From: otto@systems.cc.fsu.edu (John G. Otto)
Subject: Re: Registering "Assault Keys"
Followup-To: talk.politics.guns
Organization: Tallahassee Objectivists for  Nancy Lord in 96
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 21:17:07 GMT

> In article <1992Nov12.070004.1556@netcom.com>, 
> gurgle@netcom.com (Pete Gontier) wrote:
>> amirza@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (Anmar Caves) writes: 
>>>> Or could it be that a ban on guns looks to be the quick fix...

>>> Quick, I dunno. Sure wouldn't hurt. Let's give it a try.

>> it would hurt.  History has proven this time and time again.
>> New York, Wash. DC, Chicago, all places that have banned guns and have
>> the highest crime rates in the country, with the crime rates rising
>> dramatically after the citizenry was unarmed.

> It might be that the U.S. is already too screwed up with weird
> judeo-Xian guilt/hate for a ban on handguns to result in anything but
> pandemonium.  See?  I'm a reasonable guy.  I'm willing to fall back
> to the position: "In any *reasonable* society, this would work..."
> Like, perhaps, the majority of other western societies.

I think the key events were:
1. the revolution
2. the whiskey rebellion
3. the war between the states & Jim Crow, but, most influential to me,
4. prohibition

Before prohibition, there were some isolated places in which people
were quick to pull a hand-gun in a dispute, but it didn't become all-
pervasive until the 1920s.  From the very beginning, we had some 
scrappy folks, who would get into knock-down, teeth removing, eye 
destroying hand-to-hand fights, but it wasn't until this century that 
firearms were brought into such brawls.

>> History has also proven that the first steps in oppressing 
>> a populace is to disarm them.

> Oh, that's alarmist talk.  There are plenty of other countries
> with a ban on handguns of which one wouldn't say the population
> is being oppressed.  There are plenty of countries of which you
> *would* say it.  But you certainly can't claim any causal relation.

The relationship is not "causal"; it's "definitional".  I don't 
know of any country in which the citizenry are not oppressed by 
the government in one way or another, and that includes all I know 
of Europe, Asia, Africa, South, Central and North America.  There 
are various degrees of oppression, but none are free.
 
>>> I understand that a ban on handguns would merely be a band-aid. 
>>> That doesn't change my preference.
 
>> It would be morally wrong...

> Whoa!  Now you're talking on a whole different plane. 
> Care to elaborate?
 
Depriving people who have harmed nobody their right to be able to
defend themselves.

"I know something of the history of this legislation [prohibiting the
 concealed carry of firearms].  The original Act of 1893 was passed when
 there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for
 the purpose of working in the turpentine and lumber camps.  The same
 condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed
 for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the
 unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps
 and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling
 of security.  The statute was never intended to be applied to the white
 population and in practice has never been so applied."
 - Justice Buford, Florida Supreme Court, in Watson v. Stone,
   4 So.2d 700, 703 (Fla. 1941), quoted in Cottrol and Diamond, 355.

jgo   John G. Otto   otto@garnet.acns.fsu.edu