[HOMEPAGE].

http://www.potowmack.org/mayobloom.html

Insert January 10, 2011

There were no credible responses to these letters. The early appeal was to the Senate Judiciary Committee to conduct hearings. The later appeal was to put pressure on the Eric Holder DOJ to conduct a study that updates Ashcroft's 2004 gun lobby propaganda piece in the context of the opinions of the courts. It remains to be seen if recent events in Tuscon will make any substantive changes.

October 5, 2010

Re: "Report: Weak Laws Turn a Handful of States Into Shopping Malls for Gun Traffickers," 9/27
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-bloomberg/report-weak-laws-turn-a-h_b_740167.html

Dear Mayor Bloomberg:

In May of 2008, weeks before the Supreme Court released its opinion in Heller, I sent letters to 256 of the 300 mayors (the ones I could find addresses for) then signed on to MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns. I only received 3 responses including one from you. That was not a good display of consciousness on the most vital and fundamental issues of political life. This is serious business. It demands serious attention, but I will not spend close to $1000 in a wasted effort to write to the 500 mayors who are signed up now. As great as are your concerns, the consciousness is a continent wide and only a millimeter deep.

There can be something different. The Supreme Courts has now delivered its opinion in McDonald. The opinions in Parker/Heller/McDonald are devastating defeats for gun rights ideologies and present an opportunity for serious, aggressive political leadership to pursue a national firearms policy.
http://csgv.blogspot.com/2009/05/its-about-citizenship.html
See enclosure. The CSGV's Michael Beard's comments are adapted from a letter I sent to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in spring, 2009. No response. Nothing frightens members of Congress more than their oath of office.
http://www.potowmack.org/nfp.html
http://www.potowmack.org/abcnews.html
Policy has to start with the propositions that the Constitution is a frame of government not a treaty among sovereign individuals and that militia duty in the Constitution, the Second Amendment, and the Militia Act of 1792 was about military preparedness and a civic obligation not an anarchic individual right. Your "Trace the Guns" study points in the direction of national policy. The only role for the Federal Government is to shut down the illegal traffic between and among jurisdictions. That can only be accomplished with a national policy based on registration of ownership and reporting of private sales. The Constitutional authority which the courts have implicitly recognized is right there in the militia clauses and the Second Amendment. The original purpose was manifest in the inventory requirement of the Militia Act of 1792. All other efforts for forty years and your present proposals have been piecemeal and have failed and will continue to fail.

That political leadership could start with pressuring the Eric Holder Justice Department to update Attorney General Ashcroft's 2004 gun lobby propaganda study (very likely written by NRA operatives) in the terms of Ashcroft's own "reasonable restrictions" and the courts' opinions that we can have "registration ... for militia service if called up". The study would clarify fundamental issues and concepts and be a resource and provide direction toward national policy.

The gun rights militants led by the NRA would fight viciously to defeat any legislative attempt to implement the opinions of the courts. This is where serious leadership makes a stand and defines an agenda for national policy. The gun rights militants will have no counter argument to civic obligation.

My proposal with further rationale is outlined in a message I sent to Joyce Lee Malcolm on August 25,
http://www.potowmack.org/jlmalc.html.
Her dubious history has been embraced by the Supreme Court. What motivates the court is a subject worthy of consideration on its own right. Prof. Malcolm has not responded. She is a libertarian ideologue. She truly believes. Academics like everyone else never respond. Ideologues are not interested in truth seeking public inquiry. That is part of your challenge.

If the Holder DOJ cannot offer aggressive political leadership, the burden can fall on MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns. I will be so immodest as to offer myself to direct the study— And, for the simple reason that after 20 years of trying to get people to appreciate that what James Madison was really describing in Federalist Paper 46 was not a civil right of private individuals, I do not trust anyone else to get this right.

Yours truly,
The Potowmack Institute
enclosures.
cc: Thomas Merino, Mayor, Boston

Dear Mayor _________:
Can we have serious political discourse in an election season? This is serious business. It demands serious attention. It is not just many lives and whole communities that are at risk, but constitutional government itself. In the struggle against illegal guns there is now the opportunity to change everything. This is where we become seriously political.

Some things are very far removed from public consciousness. The DC government did not need to take Parker/Heller to the Supreme Court. The gun rights ideologies were already defeated in the court of appeals. It all gets down to a pair of very simple questions posed to presidential candidates.

****************** The DC Court of Appeals released its opinion on March 9, 2007, in Parker et al. v. DC Government. After many pages in which the court fabricated an individual right to be privately armed outside of any militia or military context 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.
http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/docs/common/opinions/200703/04-7041a.pdf,
p.54

Registration of ownership, militia call up, proficiency testing, public safety regulation, screening for militia suitability. These are the makings of a firearms policy. Do you accept and support Judge Silberman's conclusions? Will your administration work towards a national firearms policy based on these conclusions? ************************

The only goal needed for a national firearms policy is to shut down the illegal traffic between and among state and local jurisdictions. That is empowerment policy for state and local law jurisdictions to enforce the details of Judge Silberman's conclusions. Shutting down the illegal traffic can only be accomplished by registration and reporting of private sales. There is nothing unconstitutional about a national policy based on those. The Militia Act of 1792 required gun owners to be enrolled for militia duty that is registered in gun rights consciousness— And that their privately owned weapons be placed on inventories called "return of militia,"
http://www.potowmack.org/parkappf.pdf,
.../milret.html
. The inventories were reported to the President of the United States who reported them to Congress. No one in those days objected. Militia duty was conscript duty. By original design and intent, military preparedness trumps all rights and other concerns and interests. The aggressive leadership to compel change with a few simple questions can start with those who are suffering the consequences of failed policy and failed strategy. There is six months left to the general election.

Yours truly,
The Potowmack Institute
enclosures

enclosures included the page from FP 46 with this comment
http://www.potowmack.org/emerappi.html

The gun lobby has invented a whole preposterous, anarchic, insurrectionist doctrine of political liberty largely out of words lifted out of context from this one paragraph. The first step in advancing the doctrine is now before the Supreme Court. Regardless of what NPR's Diane Rehm, the "rabidly antigun Washington Post", the NRA, a host of gun lobby/libertarian pseudoscholars, and a growing number of anarchic federal judges would have us believe, James Madison in FP No. 46 was not describing a civil right of private individuals. The issue was military federalism a federalism that is today anachronistic and irrelevant. The Constitution created a delicate military balance between state militias and a federal army. The larger context of the Second Amendment manifest in the state militias was the republican "right of the people" to participate in the military functions of the state as conscript citizen soldiers, fulfilling a civic obligation, rather than leave those functions up to a mercenary army whether the British Army recently removed or the US Army which as created in the Constitution was explicitly modeled after the British Army. It is very far removed from present public knowledge, but the Second Amendment only makes sense in these 18th century terms. The original antagonistic relationship was combine in the twentieth century Selective Service Acts. The US Army became a national militia.

This where I got started on this. I am still trying to get the gun lobby's most reliable asset, the one the NRA calls the "rabidly antigun Washington Post", to print in full context what James Madison was really describing the FP No. 46. This comical assertion is widely subscribed to. Rights enumerated in a constitution have to be consistent with what a constitution is. How can a government secure a right if the purpose of the right is to abolish the government? Once the right is exercised successfully the government no longer exists to secure the right. The right reverts to the State of Nature where it was all along. The right claimed actually satisfies the constitutional definition of treason. A right we have only as long as we do not exercise it is not right at all but the fantasy of a right. It is a right that cannot be secured in court. It has to be maintained by defeating legislation. We get much cynical, obstructionist, small-minded politics. That will not change until the whole issue os redefined in terms of credible policy. Judge Silberman has given the opportunity.

---

July 8, 2008

Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor, New York City
Mayor of Dayton, OH
Mayor of Houston, TX.

Dear Mayor __________:

Thank you for your response to my letter of May 8. I sent that letter with enclosures to 256 (the ones I could find addresses for) of the 300 plus mayors who have joined MayorAgainstIllegalGuns. My purpose was to test out their commitment and consciousness. There were only four responses. Sadly, I did not expect better. The commitment is a continent wide and a millimeter deep. I have worked on this subject for twenty years. Nothing has changed in public knowledge in that time. This is still serious business. The time for change is now. The courts have given the opportunity. The leadership for change can come of out of MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.

C-Span's BookTV recently featured Kevin Phillips talking about his book Bad Money. He criticized the Democratic Party for not going for the jugular. It goes for the capillary. Nothing better describes the efforts up till now to address gun violence. The gun controllers have not got beyond promoting trigger locks and suing the gun manufactures.

The jugular is in Judge Silberman's conclusions in Parker:

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.

Registration of ownership, militia call up, proficiency testing, public safety regulation, screening for militia suitability. These are the makings of a firearms policy. Nowhere in the eighty briefs filed in Heller are Judge Silberman's conclusions mentioned. Judge Silberman makes the right he seeks to invent and the gun lobby wants to have perfectly meaningless.

MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns can go for the jugular. The goals proposed now are still the capillaries:
- Close the gun-show loophole.
- End gun-dealer fire sales.
- Require gun dealers to do background checks on employees.
- Close the "terror gap."
Judge Silberman's conclusions are a devastating repudiation of what the gun rights ideologies really want to maintain an anarchic balance of power between a privately armed populace and any and all government. The Supreme Court has not invalidated his conclusions .

Judge Silberman's reasoning in Parker and the Supreme Court's reasoning in Heller are confused, anarchic, historically preposterous and constitutionally pernicious. They are part of politically motivated agenda to control political outcomes in a much larger struggle over the modern state and the political economy of capitalism. There is an introduction at
http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson123.html.

There is more in my Parker amicus,
http://www.potowmack.org/parkarg.pdf.
It is not necessary to raise those issues. Everything changes by asking a few simple questions of our presidential candidates, Do you accept and support Judge Silberman's conclusions in Parker, now affirmed by the Supreme Court? Will your administration work toward policy goals based on those conclusions? We have until November.

Much is missing from the court opinions. The rest of us do not have to miss anything. The way we defend ourselves under law and government is to create legal categories of gun ownership that can be applied against the lawless. The only reason there is a claim for an individual right for private self-defense is because the gun lobby, led by the NRA, works very hard and successfully to defeat any laws that would apply against the lawless because the same laws would apply against its insurrectionists. In validating an individual right the courts have validated an insurrectionist doctrine well, sort of. The issue is still wide open. Along the way the courts mention lawful and unlawful purposes for gun ownership but provide no guidance on or appreciation of the need for effective standards to enforce the distinction.

The great need is for a national firearms policy that shuts down the illegal traffic in firearms between and among jurisdictions. This can only be achieved with national policy. My proposal for a national firearms policy,
http://www.potowmack.org/nfp.html
, was written in 1998. It was last updated in 2001. It has now been validated by the courts. It is about time people started paying attention.

Shutting down the illegal traffic is the essential power of enforcement for local jurisdictions' "reasonable restrictions". Judge Silberman has given the opportunity. Registration for militia call up and the reporting of private sales and transfers, strictly enforced, achieve that goal and, bring to bear the realities of political life. The obstacles are political and practical not constitutional.

The gun lobby, led by the NRA, would fight viciously any attempts to implement Judge Silberman's policy conclusions. The one point of policy the gun rights ideologies cannot accommodate is accountability to a governing authority through registration. The right sought is the right to individual or personal sovereignty. The Constitution is reduced from a frame of government to a treaty among sovereign individuals with all its insurrectionist and anarchic implications. This is proclaimed on hundreds of internet bulletin boards. An appeal to civic obligation as manifest in the original militia concept defeats these proclamation. High, enforceable standards for proficiency testing, public safety regulation, and militia suitability, decided by local needs, are the "reasonable restrictions" Judge Silberman accepts and the Supreme Court has affirmed.

The political parties have abandoned the issue. The news organs are completely derelict to enlighten the public. The gun controllers cannot get beyond gun safety. The politicians from all persuasion pander to the gun vote. The courts have now joined the pandering. The people who are closest to the collateral damage of a larger struggle have to take the leadership. The intellectual work has been done. Does anyone want to get started on this?

Yours truly,
The Potowmack Institute
enclosures.

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