wind out of the sails of the protest movement and thereby largely remove political constraints from the conduct of foreign policy and the projection of American military power at the disposal of the president. The inevitable consequence is not only the present misguided adventures in Iraq but also the enormous presence of private mercenary contractors, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070402/scahill_vid. The Founding generation is horrified.]

4. The New Deal Constitutional Revolution greatly expanded federal authority to address national issues of financial and banking regulation, worker rights and protections, etc. No one has heard of the New Deal Constitutional Revolution outside of a constitutional law course. (Search Google.) It was not a small matter in constitutional history. See the Texas Justice Foundation's amicus curiae brief in Lopez (.../loptjf.html). The TJF goes on at great length about the "infamous" US. v. Darby (1941) ruling without ever stating what Darby did, which was uphold the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established in national law the forty hour work week for wage labor reversing the truly infamous 1905 Lochner v. New York ruling. Darby is described in one constitutional law text as the culmination of and the very essence of the New Deal Constitutional Revolution. The Libertarian Right's great horror is the expansion of federal authority under the Commerce Clause. Lopez was the first curtailment of Commerce Clause authority since the 1930s.

5. The Civil Right Constitution Revolution where the federal judiciary undertook a judicial revolution in the 1950s and 1960s under the authority of the Fourteenth Amendment to establish national standards for individual civil liberties. The Libertarian Right is all in favor of individual rights, but these are rights we secure to our individual selves. That is why we need a gun in every pocket. The Libertarian Right will curtail protections for all rights but one.

These transformations are the dreaded socialism (See Parker amicus, (.../parkarg.pdf). The Libertarian Right would dismantle on sweeping ideological principles all of these (except in some quarters national conscription) to return to the golden age of political liberty of robber baron capitalism and preCivil War constitutional arrangements. That is the latent ideological agenda that we can watch to manifest itself in Parker. The Libertarian Right's problem is that most people accept the contours of the twentieth century social contract (.../ike541108.html). The strategies have to employ stealth politics and demagoguery. The Libertarian Right spent millions in the 1990s sniffing around Bill Clinton's undershorts to defeat any possibility that a popular Democratic Party president would impose a socialist agenda on America. The gun rights militants write to me that government is my god, I need a nanny state to look after me, if I want to touch guns with laws, I want to impose a socialist agenda on America. I tell them I support the socialism of the forty hour work week, originally proposed by the Socialist Party, enacted into law by the socialist Congress in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, signed into law by that socialist president Franklin Roosevelt, upheld by the socialist Supreme Court in Darby and enforced (more or less) by this socialist government ever since. The gun rights militants say they have never heard of such a thing, and then there is always the libertarian flake who says we don't need government telling us how many hours we can work.

The Million Mom March has advocated registration and accountability as reasonable regulations. Registration and accountability are the only means by which gun ownership can be effectively regulated. All other attempts will fail. These appear to be what NPR's Diane Rehm would support as stated below. It is what the Potowmack Institute has advocated and developed the arguments and background information to support for ten years. Diane Rehm has been provided with the arguments and information at every step. Many of the concepts, which support her own position, and much of the very language in the Potowmack Institute files were originally developed in letters to Diane Rehm. In November, 1998, Diane Rehm did finally respond. She told me to take her off of my mailing list. Diane Rehm's performance is very illustrative of the capacity of the news media to treat fundamental issues. Without conviction based on fundamental knowledge the Million Mom March will express no more than incoherent sentiment. Diane Rehm is very representative of how the organs of public enlightenment fail their mission to enlighten the citizenry. The children of darkness have nothing to fear.

Up until year 2000 Diane Rehm has given gun rights and gun violence only one or two poorly done programs a year if any at all. She has recently tried to catch up. Her treatment of the subject has progressed from extremely rare to infrequent without improvement in content. Gun violence is the one issue that will be addressed by employing free institutions for public enlightenment: We get out all the relevant facts, conduct rational informed public debate, arrive at a consensus and let policy follow. Without enlightenment, the public is left groping for knowledge, understanding and concepts. The whole purpose of free institutions is defeated.

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Recent programs.
These programs can be heard with RealAudio at the WAMU archive.
May 23, 2000, Open Phones, call-ins raise the subject.
May 12, 2000, Supporters of the Million Mom March.
May 11, 2000, Gun Rights critics of the objectives of the Million Mom March.

Recent letters:
Letter to Diane Rehm, April 12, 2000

Other letters. Some of these are shortened.
Letter to Diane Rehm, September 30, 1995

My first letter to Diane Rehm was on May 30, 1990. I thought it was simple stuff. Anyone can judge what James Madison was really describing with the words "the advantage of being armed" from Federalist Paper No. 46. Madison was not describing the private rights of the NRA's "armed citizen guerrillas" to "outflank" this government. The gun lobby has built a whole doctrine of political liberty largely out of a fraudulent representation of this one passage. Diane Rehm has been sent the relevant words several times a year for ten years. She actually cited the gun lobby's misrepresented version on April 12. Is there any wonder blood runs in the streets when the Federalist Papers become a subject of George Orwell's "all pervasive orthodox" that we don't discuss "large and uncomfortable fact"? We can wonder if there is any issue at all where we are getting the real information and context.

Diane Rehm would explain, as she does explain in other contexts, that she conducts "civilized discussions" and "interviews" people she does not "interrogate" them. A "civilized discussion" that evades "large and uncomfortable fact" has no substance and truncates public debate. It becomes a source of disinformation. There are many historians, political theorists and constitutional scholars available who can participate in a civilized discussion on what James Madison was really describing in Federalist Paper No. 46, what John Locke was really describing in The Second Treatise of Government or what the judiciary has long since decided in the matter of protecting gun rights. Of these she has been well-informed.

Recent experience has become more critical. School shootings and other horrors have forced gun violence more prominently into the public consciousness. The year 2000 is the best opportunity so far to break out of the false consciousness and false polarization and raise fundamental issues, but when this subject comes up minds close and there is an even greater determination to keep public consciousness narrowly confined.

The dramatic new development in 1999 was that a federal district judge in Texas embraced the enormous volume of gun lobby/libertarian pseudoscholarship published in the past twenty years mostly in law journals to find in the Second Amendment the gun lobby's personal right to be armed outside of any militia, military, or legally authorized or permitted purpose. The case, US v. Emerson, is now on appeal in the US Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit. Of this Diane Rehm has received ample notice. Oral arguments are scheduled for June. See Docket. We can't know how the Fifth Circuit will handle this case. It might sidestep the Second Amendment constitutional issue entirely, but all the major players have presented their best arguments and these are available for any and all interested parties to study. The gun lobby has met its opposition here not at what the NRA calls the "rabidly antigun" Washington Post or on the Diane Rehm Show. This is where the real debate could be engaged, but the mind numbs and professional competence is diluted.

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Recent programs illustrate the catch up activity:
These programs can be heard with RealAudio at the WAMU archive.
May 23, 2000, Open Phones, call-ins raise the subject.
May 12, 2000, Supporters of the Million Mom March.
May 11, 2000, Gun Rights critics of the objectives of the Million Mom March.

May 23, 2000., The callers are bringing up the gun rights issue. Diane Rehm can take responsibility for their low level of knowledge. Two illustrative examples are given here. The whole program can be heard with RealAudio at the WAMU archive.

A CALL-IN

Steven: The other day you had a show where you were talking about arms. You had the Mom March one day. You had the people who were progun one day and the young lady who was proguns talked about that an insurance policy that was suggested by one of the callers shouldn't be necessary because people could get their own umbrella policy and I could not get in on the line at that time to argue the point. I am neutral pretty much over all both have valid points and we as a nation need to work it out together and could end of with some compromises 'cause there are some good points on both sides.

Diane Rehm: Steven I totally agree with you. I think that you know there are so many responsible gun users out there um I think that some how the idea of government is going to confiscate all guns is the extreme position and on the other side as people who say, you know, I use guns for hunting and I license them and I register them. It does seem to me that those kinds of things are sort of in the middle. Do you know what I mean, that if you register, if you license, if you train, why is that an infringement? when you license, you register, you train for an automobile? And, I have heard people say, Well, you have a right to our guns, you have a privilege to drive an automobile. In my mind they are equal because they are both very lethal weapons and we need to be trained and we need to be licences to use them. I mean that that is the compromise what do you think?

Steven:: I think that that is at least one reasonable compromise. There could be others but the point I hope to raise that while I was neutral it was that woman that convinced to go the other way.

Diane Rehm: Really.

ANOTHER CALL-IN

Loretta: This is in regard to our Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment. I've wondered if anyone thinks, has thought of the idea that when they wrote the Second Amendment they had muskets and very unsophisticated weapons and I don't think in our widest imagination they could have conceived what has happened in the technology of firearms and wouldn't it be feasible that our government would update the Second Amendment to fit 2000 rather than 1776.

Diane Rehm: Well, I think that that is a reasonable question to put forward. Of course you would have so much opposition from gun owners who do take that as their true permission to own and operate guns of all kinds. Now, I tend to agree with you. We are talking about the words "armed militia." We are talking about muskets. We are not talking about the kind of high tech guns available today. So at some point if in fact the government the Congress decides to take that one on it would be a huge battle. Don't you think.

Loretta: Yes it would. The NRA has a bottomless pit of money and influence. I think they would find all kinds of reasons for that. I still think that, uh, there just isn't a parallel between 1776 and what we have today. Those assault weapons. Those Uzis. And even handguns and what is a handgun for but to kill another human being.

Diane Rehm: Yet on the other hand gun owners who buy them for their own protection might say, I did not buy this to kill but to defend. So you know I do believe there is a middle ground. That we haven't found it yet and that with reasonable conversation we will get there.

May 12, 2000,. The program included Connie Morella (R-Md). When politicians are included they cannot get beyond trigger locks. Anything else might require political leadership. The Million Mom March promotes as reasonable policy "registration" and "accountability". The gun rights militants can find relief that the Million Mom March and Diane Rehm have not been here for their education. US v. Emerson was not mentioned. WAMU archive.

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May 11, 2000,.
The first Million Mom March program on May 11, featured March critics Melinda Gierisch, David Kopel, and John Lott. There has to be a balance but there can't be any hard questions. Melinda Gierisch proudly wears the Potowmack Institute's label, "gun rights militant."
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a380b3d802880.htm
When the Potowmack Institute filed its amicus in Emerson in September, 1999, it was posted on the website that it was available by request as an e-mail attachment until it could be formatted. The first request was from Melinda Gierisch. She had it on her website before we had it up. It is still there.
http://homes.acmecity.com/rosie/awards/75/emerson/pi-amicus.htm
The Emerson case is where the real action is. However, Ms. Gierisch did not mention the Emerson case on Diane Rehm's the program.

David Kopel has been on Diane Rehm's program before and is the subject of one of my previous letters. We have also had previous communication.

Potowmack Institute quotes Kopel in its amicus brief:

"The tools of political dissent should be privately owned and unregistered"

http://www.potowmack.org/emerarg.html
See also Appendix D

Kopel filed a brief in Emerson. No matter, he did not mention the Emerson case either. He worries about the slippery slope to confiscation but in his brief describes the slippery slope to anarchy a "ridiculous scenario."

Kopel was quick to condemn the Million Mom March for its support and funding from the "extemist" Bell Campaign which according to him wants to confiscate all the guns. No one makes an issue of Kopel's insurrectionist extremism or where he gets his support and funding. His funding comes from Joseph Coors one of the leading players on the rightwing ideological front.

John Lott is discussed in The Rightwing Movement.

Of all of this Diane Rehm has been much informed.
WAMU archive.

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April 12, 2000
The guests were Bruce Fein and Lloyd Cutler neither of whom are significant contributors or players on Second Amendment issues. They are not among the long lists of parties who have signed on to the briefs in Emerson. They were billed as constitutional scholars and the context of the discussion was legal rights. The context of any discussion on gun rights is less legal rights than history and political theory. After her announcements leading up to the program, I sent Diane Rehm the letters below to provide some direction and references. She has actually been supplied most of the contacts on the list for years.

The Second Amendment and the Militia Act of 1792 were about military organization not personal rights. Militia duty was conscript duty. The regular army was not. There are no personal rights of the sort claimed in conscript duty. The most important single fact that defeats the gun lobby's opposition to registration is that the The Militia Act required the states to supply the President with inventories of militia resources including privately owned muskets. The controversies of the time were over state or federal jurisdiction (Houston v. Moore (1820), Martin v. Mott (1827)). Nevertheless, a personal right is seeking certification in Emerson on April 12, it took Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, the first call-in, to mention the Emerson case at all. Larry Pratt wrote in a letter to the editor, the Washington Post, March 21, 1991:

People need to realize that when the police have all the guns, brutal attacks against defenseless citizens will become as common here as in other oppressive[!] regimes. This is the primary reason gun owners oppose the banning of the so-called assault rifles. If these rifles are banned, government will begin attaining a greater monopoly of force— and that is the most dangerous kind of monoply there is.

Pratt has introduced some weighty concepts and really opened the possibility of a discussion. See amicus. Diane Rehm has had this letter and my letter of March 9, 1996 at .../washpost.html many times in recent years. She has also had in recent weeks Appendix H of the Potowmack Institute amicus in Emerson on the source of the phrase, the state's "monopoly on violence." Pratt wrapped himself in the Second Amendment and the Militia Act of 1792 which do not support his claim. A real opportunity to expand the subject was missed.

The next caller was a woman from Texas who raised the issue of why it had taken so long for this subject to come up on the terms presented. Ms. Rehm directed the comment to her guests when the burden of explanation was on her.

Diane Rehm herself quoted the gun lobby's version of the ubiquitous words "the advantage of being armed" from Federalist Paper No. 46, as usually lifted out of context. She has had this passage with comments and explanation several times a year for ten years. James Madison was not describing a personal right to be armed outside of the law or a balance of power between a privately armed populace or "armed citizen guerrilas" and any and all government.

The gun lobby demonizes the news media as a successful enemy engaged in an unending assault on their self-proclaimed rights. Here is a recent characterization from the 2ndAmendmentNews Team:

Why have our enemies been so successful? One word: PROPAGANDA. National and multinational corporations, and now venal politicians and bureaucrats working in our own government, have carried on an unending attack on gun owners and the Second Amendment. What is the primary method of delivering this propaganda? TELEVISION, RADIO, AND PRINT COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA.

Diane Rehm's e-mail address is drshow@wamu.org

Without basic knowledge especially of history and without conceptual foundation for what political community is and what a firearms policy has to be consistent with citizenship under law and government, we will get more trigger locks, more conceal carry permits, a larger body count, more bad laws that breed more political cynicism and an accelerated cycle of civic decline. Meanwhile there are the simple solutions that have been on Diane Rehm's plate for ten years.

Other organs of public enlightenment have refused to introduce any change in the context of the gun rights/gun ownership discourse. These submission, which were not published, were written from two to six years ago. The basic ideas would be the same if they were submitted now but they would be written differently now:
"A National Firearms Policy," Washington Post, Dec., 1993.
"The Armed Citizen and the Rule of Law," New York Times Magazine, Apr., 1995.
"Taking up the Second Amendment," Christian Science Monitor, April, 1995.
"The Gun Lobby's Problem," Baltimore Sun, May, 1995.
"Gun Rights, the Libertarian Fantasy and the Rule of Law," The Responsive Community, December, 1997.

The first letters below relate to the program of April 12, 2000.
Letter to Diane Rehm, April 12, 2000

Other letters. Some of these are shortened.
Letter to Diane Rehm, September 30, 1995

The next to last letter was to Derek McGinty who followed Rehm locally on WAMU and was on some NPR affiliates through 1998. Rehm is a victim of the all-prevailing orthodoxy but McGinty mindlessly provided a platform for the gun lobby's claims.

March 14, 2000

Diane Rehm
WAMU-FM
American University
Washington, DC 20016

Dear Ms. Rehm:

Enclosed in a copy of the Potowmack Institute's amicus curiae brief in US v. Emerson. It has been no farther away than your finger tips since last September. Now you have it in hand. This is where you get serious. All the briefs are now available at http://www.potowmack.org/emeramic.html. Oral arguments have been tentatively scheduled for the first week of June. You might make an announcement to encourage your listeners to encourage C-Span to provide coverage (if of course the court will allow them in): events@c-span.org. I have made the announcement all over the Internet. The gun rights militants are very obedient on this one.

Most briefs are also available for Printz and Mack, Supreme Court, 1997. http://www.potowmack.org/pzamic.html

Winston Churchill once said, Americans will eventually do the right thing but only after having tried everything else. We are in the phase of trying all the wrong things. If you can't get it right, start with a disclaimer: No public enlightenment here. It ain't about trigger locks and it ain't about smart guns. This where you not only get in touch with your political adulthood but also fulfill your public mission. You might even save a few lives. Any other performance demands an explanation.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

April 5, 2000

Diane Rehm
WAMU-FM
American University
Washington, DC 20016

Dear Ms. Rehm:

I have written to you going back more years than I can remember that there is volume of ideological advocacy which I do not hesitate to call pseudoscholarship published mostly in law journals that lifts words out of context to mean things that are very different than what the words mean in context, recycle the quotes through different articles and then cite each other as authoritative sources. Below is how some professional scholars with the kinds of credentials you are impressed with observe the phenomenon. If your small hint that you will become a serious voice for public enlightenment on what is at issue in addressing gun violence, you might take notice. This is not a routine competition among equally valid, honorable differences of interpretation and opinion. I encourage everyone to examine the source material for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions. You can examine the source material too and encourage others likewise.

The gun lobby knows what it is doing. It cannot win what it wants in court. It has to cultivate a constituency to defeat legislation. It found a weak link in the law journals. The strategy is very effective. I hear from them all day long. It succeeds because you fail. Much of the pseudoscholarship, however, has no visible connection to the identifiable gun lobby. It is more insidious and reflects a much broader public mood that spans the political spectrum. In his book Everything for Sale Robert Kuttner devotes some space to the Rational Expectations school and Public Choice theory in economics. These have been around for decades. In these disciplines political choice and participation are reduced to the irrational and counterproductive. They are another version of the contemporary political cynicism that makes the individualism of marketplace relationships the basis of political choice and the only rational basis for human interaction. In Restoring the Public Trust (...potowmack.org/pubtr1st.html, Chapter 1) Peter Brown describes the inability of established centers of power to deal with the insurgence of this ideology. These are the same people who will give us trigger locks rather than open discussion on the contours of citizenship. If the Washington Post is any representative of the established centers of power, there seems to be a concerted effort to make sure no self-conscious constituency develops for a more constructive vision of political life. We can't have an enlightened citizenry taking charge of its political destiny. You can start explaining where you fit in.

Of those cited below, Garry Wills has been on your program. The others are among the 52 cosigners on the David Yassky brief in US v. Emerson. All four are signatories to the conventional points asserted in the recent letter to the NRA sponsored by Handgun Control through the Legal Community Against Violence, http://www.lcav.org/letter.html.

Garry Wills and Saul Cornell in "Showdown" on Linguafranca:
http://www.linguafranca.com/0002/showdown.html.

Observing that law journals are generally run by squads of students rather than peer reviewed, Cornell claims the structure of legal scholarship has allowed the Standard Modelers to recycle their errors tenfold because they are insufficiently scrutinized before publication but canonized afterward. "The standards for history in law journals are just not the same as the standards for historical scholarship in professional history journals," he declares. Garry Wills concurs, though he says he only realized law journals were not peer reviewed after lambasting the Standard Model in the New York Review of Books. "I was taking these people more seriously than I perhaps should have, because I thought, 'Well, my God, here are refereed journals,'" he says. "And it turns out they're not."

Saul Cornell succeeded to the professorship of John Kenneth Rowland's thesis advisor at Ohio State.

Michael A. Bellesiles, "Suicide Pact: New Readings of the Second Amendment," Constitutional Commentary, October, 1999:

The Standard Model is an abstraction divorced from a specific historical context. At times it borders on an intellectual game played by law professors swappping quotations and citing one another. As one reads yet again Justice Story's description of the militia as the "palladium of liberty," one realizes that the Standard Modelers are just shuffling the same deck and dealing it out in a different order.

See Appendix I, "The Meaning They Seek."
http://www.potowmack.org/emerappi.html See "A National Firearms Policy," for the source of "suicide pact."
http://www.potowmack.org/nfp.html

Saul Cornell, "Commonplace or Anarchronism: The Standard Model, the Second Amendment, and the Problem of History in Contemporary Constitutional Theory," Constitutional Commentary, October, 1999. http://www.potowmack.org/scornell.html

The flaws in the Standard Model are emblematic of deeper problems in the way history has been used by constitutional scholars.9 Partisans of the Standard Model have not only read constitutional texts in a anachronistic fashion, but have also ignored important historical sources vital to understanding what Federalists and Anti-Federalists might have meant by the right to bear arms. The structure of legal scholarship has served to spread these errors rather than to contain them. Once published, these errors enter the canons of legal scholarship and are continuously recycled in article after article.10 Upon closer inspection, the new orthodoxy of the Second Amendment shares little with the Standard Model employed by physicists. Indeed, recent writing on the Second Amendment more closely resembles the intellectual equivalent of a check kiting scheme than it does solidly researched history.

Don Higginbotham, "The Second Amendment in Historical Context," Constitutional Commentary, October, 1999: http://www.potowmack.org/higg.html

...it is easier to fathom the motivations of the National Rifle Association and Brady legislation supporters than it is the dozens of those who reside in the halls of ivy. To further complicate matters, one finds both liberals and conservatives on each side of the debate.

Second, the vast preponderance of these writings have been by members of the legal fraternity. Their approach has on the whole been narrowly legalistic, and they have borrowed very heavily from each other, recycling the same body of information. That information often refers to the generalizations and conclusions of their lawyer colleagues at other institutions.

An important case cited in both the Potowmack Institute and the Handgun Control amicus briefs is one where a bankruptcy court devoted much attention to the difference between militia arms and private arms. It will by added to the website by the time you get this,
http://www.potowmack.org/brown.html.

Another very valuable source on this subject is "Militia - History and Law FAQ" provided by Mark Pitcavage and Sheldon Sheps,
http://www.militia-watchdog.org/faq1.html. It is part of a very elaborate website. Pitcavage's history dissertation, An Equitable Burden: The Decline of the State Militias, 1783-1858, was completed at Ohio State in 1995.

I do my part and I don't get paid anything for the effort. You can start doing yours.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

Contacts provide with phone numbers and e-mail addresses:
Saul Cornell
Michael A Bellesiles
Don Higginbotham
http://www.unc.edu/depts/history/faculty/higginbotham.html
John Kenneth Rowland
http://www.potowmack.org/1197row.html
http://www.potowmack.org/emerappa.html
Ralph Brock
amicus curiae, US v. Emerson
http://www.potowmack.org/brock.html
David Yassky
amicus curiae, US v. Emerson
http://www.potowmack.org/yass.html

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April 8, 2000

Diane Rehm
WAMU-FM
American University
Washington, DC 20016

Dear Ms. Rehm:

Copyright permission has been received for Garry Wills' article, "To Keep and Bear Arms," New York Review of Books, September 21, 1995. It is now available at http://www.potowmack.org/garwills.html. Wills makes mention of Max Weber (.../emerapph.html) and the abuse of Federalist Paper No. 46 (.../emerappi.html). He even uses the word fantast which I, completely independently, have used to describe our libertarian delivers. When you decide to become a serious voice for public enlightenment you will have to direct concerned parties to where the most important resources are located at "potowmack.org" right along side of your own dereliction, http://www.potowmack.org/196rehm.html.

The URL for Mark Pitcavage is http://www.militia-watchdog.org/faq1.htm. It is without the final L.

The most active file these day, however, is none of this but Whittaker Chambers' review of Ayn Rand, 1957, http://www.potowmack.org/aynrand.html. I provided it more than a year ago to point out the conflicts within rightwing ideologies. Last October the Ayn Rand Objectivists discovered it. It gets much attention.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

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April 12, 2000

Re: Bruce Fein and Lloyd Cutler

Diane Rehm
WAMU-FM
American University
Washington, DC 20016

Dear Ms. Rehm:

Very Reprehensible.

You might have taken the opportunity to explain to the woman from Texas why this subject has been neglected for so long. You have a very important testimony to give on the false consciousness that has created the "muddied waters" and you have no shame that the story will be told. The woman might put "Diane Rehm" into a search engine and discover that this business on its proper terms has been on your plate for ten years.

On its proper terms, the only issue in gun rights, gun ownership, gun violence is accountability to public authority. It gets down to one simple question: Are gun owners citizens under law and government or are they individual sovereigns, laws unto themselves, in the State of Nature which is the state of anarchy; or, phrased another way, Is the Constitution a frame of government with "just powers" that derive from the consent of the governed or is it a treaty among sovereign individuals who give no more than word of honor and promise of good faith? Much follows from the distinction. See amicus brief.

After a while one come to the conclusion that there are forces in this society for whom the idea that an enlightened citizenry that might become involved in fundamental political choice is terrifying. We get trigger locks. Millions are spent on gun safety and public health statistics to deflect attention away from fundamental choice and the political leadership and necessary public enlightenment that goes with it. The whole purpose of free institutions is defeated. You might explain what constrains you. If this is more than you can handle, seek out assistance or start with a disclaimer and confine yours topics to travelogues and cookbooks. Anything else is a disservice to the public.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

September 30, 1995

Dear Ms. Rehm:

You do not read your mail but it is important that you be on record as having been sent the message. If you read your mail you would know that David Kopel has written referring explicitly to guns, "the tools of political dissent should be privately owned and unregistered" (— "Trust the People: the Case Against Gun Control," Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 109). Kopel does not care if private individuals have concealed weapons for self-defense and he is not "progun/procontrol" as he explains. Kopel is a militant libertarian. He does not accept the legitimacy of government.

Campaigning to liberalize conceal/carry permit requirements is part of the gun lobby's cynical strategy to have the doctrine of political liberty which the courts have thoroughly rejected. To have its doctrine the gun lobby has to defeat legislation. To defeat legislation it has to win the votes of gun owners. To win the votes of gun owners it has to prey on fear among other techniques. The next step in the conceal/carry strategy is to remove the permit requirement altogether. The gun lobby will be closer to the libertarian goal of individual sovereignty which means we become laws unto ourselves, judges of our own actions, and we reserve the discretion to withdraw from any political obligation whatsoever. The libertarians are quite explicit about this. Read their party platform. The libertarians provide the gun lobby the pseudointellectual justification for its demagogic appeal.

Libertarians get excited when the subjects of law and government come up and declare, "We don't want a coercive State." The problem is there is no other kind of state. Coercion is what the State does. A law is authority to coerce. The libertarians do not want a state. They cannot put themselves into political society. This childish insolence has been elevated into the civic pathology of mystical individualism which, in its extremes, has no resistance to malignant conspiracy theories. It has cultivated a few widely believed frauds.

Last April 10th on your program Daniel Polsby and Bruce Fein, without contradiction, attributed the gun lobby/libertarians' armed populace doctrine to John Locke. Daniel Polsby is, like Kopel, a militant libertarian, and also, like Kopel, a Second Amendment lawyer who has represented gun rights cases in court. I must be the only living person who has read John Locke's The Second Treatise of Government. The Second Treatise of Government is a treatise on government. It is not a treatise on anarchy. The gun lobby/libertarians quote as liberally and dishonestly from John Locke as from the Federalist Papers. (See FP No. 46.)

Locke's purpose was to "find out another rise of government, another original of political power" in contradistinction to an absolutist state where "all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition, and rebellion." Locke is explicit about his context: "Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this for the public good." There is no implication that private armies are part of Locke's purpose.

Locke was concerned with government to guarantee the security of property. Property rights logically extend to civil rights. Civil rights are not self-proclaimed. Civil rights are guaranteed by government. The connection has only been fully appreciated and put into practice in our own lifetimes. At every place where Locke uses "property rights" can be added "[and civil rights]" without logical difficulties. We enter Political or Civil Society for the greater security derived. In the State of Nature we are burdened by the inconvenience of securing through our own efforts both our property and our rights and have little time or energy for anything else.

. . . .

See amicus for more on this.
Also "Libertarians and Conservatives".

January 16, 1996

You do not read your mail, but it is important that you be on record for having been sent the message. If you read your mail you would know that Sanford Levinson has written explicitly in the context of gun ownership:

...the citizenry itself can be viewed as an important third component of republican governance insofar as it stands ready to defend republican liberty against the depredations of [state and federal government].

I sent you Levinson's article "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," Yale Law Review (fall, 1989) in May, 1990. This article came to my attention on your program on March 2, 1990. I sent you Dennis Henigan's article "Arms, Anarchy, and the Second Amendment," Valparaison University Law Review (fall, 1991) in the spring of 1992. Henigan's article explicitly refutes Levinson's prescription for anarchy.

. . . .

July 8, 1995

Derek McGinty
WAMU-FM
American University
Washington, DC 20016

Dear Mr. McGinty:

In Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt explains how she adamantly refuses to appear on the same platform with the deniers despite repeated requests from people in your business that she participate in a balanced discussion and debate the opposing view. She insists she will not debate an opposing side that presents a complete and thoroughgoing fraud and when its only objective is to gain respectability for arguments that have no respectability. You fall into that trap when you put Wayne LaPierre on your program.

What motivates the gun lobby is its doctrine of political liberty which is no less a complete and thoroughgoing fraud than the Holocaust deniers' fraud. The doctrine, the objective, and the strategy are amply explained in the enclosures. The gun lobby fights rabidly at the periphery on the most trivial issues, as you observe, because its doctrine at the core is childish nonsense. The doctrine has no validity in historical fact, constitutional doctrine, political theory or good sense. It is hostile to every premise that democratic constitutional government is built on. The strategy is successful in good part because the doctrine is so preposterous. No one believes this is what the gun lobby is up to. Nevertheless, what the gun lobby needs to maintain its doctrine and the frauds the doctrine is built on is respectability and credibility. The gun lobby is very experienced and practiced and knows exactly what it is doing. LaPierre presents himself as a very reasonable, respectable, credible spokesman for positions that are completely fallacious under the most cursory examination.

I, as the first caller on July 6, raised a very fundamental point that is the beginning of a serious discussion that, if pursued, completely destroys the gun lobby's credibility. At the point when I was abruptly and irresponsibly cut off in mid sentence, I was saying that when the gun lobby has to tell lies to make its case we have to inquire into its ulterior motive. The ulterior motive is to maintain its doctrine of political liberty. LaPierre went on to give big name references from the period of the founding of the Republic, all of which are as dishonest as the misquote from Federalist Paper No. 46. Then to prove his case itwas insulting to me that he was allowed to refer, without rebuttal, to the 1982 Senate Judiciary Committee Report. Your performance was particularly reprehensible because if you had read the paper "Armed Anarchic Individualism" I sent you more than four years ago you would have read the words:

When the Republicans gained control of the Senate in 1980 one of the orders of business was to produce an NRA tract asserting an individual right to keep and bear arms that could be referred to as an authoritative impartial study under the imprimatur of the Senate Judiciary Committee as if Orrin Hatch and Strom Thurmond ever did anything impartial in their careers and as if congressional committees decide the contours of constitutional rights. The report itself is only ten pages with an additional five pages describing the inconvenience inflicted on gun owners by federal enforcement. Much of the 161 pages of appendices completely contradict the assertions of the report.

[The words at issue here "...the advantage of being armed..." are quoted in the Judiciary Committee Report and in Sen. Hatch's Preface to the Report.]
Mary Jolly, the Judiciary Committee staff director, who wrote the report [gun rights ideologues Stephen Halbrook and David Hardy also had a hand in writing this report] and assemble the documents, left the Senate immediately for employment as an NRA lobbyist. LaPierre referred to the report exactly for the purpose it was created— to gain respectability. Because you do not read your mail, you become used. You provide your program as a platform in the gun lobby's cynical scheme. You become an accomplice in the carnage.

Getting this subject right does not require much effort. Getting it right is the basis for genuine political leadership. Once the gun lobby's strategy and real objective are understood, every one of LaPierre's arguments— 20,000 gun laws that don't work, scapegoating the criminal justice system, the blame the gun mentality, among others— which are presented so reasonably and seductively are easily refuted with a little thought and conviction.

It is noteworthy that some of your callers who indentified themselves as gun owners and NRA members actually expressed support for reasonable gun laws. The NRA's greatest weakness is the serious bind it is in between the majority of gun owners who, if enlightened, would find reasonable gun laws acceptable and the extremists in gun lobby ranks who really want to proclaim the right-to-arms as a right-to-insurrection.

. . . .

June 28, 1999

On your Talk of the Nation program June 16, you had Paul Weyrich make, in the context of transportation policy, a distinction between libertarians who will fit the world into an ideology and conservatives who just want a way to live. He even went so far as to compare libertarians with Marxists. There is a large literature on the longstanding conflicts among libertarians and conservatives. See Resources. The distinction was especially noteworthy coming from Weyrich.

Further comment will enlighten the comparison with Marxists. The introduction to the Croft's Classics edition (1955, editor Samuel Beer), The Communist Manifesto, observes:

In time, however, as "cultural lag" was overcome, even this form of state [the dictatorship of proletariat] would no longer be needed. Then in Engels' expressive phrase, it would "wither away."19 [Anti- Duehring] Force would vanish from the relations of men...After having been so long alienated from his true self, man would at last through the grace of the iron law of history enter into his earthly paradise, where all live together in perfect freedom and community.

This final vision of Marx is ancient and in no sense ignoble. His is, however, a vision— a dangerous vision. To teach that evil arises only from economic institutions is false. Men may be corrupted by power as well as by property and in any society pride will find ways of distorting human nature. To found a movement or a state upon a doctrine which does not recognize these possibilities is an invitation to tyranny.

It is equally false to teach that evil arises only from government and public authority. Historian Richard Tawney described Marx as and "the last of the Schoolmen," the medieval theologians who made moral pronouncements on society; but, alas, Marx was a mere transitional figure. He was, ironically, the first of our Libertarian Deliverers. Marx and Engels at least required a historical process for the state, public authority, to wither away. Our Libertarian Deliverers will wish it away.

The conflict between libertarians and conservatives is intellectually acute in firearms policy although no one has explicitly debated gun ownership as a libertarian/conservative issue. It is unfortunate because this is where we can get a large perspective on contemporary American politics.

In this regard, your series on the gun culture misses a great opportunity to enlighten the subject. Instead, you go to some towns in rural America where there is no visible crisis in gun violence. You then report uncritically the same political cynicism— make laws that only apply to someone else— that permeates the political culture. You might have made an inquiry into what the NRA really wants. See ../potowmack/nratanya.html. You might have gone to some places where the true belief in the gun lobby's armed populace fantasy is more unabashedly proclaimed. You might have gone to neighborhoods in the inner city where gun violence is real. I have been there. The people on the street, who not only have guns in their pockets but have used them for something other than sport and recreation, are the first to say we have to get these guns off the street— that is, we have to create a civic culture. For national policy there are simple solutions. See .../nfp.html. Progress towards solutions starts with informed public debate about what we are doing here as a political community.

Here is where you can get serious, relevant, and competent: The gun lobby with much assistance from true believing libertarian law professors has invented a wholly new and malignant vision of political life. It is based on an elaborate fraud which is widely believed and which you have not examined or exposed. The quote in your first part that John Adams said, "arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion in private self defense," is just one of dozens that are used to fabricate the fraud and cultivate a constituency. Here is what John Adams said in full context:

[T]he militia then must all obey the sovereign majority, or divide, and part follow the majority, and part the minority. This last case is civil war; but until it comes to this, the whole militia may be employed by the majority in any degree of tyranny and oppression over the minority. The constitution furnishes no resource or remedy; nothing affords a chance of relief but rebellion and civil war: if this terminates in favor of the minority, they will terrorize in their turns, exasperated by revenge, in addition to ambition and avarice; if the majority prevail, their domination becomes more cruel, and soon ends in one despot. It must be made a sacred maxim, that the militia obey the executive power, which represents the whole people in the execution of laws. To suppose arms in the hands of the citizens, to be used at individual discretion, except in private self defense, or by partial orders of towns, counties, or districts of a state, is to demolish every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty can be enjoyed by no man is a dissolution of the government. The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created, directed, and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of the laws.

The words would be accurate cited as, "to suppose arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual discretion...is to demolish every constitution." The fraud and the strategy are the story for you. See also .../196fp46.html, .../196locke.html. It is not as if you have not had the story. I have sent it to you enough times. It is never too late. You might get to your homework. Much more is explained in the Potowmack Institute files. We don't want an armed populace that is not a citizenry and we don't want an armed citizenry that is not also an enlightened citizenry. You might report on a gun culture that connects gun ownership with the obligations of citizenship. See the Militia Act of 1792, .../597mil.html.

The gun lobby cannot win what it wants in court, but not for the want of trying. It has to circulate these quotes around among the already eager to believe to cultivate a constituency. Unmentioned by NPR, the elaborate fraud is now in federal court in a new case seeking certification. See US v. Emerson, http://www.txnd.uscourts/PDFs/emerson.pdf. If this case is successful on appeal, it will mean a redefinition of the relationship between citizen and state and the eventual unraveling of law and government.

The Potowmack Institute will file an amicus curiae in Emerson exposing the fraud. This is serious business. It is about time you started paying attention. It should not be up to us. There are 535 members of Congress who take an oath of office to maintain the internal sovereignty of the United States. In your next report, you get them to explain what that means.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

The controversies over arms in the early republic involved wholly different concepts. The part about "not in the same way" is where you should give your attention. The Second Amendment was about military organization not gun control, not "safe and responsible" use and certainly not the civil rights of private individuals to defend themselves against the "just powers" of any government at all as many will read into your report. To "bear arms" describes a military function. The Constitution created a national militia out of the pre-existing state militias. The Militia Act of 1792 required the states to "enroll" that is, register militiamen for militia duty. Militia duty was conscript duty subject to federal call up. If the Constitution had provided for conscription into the regular army, routine in the mid- twentieth century, it would never have been ratified. The Militia Act also require the state militia officers to maintain inventories of militia resources including privately owned weapons and report them to the president of the United States. Don't tell the NRA but blank bureaucratic forms were provided. Washington and Adams neglected the inventory requirement but Jefferson's distrust of arms in the Federal Government, as Rosenfeld put it, was manifest in his desire to reduce dependency on the regular army and rely on the militia. To assess militia capabilities he required the inventories be reported. The inventories, called "Return of Militia," are the most subversive documents our present politics. See if you can get Mr. Rosenfeld, Wayne LaPierre, Charlton Heston, and our contemporary gun rights advocates to endorse the inventory requirement now. Jefferson founded West Point in 1803 to train militia officers not officers for the regular army. Jefferson, as president, it should be pointed out was not averse to using the federal army to suppress local dissent when the circumstance required strong action.

The controversies in the early republic were over state and federal control of the militia not maintaining a contingent of extralegal armed force that would keep government, state and federal, in awe. That is what Mr. Rosenfeld implies and many in our present political environment sincerely believe.

If you want to be a responsible voice for public enlightenment, there are plenty of resources available to inform your consciousness. You can start with the enclosed letters. You might study the briefs filed in US v. Emerson, now on appeal the US Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, http://www.potowmack.org/emeramic.html." There are many competent historians who have contributed to those briefs. The Potowmack Institute's amicus brief might be particularly helpful. The ruling should be out before the election. There is a story where you can fulfill your public mission by opening up the subject. You might even make a constructive contribution.

This will be added to http://www.potowmack.org/196rehm.html right after the letter of June 28, 1999.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

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