Date: Wed, 5 Oct 1994 14:51:28 -0700 (PDT) From: "David J. Edmondson" THE QUILL Queer Individual Liberty Letter, Vol. 1, No. 5, December, 1993 A publication of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty GUN CONTROL VS. OUR FREEDOMS Austin Fulk "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." --United States Constitution, Second Amendment When the Constitution was drafted, the Bill of Rights was understood to be a restatement of the fundamental rights and liberties enjoyed by free men everywhere. By owning weapons, a citizen could protect himself against all forms of enemies, whether these were savages and wild animals that posed a threat to his life, tyrannical rulers who threatened his liberty, marauding bandits after his hard-earned property, or any combination of the above. With the advent of democratic elections, a full-time national military, and a professional police force, it has been argued that the right to keep and bear arms has become an anachro nism, and one whose continuation poses a threat to the maintenance of public safety and order. It is argued that this right causes many of our social ills, and that a whole host of restrictions are needed on the right to keep and bear arms in order to keep us safe in society today. Nothing could be farther from the truth, particularly where the rights and safety of minorities in a society, including gays and lesbians, are concerned. The right to keep and bear arms in society today is, quite simply, the right to be safe and secure. Municipal police forces, inventions of the early-mid nineteenth century, are under no legal obligation to provide protection to any particular individual or group, and are generally incapable of doing so even if they desired to. At any given time, there is around one police officer on the streets for every 3,000 residents. With this size of a ratio, it is usually impossible for police to do much about crime other than show up after the fact and take a report. The problem of the lack of adequate police protection is especially acute in the large urban areas of our country, where a disproportionately large percentage of the gay population resides. Outside of the large population centers of this country, gays and lesbians often face the double difficulty of a culture that is much less tolerant and accepting of the subject of homosexuality coupled with a police force that is at best indifferent to our need for protection and that at worst is overtly hostile to us. Personal safety and protection against crime is still the responsibility of the individual. In addition to the normal crime problems that we must deal with as inhabitants of a modern society, gays and lesbians also have the added fear of attack by bashers. Since these attacks are motivated either partly or wholly by a hatred of the victim, they tend to be particularly violent, and thus even more important to prevent. To this end, guns, and particularly handguns, are effective tools available for personal protection. Of all the personal protection devices available to the general public today, guns are without a doubt the most effective at stopping an attack. Studies consistently show that guns are successfully used for personal protection of at least 645,000, and perhaps as often as 2 million, times a year. In the vast majority of these cases, no shots are ever fired. Because of a fear of rising crime, much of it involving the illegal usage of handguns, many proposals for restricting access to firearms are being discussed and, in some cases, enacted. Society in general, and gays and lesbians in particular, would be well advised to look skeptically on these proposals for a number of reasons. Gun control laws have historically been used in our society to disarm unpopular minorities, leaving them at the mercy of the better armed (or simply numerically superior) masses. The first gun control measures in the United States were passed in the South after the Civil War, and were aimed at keeping newly-freed blacks disarmed and in conditions of servitude. Without the means to resist, they were at the mercy of white terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Xenophobia was the driving force behind the enactment of gun control laws in a number of northern cities around the turn of the century, where fear of newly arrived immigrants from eastern and southern Europe led to the enactment of handgun licensing laws. Even relatively recently, the city of St. Louis routinely denied gun permits to, among others, known homosexuals and wives who lacked their husbands' permission to have a permit. Stricter gun control laws are but one example of our society's movement away from personal liberty and self-reliance, and toward an assumption that the best agent to handle all of our problems is the government. Governmental police forces were created to prevent and break up riots, and to keep a general sense of public order. They were never designed to stop criminal acts against individuals and, accordingly, they do this job poorly. When confronted with a threat to their personal safety or property, many people will choose to simply submit and hope for justice later. This is most definitely a personal decision, and entirely their right. However, for those who choose to exercise their rights to self protection it is immoral to deny them the most effective means to do so. As minorities, and oftentimes unpopular minorities, in this society, it is of critical importance that we have access to the most effective tools to protect ourselves when an overburdened and frequently unconcerned legal system fails to do so. Our very lives could depend on it. [Mr. Fulk works for the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action. He is also an NRA-certified pistol instructor.] DOMESTIC PARTNERSHIPS, FREE-MARKET STYLE Or: An Apple A Day Keeps the Statists Away The gay movement holds as a central dogma the idea that only government has the power to define and to recognize our intimate relationships. We think of domestic-partnership benefits as something to be legislated and of private enterprise as something that, if left to its own devices, would yield nothing but homopho bic discrimination. Nonetheless, in Williamson County, Texas, the truth has turned out to be the opposite of this conventional wisdom. Apple Computer, Inc., is the sort of employer that most local politicians would axe-murder their grannies to attract. It is also one of many computer hardware and software companies that have revised their employee benefits to recognize domestic partnerships. When Apple wanted to expand its Austin facility, nearby Williamson County originally offered a tax abatement of $750,000 to entice Apple to move in. Later, when the county commissioners learned of Apple's lack of traditional family values, they voted to rescind the tax abatement. One commissioner said that he did not want to use taxpayers' money to subsidize a domestic-partnership policy with which he disagreed. In other words, this man believes that any wealth created by private interests and not stolen by govern ment is _ipso facto_ a subsidy. It would make more sense to say that because the commissioners would have granted the abatement without controversy but for the domestic-parter policy, the rescission of the abatement amounted to a $750,000 tax on wrong thought. Eventually, after counties and private landowners throughout Texas lobbied Apple, and after the Williamson County business community complained to the county commissioners about Apple's importance to the local economy, the county commissioners got a clue and restored the abatement, although repackaged as something else, evidently so they could save face. Specifically, Apple will now pay the taxes and get a rebate. In this incident, a private concern, reacting to market realities, provided domestic-partnership benefits. In response, a local government, thinking that it could repeal the law of cause and effect, sought to punish the private concern for its stance. Those who reverence government as our protector from private enterprise may have trouble explaining what has happened, but Libertarians do not. Expecting government to uphold our rights, let alone to define them, is pure folly because government is the biggest violator of our rights. Moreover, if private interests are permitted to interact freely, rational people will soon see the economic costs inherent in bigotry. Finally, government should decree neither special privileges nor special burdens for any form of intimate relationship, but should instead allow individuals to decide what is best for them and to contract accordingly. WHAT IS GLIL? _The Quill: Queer Individual Liberty Letter_ is the bimonthly newsletter of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL), an organization of classical liberals, market liberals, limited- government libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and objectivists. GLIL publishes _The Quill_ to promote the political philosophy of individual liberty, both generally and as it affects lesbians, gay men, and bisexual persons. In addition to this newsletter, GLIL sponsors a happy hour on the first Tuesday of every month at Trumpets, 17th and Q streets, N.W., from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. We also host speakers and debates on issues of concern to our community; as events are scheduled, they will be announced both in _The Quill_ and in _The Washington Blade._ For more information, please contact GLIL as follows: Mail: PO Box 65743, Washington Square Station, Washington DC 20035-5743 Telephone: 703-849-9065 Facsimile: 703-519-0034 Internet: ghoti@netcom.com We welcome articles and letters to the editor. You may send submissions for the next issue through January 15. We shall also be happy to add you to our mailing list; while we do not currently charge for The Quill, we should appreciate a contribution to help cover the costs of printing and mailing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dave Edmondson ghoti@netcom.com, 72020.600@compuserve.com, dave.edmondson@glib.org "Exalted Master, you told us that the world would end yesterday." "My child, it did end yesterday, but you're too sinful to notice."