Hindsight from The New Gun Week October 20, 1998
It Looks Like Crazy Season, Again
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive EditorWhether it's part of the lead-up to Halloween or a bizarre election campaign season, there seems to be a craziness in the air, again.
You can see it in news clips from around the country.
Item: In Ohio, The Columbus Dispatch reports that, "Attorney General Betty D. Montgomery is peeved that handgun-control activist Sarah Brady campaigned in Cleveland (on Sept. 28) for Montgomery's Democratic opponent, Richard Cordray."
According to the newspaper, "Montgomery, a Republican, says she'll stack her record up against Cordray's on handguns. 'In Ohio, 100% of all people buying a handgun in a store have their criminal histories checked before they can purchase that gun,' " Montgomery said.
During her Cleveland appearance, Brady lauded Cordray as one who would "work to protect you." Cordray has criticized Montgomery for stopping record checks after the US Supreme Court struck down that part of the Brady Act. In fact, in spite of complaints and a separate suit by Ohio gunowners, Montgomery devised a system to fill the void in the state-charging fees all along the way. The Dispatch story quoted Medina County Sheriff Neil Hassinger as confirming that fact and saying that Brady and Cordray were mistaken.
Montgomery has cried foul over the criticism as she bids for the anti-gun vote and another term.
Incidentally, The Columbus Dispatch added its own cupful of craziness to the stew when it claimed in the same story that Sarah Brady had formed Handgun Control Inc. after her husband, Jim, was injured in the attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981. Anyone with their feet on the ground knows that HCI was formed many years before that event, and was chaired pre-Brady by another "victim" spokesperson, the late Nelson T. "Pete" Shields.
But then in the wacky Ohio world in which gunowners see the candidates for attorney general fight over an endorsement by Sarah Brady, mistakes in fact by the equally anti-gun newspaper should come as no surprise.
Item: When The Los Angeles Times criticized California Gov. Pete Wilson's veto of gun bills (See Page One story in this issue of GW) in a Sept. 30 editorial, they made several false claims when they criticized both Orange County Sheriff-elect Mike Carona's promise to issue more concealed handgun permits and Chicago University Law Professor John Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime.
Lott called the errors to everyone's attention in a letter printed by the newspaper on Oct. 2.
"The Times cites critics of my research and claims that allowing people to defend themselves is 'bound to increase injuries and deaths-either through accidents or deliberate shootings that occur in a moment of passion,' " Lott replied, "but The Times fails to note that even my harshest critics have found no evidence that permitted concealed handguns increase crime, accidental deaths or suicides."
Lott continued, "My book analyzed FBI crime statistics for all 3,054 American counties from 1977 to 1994, as well as extensive cross-county information on accidental gun deaths and suicides. I found that allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns deters criminals and reduces violent crime, with murder rates falling by at least 10%. The percentage drops were largest in most urban, most crime-prone counties, and women benefited much more than men.
"I have made the data available to academics at 36 universities," Lott wrote. "Everyone who has tried has been able to replicate my findings, and only three have written pieces critical of my general approach."
Perhaps it is a symptom of the crazy season we are in, but there was no reason for The Times, even with all its anti-gun catechism, to use an editorial about Wilson's vetoes to beat up on the sheriff and to find another reason to attempt to discredit Lott and his research. The legislation rejected by the vetoes had nothing to do with the right to carry and the issuance of concealed carry licenses, although Wilson did mention people being able to defend themselves in his veto of the bogus "junk gun" proposal.
Item: The Violence Policy Center (VPC), the anti-gun propaganda factory that originated the "assault weapon" hoax back in 1988, hosted an early Halloween gathering at the National Press Club on June 1 in which the history of the Second Amendment was completely reversed.
Taking several pages from the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbel's PR manual, the VPC found three professors and a syndicated columnist who claimed that the Second Amendment was fostered by slave-holder states as a way of guaranteeing that state militias would be able to put down slave rebellions. According to the VPC researchers, the other states went along with this scheme in order to "appease" the Southern states.
The report of this extraordinary bit of witchcraft did not mention whether the so-called researchers discussed the true racists roots of gun control in America, which were born in the Southern states after the Civil War. Nor apparently did they discuss the fact that in 1791 when the Bill of Rights was ratified there were only four Southern states compared to nine so-called non-slave Northern states.
It is worth noting, however, that the original VPC press conference garnered very little press or television coverage. Perhaps even the normally anti-gun press found too many masks, goblins and ghosts at the event. We found out about it from the Texans Against Gun Violence (TAGV) web page, which considered this "groundbreaking new historical analysis."
Neither TAGV nor VPC gave any indication whether or not the three professors involved in this charade had read any of the so-called scientific and academic studies created in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, which provided "groundbreaking new historical analysis" to show that Jews, Gypsies, blacks and other non-Aryans were inferior races, before they wrote their blatant revisions of Second Amendment history.
Item: Perhaps the strangest bit of craziness to come across my desk recently was a clipping from the Sept. 23 Washington Times in which was published a bizarre story from the Raleigh News & Observer, distributed by Scripps Howard.
The story appeared under the headline: "Doctor held liable for man who killed 2 in rampage."
It went on to report that the retired psychiatrist who briefly treated Wendell Williamson, a man who killed two people in a January 1995 shooting in downtown Chapel Hill, NC, was blamed for the deadly shooting and ordered to pay the shooter $500,000 in damages in a weird medical malpractice suit.
Jurors apparently agreed with Williamson who contended that Dr. Myron Liptzin failed to take Williamson's mental illness seriously enough, failed to ensure that Williamson would continue to receive care after the doctor retired, and hadn't informed Williamson adequately about the long-term nature of his disorder and the need to seek further treatment and medication.
The newspaper reported that this was the second time that an Orange County, NC, jury had absolved Williamson of responsibility in the murder. In a capital murder trial in November 1995, a jury found Williamson not guilty by reason of insanity.
The September 1998 jury awarded him the judgment against the psychiatrist. (Williamson also has another suit pending against the University of North Carolina.)
Williamson was a law student at the university when, during a 1992 stay at University of North Carolina hospitals, he was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. He saw Liptzin six times from March through May 1994 after he was sent to Student Health Services for disrupting a class with an outburst about his belief that he had telepathic powers. The doctor counseled him and prescribed low doses of an anti-psychotic drug, but the doctor retired after their last meeting. Eight months later, Williamson walked into downtown Chapel Hill randomly firing an M-1 rifle, killing two men and wounding a police officer. The rampage ended when police shot Williamson in both legs.
Perhaps the most significant commentary on the craziness of the latest jury decision-which could yet be appealed-came from a relatives of the men killed by Williamson.
June Cayton, sister of Ralph Walker Jr. who was killed at age 42, said: "It's like, he's doing it, he got away with it, and now he's getting paid for doing it."
Dr. Karl Reichardt, father of Kevin Reichardt, a UNC student and lacrosse player who was killed at age 20, referred to Williamson as "a murderer who is now literally rewarded for what he did."
Maybe it's not surprising that most police will tell you that there is a lot to that full moon business. If you don't believe the cops, just read your newspaper.
The New Gun Week is published three times a month by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on the 1st, 10th, and 20th. Hindsight is a commentary written by SAF President and Gun Week Executive Editor Joseph P. Tartaro. This commentary may be reprinted so long as credit is given to the author and the publication. For more information or to subscribe, write Gun Week, PO Box 488, Buffalo, NY 14209, or call 716-885-6408 Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, or inquire on Compuserve to John Krull, Production manager-JohnSAF@Compuserve.com or gunweeksaf@broadviewnet.netAlso, check out the New Gun Week at http://www.GunWeek.com