From: bb063@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Christopher J. Crobaugh)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Paul Craig Roberts on Brady Bill
Date: 3 Oct 92 21:54:56 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc4.ins.cwru.edu


Many of you may have seen Paul Craig Roberts' piece against the
Brady Bill last year....it is possibly the most cogent rejection
of the premises of Brady supporters ever penned....(I might
still have it, or can get it from the Cleveland Plain Dealer).
Anyway, he's done it again, and the Plain Dealer printed it on
Thursday, Sep 30, 1992 (thank you thank you Jim Strang). Read it
and pass it around at work or school. It knocks many of the 
Brady supporters' arguments rights square in the forehead.


CONGRESS COVERS ITSELF BUT NOT PUBLIC

*by Paul Craig Roberts
(printed in the October 2nd, 1992 Cleveland Plain Dealer)

      In an extraordinary development, Congress has passed
legislation giving its private police force jurisdiction over parts
of the District of Columbia surrounding Capitol Hill.

      Previously the U.S. Capitol Police protected members of
Congress in their office buildings and in the Capitol itself.

      But the violent crimes that surge through the streets of the
capital have made life too uncertain for solons and staff. So
lawmakers have amassed their own private army to patrol the areas
in which they move. Like the nobles of yore, they have their armed
retainers.

      Stripped of self-defense by gun-control laws - which have yet
to deter a single criminal - the rest of the hapless citizenry,
unable to the taxpayers' purse to hire protectors, must walk and
drive the streets in constant peril of their lives and property.

      The latest indignity to be suffered by Washingtonians is to be
"carjacked: -- a new word to describe being robbed of your car
while driving it.  Armed thugs evict you, dead or alive, from your
auto and drive off.

      Among the recent spate of victims was a young mother driving
a BMW in the Maryland suburbs. Two socially disadvantaged
characters decided that the BMW should be theirs and ejected her.
But she was dragged for a mile before the carjackers dislodged her,
dead of course, by sideswiping a fence. When the murderers
discovered a baby girl in the back seat, they threw her out of the
moving car.

      There were so many carjackings in a recent two week period
that President Bush called for the death penalty. But things calmed
down a bit when the thugs tried to grab a car from an FBI agent,
who promptly pulled out his own gun and killed one of them.
      This sent the anti-gunners up the wall, because it is supposed
to be too dangerous to try to defend oneself with a gun. Many are
now waiting for the first non-FBI or police to shoot a carjacker.
That person, under District of Columbia anti-gun laws, would face
a one-year prison sentence for illegally possessing a weapon.

      Interestingly, carjacking is not popular in the Virginia
suburbs, where owning a gun does not automatically brand a person
as a criminal. There a wrong guess and carjacking would be a good
way to meet your maker.

      Formerly, government protected law-abiding citizens. Now it
protects criminals, while making it impossible for citizens to
protect themselves. We have adopted an approach to crime that
blames society. This has made the law-abiding increasingly easy
targets for criminals.

      As society becomes more unsafe, lawmakers luxuriating in guilt
over the thought of punishing the socially deprived, will acquire
more priveleges guaranteeing their personal safety. The gulf
between the rulers and the ruled will widen.

      In contrast, when the president moves around, all traffic is
stopped in every direction while a convoy of stretch limos, police
cars and vans filled with machine-gun-packing Secret Servicemen
speed through the streets.

      Now that Congress has its private armed retainers, mayors,
governors, judges, prosecutors and senior civil servants will want
to partake of the privilege, thus further insulating them from the
consequences of their actions that the rest of us have to suffer.

      In the end a person will have to join the government class or
the criminal class, because no one else will have a chance.

*Paul Craig Roberts is the William E. Simon professor of political
economy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in
Washington and is a former assistant secretary of the U.S.
Treasury.
-- 
bb063@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu  Chris Crobaugh - (216) 327-6655 (V)
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little 
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." B. Franklin