Balance the Budget, Limit Terms, and Control Taxes in One Step

Sat   1 Jul 1995   11:06 by Kevin McGehee in Fairbanks, Alaska 0 comments [The Armed Genius]

As of this date, the Newt World Order is missing two important parts of its platform—a balanced-budget amendment and a congressional term-limit amendment. What follows is my own modest proposal to achieve the best of both aims without the drawbacks of either. Instead of having members of Congress limited to serving only so many years, let’s limit them to only so many net deficit or tax-hike dollars, say $250 billion, accumulated over the length of their careers. This would mean that the better they do their job, the longer they’ll be allowed to stick around—giving them an incentive to avoid overspending or overtaxing. Here’s how it would work: say Rep. Ron Rook is a freshman when Congress enacts a federal budget that’s either $100 billion in the red, balanced by $100 billion in “revenue enhancements”, or a combination of the two amounting to $100 billion (it doesn’t matter how he voted on it—keep reading for an explanation). Then let’s say the next year Congress enacts a budget that is $75 billion in surplus or carries a $75 billion tax cut, or a combination. When Rook goes home at the end of that second year, his score is a net deficit of $25 billion, and he can run for re-election. Or, let’s say Senator Seymour Shmoo has been in the Senate for two terms, and during the first ten of those twelve years the Congress voted budgets scoring a net deficit of $235 billion. An additional $25 billion run up in the final two years of Shmoo’s second term brings the score to $260 billion, which means that all incumbent Senators who served for just those twelve years, including Shmoo, are ineligible to run for re-election. How an individual member votes on a budget, whether he votes to spend more than the government takes in, or to raise taxes to cover overspending, is not considered because we want the balanced-budget pressure to be on all the members. Those favoring sound budgetary practices would therefore have additional incentive to work extra hard to balance budgets. The cut-off point would be the annual federal budget vote, and the authoritative figures would be whatever nonpartisan figures are most up-to-date at the federal election filing deadline—to ensure that post-budgetary appropriations don’t cause late, unpunishable deficits. A senator or representative who joins the Congress after the budget vote would only get credit or blame for the budgetary outcome of that year if the budget is altered in the house he or she joins, after he or she joins. Of course, under the Clinton budgets, with annual deficits of over $200 billion, and no balance or surplus in sight, all members of Congress would be ineligible for re-election after just a single term! Now that’s term limits!

PCI Shifts into High Gear

Wed   31 May 1995   10:51 by Kevin McGehee in Fairbanks, Alaska 0 comments [Humor?] [The Armed Genius]

“What’s wrong with a waiting period before you publish a newspaper while the government checks your facts?“ That question, seen by RKBA member David Gonzalez on a button on sale at a science fiction convention, aptly summarizes the position of Kent Hackett, founder and chairman of Press Control, Incorporated (PCI), an organization readers of The Armed Genius first learned of back in TAG #7. Hackett promises that PCI’s legislative agenda for 1996 will outshine the presidential election campaign and enact more unprecedented change than the House’s Contract with America. Hackett held a news conference in Washington, D.C. recently in which he and other spokesmen for the organization spelled out the proposals they want to see enacted, and the reasons for them. One such item is a seven-day waiting period between composition of a publication and its release for printing and distribution, while a newly established U.S. Bureau of Accuracy, Truthfulness and Factuality (BATF) investigates the assertions contained in it. “A waiting period on publications would go a long way toward alleviating the damage done by hole-in-the-wall publishers,“ Hackett says, “and we’re confident that the real newspapers and magazines, having as their primary purpose the imparting of accurate information to the public, will have no problem with this proposed law. Only those publishers that routinely spread inaccurate information, untruths and half-truths, and political propaganda in the guise of information, will suffer more than an inconvenience.“ The waiting-period legislation, dubbed the Hackett Bill, is only the beginning of the blitz planned for next year. Other proposals include laws to prohibit the use or possession of a printer within 1,000 feet of a school. “Our kids are having a tough enough time learning without being exposed to pamphleteering by irresponsible people,“ says Hackett. To complaints that the law would also ban printers in schools, Hackett argues that teachers are as prone to printer abuse as anyone else. “We want only licensed printers operated by people who have demonstrated proficiency and knowledge of safety rules,“ he said. “Licensing will also afford the government the means to enforce safety compliance. Too many personal printers are based on dangerous laser technology. Anyone who has seen an episode of ‘Star Trek’ or a Star Wars movie can clearly see that these death-ray printers can’t be allowed to fall into the hands of just anybody.“ Other proposals PCI plans to try to push through Congress: Banning certain sizes and types of ribbon for dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers. Registering people who purchase toner for laser-jet and ink-jet printers. Restricting licensed persons from owning more than a set maximum number of printers and copiers. Blanket authority given to police to conduct unannounced, warrantless searches for unregistered printers. In an ambitious plan that would vastly increase the cost of owning and using a printer, copier, fax, or desktop publishing software, a 1,000-percent surtax on these items and supplies to pay for psychiatric counseling for victims of information overload. “The American Medical Association has been aware for years of the psychological harm caused by information overload in our present, information-saturated society,“ said Hackett. “Now at last there is sufficient evidence to declare the unregulated profusion of fly-by-night publishers a public-health menace. The mental health of the nation is at stake, and the need to protect that health outweighs any argument from the printer lobby that there is some kind of constitutional right to have and operate a printing device.“ Appearing with Hackett at his news conference was Congressman Harley Hoohaw (P-DQ), who announced that he was already actively seeking co-sponsors for the Hackett Bill, and that his staff was hard at work drafting bills to enact PCI’s other goals. “We will not allow the scare-mongering and lies of the printer nuts to forestall this eminently reasonable and necessary legislation. And we already have a pledge from President Clinton to sign the Hackett Bill when it reaches his desk.“ A spokesman for the leading organization promoting printers, the National Printer Association, criticized PCI’s agenda as “doing serious damage to the Constitution and to the personal freedom of every American.“ Michael Gartner, speaking to reporters immediately after Hackett and Hoohaw finished their talk, added that “the real agenda here is not to resolve any problems arising from the misuse of these items, but to exert control over the thoughts and speech of individual, law-abiding citizens.“ Gartner offered no evidence to back up his allegation. PCI was founded by Kent Hackett after his brother-in-law was gruesomely slandered by a drive-by pamphleteer using an assault printer. Its position is based on the underreported belief by pre-eminent constitutional scholars that the free-press provision of the First Amendment, having been drafted at a time when today’s high-tech publishing technology could not have been anticipated, does not protect the unregulated use of desktop publishing software, personal printers and copiers, or other such devices to disseminate news and opinion.

VOTE!

Tue   1 Nov 1994   6:45 by Kevin McGehee in Fairbanks, Alaska 0 comments [Get Offa My Lawn!] [The Armed Genius]

On Tuesday, November 8, voters all across America will go to the polls to express their will regarding what their government will be permitted to do to them. For the first time in years, perhaps decades, millions of U.S. citizens are looking forward to the chance to exercise their right to vote with a certain special anticipation. According to Michael Barone, in a column for U.S. News & World Report (Sept. 19, “The dawn of ‘Just say no’ politics”), 1994 could be the political watershed that observers have been waiting for since 1980. “The Congress the voters are on the verge of electing,“ Barone wrote, “will have many more Reagan Republicans than when Ronald Reagan was president, just as the Congress that was elected in the 1958 Democratic breakthrough had many more New Deal liberals than in FDR’s time.“ Between public doubts about President Clinton’s character, his humiliation in August when his crime bill almost went down in flames, the gradual yet utterly devastating failure of his “health security” plan, and the almost universal skepticism about his push for a Haiti invasion, Clinton seems more vulnerable, more of a political liability, than George Bush was in the disastrous final year of his presidency. A Clinton operative has reportedly told Democratic candidates to run as far away from Clinton as they can. In Michigan, where voters most closely approximated the national averages in 1984, 1988 and 1992, almost two-thirds of voters surveyed believe the nation is moving in the wrong direction. As Barone puts it, “Barring a major shift of opinion, our ‘I feel your pain’ president will be confronted with a ‘Just say no’ Congress.“ The good news is, the electorate seems ready to vote in favor of protecting its freedoms over the remaining two years of the Clinton presidency by electing to Congress people who do not share the President’s pro-government, pro-control philosophy. The bad news is, if pro-freedom voters take this for granted, the gains made on November 8 will not only be less than we hope for, they’ll be less than we need. Every single pro-freedom American must be certain to get to the polls that day, to cast votes for candidates who can be counted on to remember the Constitution whenever Clinton or one of his crew come up with some new scheme for separating us from our rights. If we take for granted that the average voter is fed up with Clintonism, the next two years will be noticeably better than the last two years. If we don’t take it for granted—if we fight and work and, finally, vote—we may get the Clinton-proof Congress we needed in 1992.

HCI: ‘Too Much Freedom’

Fri   30 Sep 1994   10:34 by Kevin McGehee in Fairbanks, Alaska 0 comments [Wackadoodle] [The Armed Genius]

“We must realize that there can be such a thing as too much freedom…“ So states the notorious Handgun Control, Inc.* confidential memo that was posted on Internet last February after having been leaked to the public. The remark is part of a paragraph dealing with a proposal to have the government control “dangerous literature”—books, magazine articles, pamphlets, etc., that tell how to make bombs, convert machine guns, or do other things of which HCI’s disapproval is not specified. But it is a telling attitude because it seems to explain the entire HCI philosophy. The memo contains several proposals that run afoul of the Tenth Amendment, which is being used now to challenge provisions of the Brady Law. HCI envisions federal mandates on states to license possession of firearms; to regulate firearm carry more strictly; and to prohibit any kind of shooting range in counties with more than 200,000 residents. Pending the outcome of the Brady Law challenges, these proposed mandates may be ruled unconstitutional. The memo also swerves onto the soft shoulder with the Fourth and Fifth amendments. Proposals requiring all licensed gun owners (and HCI wants all law-abiding gun owners licensed) to be required to install federally approved gun and ammunition safes—and to submit to unannounced inspections. These inspections amount to warrantless searches, just like the public-housing “gun sweeps” liked by the Clinton administration—except that HCI wants the victims of these searches to finance them through exorbitant license fees. HCI also likes the idea of random gun searches similar to sobriety checkpoints, yet while an intoxicated driver is by definition a public hazard, a gun in a car is not necessarily such. The “takings” clause of the Fifth Amendment would be injured by HCI proposals such as a requirement that all gun ranges have written permission to operate from every single landowner within a seven-mile radius—clearly an unreasonable requirement—and a law banning guns inside homes within 1,000 feet of a school. The latter also risks injury to the Fourth Amendment, for how is the law to be enforced? Most interesting, however, are HCI’s proposals that attack the First Amendment—proposals like the one for which the memo complains about “too much freedom.“ Once the government has the power to control certain literature as “dangerous”, the temptation to extend the definition of “dangerous” literature will always exist. HCI also faults the broadcast media for the number of portrayals of violence—and if the broadcast media do not police themselves HCI supports government controls. Do ABC, CBS and NBC know about this? Three separate proposals in the memo attack the First Amendment right of peaceable assembly: bans on gun shows, military reenactments, and the assembly of more than four armed individuals other than police or soldiers. This last is aimed at “the need to eliminate the current legal assembly of shooters for paramilitary training on private lands.“ Matters that may not be unconstitutional but are certainly unreasonable include registration of all gun owners and publishing their records and photos; banning any ammunition that fits guns in use by the military since 1945, a criterion that includes .22LR, .38 Spl., .45 ACP ammo, and 12-gauge shells; a plan to progressively ban hunting from all public lands (allegedly without affecting hunting on private land), followed by a ban on camouflage gear often used by hunters. HCI says it wants to reduce violent crime, but when it supports making firearms manufacturers and dealers liable for gunshot wounds, it increases the deflection of responsibility away from the violent criminal. Such a stance calls HCI’s claims into question. If their goal is not a society free of crime, what is it? Judging from the memo, it’s clear enough: they seek to establish, under the guise of “enhancing public safety,“ a Police State. It would not be the first time in human history such a regime was brought about on such a pretext. It’s a relief, in a way, to see that HCI has as much contempt for the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, as for the Second. They’re taking aim at freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceable assembly, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, freedom from confiscation of private property without due process, and freedom from federal intrusion into the constitutional sovereignty of the states. As suggested in last issue, I think HCI’s overconfidence will be its demise. » Read more "HCI: ‘Too Much Freedom’"

Sacramento July 2 Rally Just One of Many

Fri   30 Sep 1994   10:28 by Kevin McGehee in Fairbanks, Alaska 0 comments [The Armed Genius]

The Independence Day weekend saw several state capitals inundated with supporters of the Second Amendment, bent on showing lawmakers their frustration with a movement that makes law-abiding gun owners the scapegoats of the growing crime problem. In Sacramento, I was able to look in on the California rally on the west steps of the Capitol, where prominent state and local politicians appeared to voice their support for the private citizen’s right to keep and bear arms. Booths set up in the area were manned by representatives of the NRA, Gun Owners of California, American Pistol & Rifle Association, and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (the organization that turned up the link between the Gun Control Act of 1968 and a Hitler-era law in Germany). At least one of Sacramento’s TV stations gave the rally surprisingly even-handed coverage, refraining from showing anyone in camo pants with obscene slogans on their T-shirts. For “balance” they interviewed a legislative aide, whose devastating argument was that we are “out of step” with what the people want. The aide was available because California’s ailing economy made necessary a rare holiday-weekend legislative session to deal with the 1994-95 budget. During my brief visit to the rally, I heard state Sen. Cathie Wright, the GOP nominee for Lt. Governor, speak. She told a crowd of about 150 listeners (the majority of attendees were milling among the booths) of a bill stalled in committee that would require California public high school students to read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence in order to graduate. Opposition came, she said, from the California affiliate of the National Education Association and its clientele in the state department of education. This news was met with catcalls from the crowd, many carrying signs critical of politicians who ignore the Constitution.

From ‘The Armed Genius,‘ May 1994

Tue   31 May 1994   9:57 by Kevin McGehee in Sacramento, CA 0 comments [The Armed Genius]

Attention NRA members! If you have not already cast your ballot in this year’s election to the NRA Board of Directors (ballots due May 1), take another look! RKBA member Prof. Joseph E. Olson, who is an incumbent on the Board and who also founded Academics for the 2nd Amendment some time before I founded RKBA, is seeking re-election. I made the mistake last year of not endorsing an RKBA member who was seeking re-election to the Board at that time, and he lost. We currently have two representatives on the Board; let’s keep it that way. If you haven’t made up your mind about the other 24 votes you have in that election, some editorial opinion: read the statements carefully and give preference to candidates whose focus is not on looking good in a stalemate, but on winning the war. § From Steve Wiegand’s column in the March 27 Sacramento Bee: “(Sacramento) cop Mark Tyndale has only an outside shot to knock off Sheriff Glen Craig in the upcoming sheriff’s race, but not for want of a novel campaign pledge. ‘If elected,‘ he says, ‘I will issue a permit to carry a concealed firearm to every qualified person who applies for one. There is no better deterrent to crime than a well-armed community!‘“ § It’s rumored that there’s a new D.C. status symbol: word is, you know you’re important if George Stephanopoulos calls your boss and tries to have you fired. § People persist in considering it paradoxical that wild beasts renowned for their strength and ferocity, are also capable of great gentleness. Not only wild beasts, I say, but humans as well, both good and bad. I have noticed that many a hothead became a cool-head upon getting, and learning to use, a gun. I’m also aware that many of the great human monsters of history were very affectionate with their own offspring, if not with anyone else’s. Stalin loved his own children, but that didn’t stop him from exterminating some 20 million of other people’s. § I recently received a fund-raising letter and complimentary bumper sticker from “Dehere Gun Fighters of America”, creators of the ridiculous New York “Death Clock.“ Much as I appreciate receiving bumper stickers gratis, I couldn’t display this one, with its insipid slogan, “Guns. They’re Killing Us”, without my educational and intellectual credentials being—if you’ll pardon the expression—shot to hell. § It began, actually, with a handful of counties out West, asserting state sovereignty in response to federal attempts to overregulate land use. Now we see county sheriffs challenging the Brady Act as an unfunded federal mandate; ten states suing on the grounds that state constitutional provisions banning public funding of abortion supersede a federal rule to the contrary; other states winning Supreme Court approval of student-led school prayer; and forty states studying a Colorado proposal to nullify unfunded federal mandates with state action, rather than by going through the federal courts. The abortion case is the federal government’s attempt to nullify the principles of federalism by making Congress and federal bureaucrats sovereign over state constitutions. We’ll be watching this and the other cases. § I was editorially gratified at the results of a recent poll that show Bill Clinton losing in a two-way election against “a Republican.“ This despite economic figures released about the same time that bore absolutely no bad news! Perhaps voters are sophisticated enough to know that when all the news is “good,“ something is terribly wrong somewhere. § In response to a letter from one of its readers, Guns & Ammo printed the following editor’s note: “Any of our Right to Keep and Bear Arms articles may be reprinted and circulated, as long as they are used for non-commercial purposes. In fact, we urge any interested reader to do so to help support our ongoing battle to preserve our Second Amendment rights.“ FYI. Also in G&A, columnist Jeff Cooper offers the following: “Ed Detrixhe gives us a very pungent analogy when he points out that when a hoplophobe is confronted with a reasoned argument that destroys his position, he reacts exactly as a computer does when it is suddenly hit with an unexpected power surge. The screen goes blank. In an age when our educational system produces technicians rather than educated people, it is common for one who has never been introduced to logical argument to blow a fuse when he is hit with it. It is possible that these hoplophobes are not necessarily insane, but rather totally unable to think straight, never having been called upon to do so in school.“ By and large, public education has become an American genocide. § I was pleased to give Dick Hershbain, who besides being a member of RKBA co-ordinates the [Mensa] Survivalist SIG, my permission to reprint “Join the PCI Crusade” in his SIG newsletter. Many of you know that one of the great thrills for any writer is learning that someone considers your work worthy of inclusion in their own publication. [That piece was later published in Guns & Ammo, attributed to some hunting club newsletter. G&A never responded, as far as I know, to my attempts to have them correct the attribution.]

Join the PCI Crusade

Mon   31 Jan 1994   6:38 by Kevin McGehee in Sacramento, CA 0 comments [Humor?] [The Armed Genius]

There is a plague in our nation that arises from the widespread misinterpretation of the First Amendment. The portion of the First Amendment dealing with the freedom of the press, reads, quite simply (or should I say, simplistically): “Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the freedom ... of the press.“ As you can see, the phrasing is highly elliptical and open to interpretation, and the prevailing view both among the people and in the courts holds that the freedom of the press is nearly, but not quite, absolute. The problem with this interpretation is that it is based on an obsolete understanding of what a bunch of dead white guys known, rather messianically, as the “Founding Fathers”, intended for it to mean. The authors of the Bill of Rights were addressing a publishing technology that was restricted to hand-operated presses using movable engraved type. Such presses were slow to set up, slow to operate, and could print only one page at a time. They had no inkling back then that publishing technology would reach today’s level, with high-speed mechanical presses printing thousands of copies per hour from computer-typeset models. Nor could they have anticipated today’s world of personal laser printers hooked up to personal computers using desktop-publishing software, which turn people of relatively slight means and low social standing into mass-media publishers almost on a par with the established, respectable commercial publishers. These technological developments show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current view of this portion of the First Amendment is no longer tenable, and that reasonable controls must be enacted on the tools used in printing to ensure that these “nobody” publishers do not cause great harm to our Republic. Each of you is invited to join in this effort to enact reasonable press controls by joining Press Control, Incorporated. Our president, Kent Hackett of Monroe, Md., has known personal tragedy as a result of the careless misuse of these widely available, unregulated concealable publishing devices; his brother-in-law, Pat Pending of Attica, N.Y., was ruined financially after a common street publisher printed pamphlets attacking his business methods (the pamphleteer accused Pending of causing his own name to be engraved on every new invention developed in America for the past several decades, with the result that millions in royalties were allegedly diverted to his own pockets, rather than those of the true inventors). Although Mr. Pending and his army of high-priced lawyers succeeded in winning billions in damages from the pamphleteer in a lawsuit, he says his reputation has been besmirched and small children now call him names on the streets of his own hometown. This same kind of vicious, unprovoked attack can happen to any of us, at any time, from quarters none of us expect. Should our children be afraid to go to college because they fear that an independent student paper might print bad things about them? Should the thankless work of authoritative publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today be made unrewarding by competition from the likes of Rush Limbaugh (The Limbaugh Letter), R. Emmett Tyrrell (The American Spectator) and Mike Antonucci (The Right Mind)? If your answer to these questions is “No,“ then you should be one of us. If not, then you are a despicable creature undeserving of the name “human being”—probably a white supremacist printer-nut getting bribes from the makers of cheap Saturday-night special desktop printers. We know who you are.

...And It Fires 300 Stupidities per Second

Sat   1 May 1993   15:45 by Kevin McGehee in Sacramento, CA 0 comments [Media Ochre] [The Armed Genius]

ABC’s Easter Sunday presentation of the comedy farce “This Just In” promised to be a send-up of the idiocies of television news—but it sent up a few idiocies of its own, including showing an Army general holding a “service revolver” that looked suspiciously to me like a Colt M1911 autoloader. Even more idiotic was the fake commercial for the “National Semi-Automatic Rifle Association”—portraying people firing machine guns. Once more, you Hollywood types: a semi-automatic rifle does not have continuous-fire capability! Chalk it up as yet another example of the role ignorance plays in Hollywood-style political correctness.

‘The Armed Genius’ #1, January 1993

Thu   7 Jan 1993   5:16 by Kevin McGehee in Sacramento, CA 0 comments [The Armed Genius]

[The following was sent out as the first official letter of the “RKBA” special interest group I founded as part of Mensa in 1993. The disclaimer below is included here because it is referenced in the letter itself. The scare quotes on “has no opinions” are mine, because the Mensa Bulletin had done a fawning cover story about Bill Clinton, which many Mensans interpreted as a violation of the society’s claim to (all together now) “have no opinions.“] RKBA is a special interest group of American Mensa, Ltd. The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect those of American Mensa, Ltd., which “has no opinions.“ Dear Members and Friends: As of January 7, 1993, RKBA is an officially recognized Mensa SIG, and will be listed in the regularly published SIG directory. The disclaimer above is mandatory even though Mensa’s claim to have no opinions has been questioned by some since the appearance of the January/February 1993 Mensa Bulletin. My opinion is, that kind of hypocrisy on the part of Mensa officialdom merely highlights the need for Mensans like us to stick with it and be active in promoting our own views—on Second Amendment freedoms and on other things. In any case, this is the first official communication of RKBA as a Mensa SIG. Some of you may find that it repeats things I’ve written in other, informal, pre-recognition communications. I hope you’ll bear with me. The stated goal of this group is to bring pro-freedom Mensans together in a kind of long-distance roundtable to discuss ways to better promote the pro-freedom position to the general public. Our SIG directory listing will characterize RKBA as “the pro-freedom brain trust.“ Its success as such is contingent on my hearing from members and friends with ideas for attacking the stereotypes, distortions, lies, and overwrought rhetoric of the pro-control forces. As I write this, one William Jefferson Blythe Clinton of Arkansas is less than a week away from assuming the presidency. Mr. Clinton, who received votes from the largest minority of those casting ballots on Election Day, has embraced Sarah Brady and the Brady Bill—which cannot have come as any surprise to any of you. During one of the presidential debates, Mr. Clinton responded to a question about gun control with the patented disclaimer, “I support the right to keep and bear arms, but—-“ This kind of talk has earned pro-control politicians the affectionate nickname, “but”-heads. Pro-freedom opinion made some headway in the congressional elections, but the domestic disarmament lobby remains strong, and is backed by the media and leading segments of the legal profession. Politicians, journalists and celebrities who push gun control are a curious breed. While they undertake to legislate the survival imperative out of existence for ordinary citizens like you and me, they insist on their own right to hire bodyguards with permits to carry exotic weapons that would not be available to the common citizens even in the wildest utopian dreams of the most fanatical “gun nut.“ Mobilizing pro-freedom opinion is essential under these circumstances. We can be the leaders of one segment of the movement, opening a new front in the battle. I want to hear from you with ideas that can be tested, as well as with success stories of your own. One of our new members belongs to a shooting club and hosted a reporter whose opinion had been mildly hoplophobic. By the time the club members were finished, that reporter had changed her opinion, and is now a pro-freedom, armed American. All it takes is to show people how it really is. There is a problem, however. The depth and intensity of bias against the right to keep and bear arms is considerable among the members of the news media. Getting a pro-freedom message, even an extremely well-constructed and argued one, to the general public can become impossible. The willingness of the media to censor inconvenient facts is illustrated in the fact that, while the national economy bottomed out and began to recover early last year, the news of the beginning upturn never made it to the people until after the election. When the vast majority of Americans have their opinions shaped by Big Media, this lack of journalistic integrity is a tangible threat to all our freedoms, including freedom of speech. I wish therefore to place on the table the question of how to circumvent the hostile media gatekeepers in order to get our messages to a wider audience. The National Rifle Association has some good, sensible guidelines for writing printable letters-to-the-editor that won’t show gun owners in an even worse light than the pro-control forces create. Unfortunately, no glut of brief, snappy LTEs can hope to overcome the influence of a 25,000-word editorial full of the worst kind of misrepresentation. Playing the media game by the media’s own rules is very much like gambling in a corporate-owned casino: the odds are always stacked in the house’s favor. The NRA has created “GunTalk,“ a computer bulletin-board service for pro-freedom networking. Its new, aggressive approach to championing the right to keep and bear arms is very promising. I, however, subscribe to the theory that the best and quickest way to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem is to attack it from several angles at once. What other ways are there for us (supporters of Second Amendment freedoms) to get our arguments out there? What little-known strategy or system already works? What untried idea seems promising? Millions of Americans terrorized by crime in their own neighborhoods, or faced with the loss of their hunting heritage, or fearing that their favorite shooting sports will become impossible to practice, are waiting for thinking, concerned people like us to help protect what they hold dear. I need to hear from you. I want to thank all of you for your enthusiastic support. Although it has been something of a deluge, I can’t honestly say I’m surprised. Public opinion since last spring’s L.A. rioting has swung slightly but noticeably in our direction. A greater proportion of America’s 70 million gun owners are becoming aware and involved in the fight to preserve their freedoms. Your interest in RKBA is just one more example, especially when I see how many of you have never even considered joining a SIG before. I suspected when I joined Mensa last July that its membership included a vast, untapped reservoir of pro-freedom opinion. What I reasoned then has now become incontenstible. We can win. We must. Yours, as always, in support of freedom, Kevin McGehee Co-ordinator, RKBA [To put the timeline in perspective, I didn’t even have a computer yet when I wrote this; got my 386 later that year. Moved to Fairbanks, Alaska the summer of ‘94 and got married that fall. Didn’t get an email address until 1995, a website until 1996. TAG content got posted on the website as it was produced, and I back-archived older stuff for a while too—but website space in those days was very limited; you couldn’t leave a lot of stuff posted very long if you were generating new content.]

Page 2 of 2 pages  <  1 2