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Potowmack Institute as amicus curiae in US v Emerson (1999) The National Rifle Association What does the NRA really want? The National Rifle Association Charlton Heston Speaks: National Press Club, 9/97 Free Congress, 12/97 The Founders and the AK47 Sue Wimmershoff-Caplan: The NRA's "armed citizen guerrillas" "outflank", Wash. Post 7/6/89 Getting Commitment from Congress The blood on their doorstep The Libertarian Fantasy on the Supreme Court Thomas and Scalia Joyce Lee Malcolm Ayn Rand, Blackstone Joseph Story's "Palladium of the Liberties" The Second Amendment in Court True History John Kenneth Rowland Lawrence Cress Jerry Cooper Leon Friedman Saul Cornell Don Higginbotham Garry Wills Gary Hart Pseudohistory LaPierre's List and the Law Reviews |
FLASH: November 6, 2001
BEHOLD A DEAD HORSE
Militia leader killed, deputy wounded during attemped arrest
EAGAR - A national leader of the militia movement has been killed and an Apache County sheriff's deputy wounded in a shootout, authorities said. William Milton Cooper, 58, of Eager, had hosted a talk show broadcast on the Worldwide Christian Radio out of Nashville, which receives it via phone from his home in St. Johns. He had millions of listeners worldwide, including Timothy McVeigh.
The story: William Cooper web page Hour of the Time "There is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies." -- Jesus Book of John, Chapter 8 Verse 44
More News: Militia Figure Killed After Shooting, 11/06/01 PHOENIX (AP) - A wanted militia figure who vowed that he would never be taken alive was killed by a law enforcement officer after he shot a sheriff's deputy trying to arrest him, authorities said Tuesday. The deputies drew the man out of his house Monday by posing as civilians parked near his house in Eagar, about 165 miles northeast of Phoenix. William Milton Cooper, 58, had confronted people who stopped near his home with a handgun in July and September, said Department of Public Safety spokesman Steve Volden. The deputies were serving an arrest warrant on those incidents. Cooper turned and fled when the deputies identified themselves. He opened fire with a handgun as two deputies closed in, wounding an officer in the head, Volden said. The other officer shot Cooper. The wounded deputy remained hospitalized Tuesday; his condition was not released. Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks militias, said Cooper was known within the movement for his short-wave radio show and a book called "Behold a Pale Horse," in which he wrote about global conspiracies, some involving aliens. Federal authorities said Cooper, who was always known to be armed, had spent years trying to avoid capture on a 1998 arrest warrant for tax evasion. "He had vowed that he would not be taken alive," said Tom McCombs, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshal's Service in Phoenix.
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Cooper's conspiracy theories are not unlike those put out by Pat Robertson and the John Birch Society. They are not completely without some claim to credibility. His objections to the United Nations, for example, have some remote resemblance to Pat Buchanan's and Ralph Nader's objections to the World Trade Organization. But, Cooper is really on an extraterrestrial plane, and it is just not explained what all those guns in private hands are going to accomplish.
Cooper includes the statement below (p. 180-1) by Neal Knox who has been a guiding force at the National Rifle Association. (See "Gunning for His Enemies: Neal Knox, the Real Power at the NRA, Sees Diabolical Plots Everywhere," Washington Post, July 9, 1995, p. C4.) Cooper introduces Knox's statement with the comment: "I was impressed by its simplicity of message that I had intended to convey in twenty pages;" and, is appreciative of Knox's contribution. The Potowmack Institute can thank Cooper for his simplicity of message. In his note on this passage, he writes:
In Case you have not guessed by now, the fact that most Americans own at least one firearms weapon is the only thing that has kept the New World order at bay.
Cooper sums up the whole rationale for the gun lobby's armed populace fantasy in one simple statement. Cooper is only a little more direct and explicit than Pat Robertson who writes in The New World Order (p. 212):
Pat Robertson is just farther out from Newt Gingrich. In To Renew America. Gingrich writes:
To the conspiracy theorists the government and the New World Order are much the same thing, and it is the individual clutching the gun that is the first line of defense. Gingrich gives downright respectability to what is by any standard a latent fascist conspiracy theory.
The respectability comes from other places. Neal Knox was featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," December 18, 1991, in series on the Bill of Rights talking about the pleasures of recreational gun ownership. Any public appearance gains respectability. What never comes up is that Neal Knox does not trust the government with its capacity to exercise armed force but has the arrogant expectation that the rest of us are to trust him, completely without accountability, with the same capacity. The government at least in theory is accountable. To use John Locke's words: the rulers are to be "kept within their due bounds, and not to be tempted, by the Power they have in their hands..." Keeping rulers within their due bounds connects the theory with the practice of citizenship and is the primary burden and responsibility of citizenship. When citizenship fails we get private armies. Private armies can be paramilitary police forces, organized crime protection rackets, the gun lobby's "sedentary militia," citizen militias, or Stormtroopers.
This passage first appeared on Internet bulletin boards. Knox invites everyone to upload to as many places as possible. The Potowmack Institute obliges:
By Neal Knox
Those who avoid and evade the reason for the Second Amendment to the US Constitution would surely admit that Lithuania had a Second Amendment, Mikhail Gorbachev violated in on March 22, 1990— Russian troops seized arms from the Lithuanian militia. Or was "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" actually violated two days earlier, when Premier Gorbachev ordered private citizens to turn in their hunting and competition guns to the Russian army within one week "for temporary safekeeping" or have them confiscated and their owners imprisoned? Or was "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" initially violated many years before, when the people were first prohibited from possessing guns without permission of government and laws were passes requiring every gun to be registered? In fact, the Soviet Constitution guarantees the people the right to keep and bear arms, and Lithuania is part of the Soviet Union— or so Gorbachev contends. But obviously the Soviet government pays no more attention to that constitution freedom guarantee than do the majority of the US government, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, or CBS and the Washington Post. What is the difference, precisely, between the confiscation of private firearms in Lithuania and the confiscation ordered by S. 166, the Graves bill now pending in the New Jersey Senate? What is the difference, precisely, between the registration law in Lithuania— which makes confiscation possible— and the registration of military-style firearms required by California's Roberti-Roos bill, which went into effect January 1, 1990. What is the difference, precisely, between Lithuania's law prohibiting the people from owning military-style firearms and the so-called "assault rifle" bans now pending in both houses of Congress and in many states? The difference is that the people of the United States are free men and women who can trust their benevolent government. Forever?
NOTE: Nothing has so clearly demonstrated the reasons for the Second Amendment and the reasons it must be defended than when on Dec. 14, 1981, when Gen. Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland, placed all press under total government control, and declared all firearms licenses and gun registration certificates void— requiring the licensed owners to turn in their registered guns within 48 hours. Of course, since the government knew where every gun was— except those in the hands of criminals— they had no choice but to comply.
Please download this file, print it out and send it to your local newspaper— putting your name on it if you think it will cause more letters editors to run it. Also please upload it to as many other bulletin boards and nets as possible.
The gun lobby's alarm about the surrendering of weapons in the Soviet Union is rather curious. From gun lobby rhetoric one would have though that the absolutist state in Soviet Russia had long since confiscated guns; but more important is what is completely missing from this statement. Lithuania is a conquered province of the Soviet Union. It was forcibly annexed by Stalin on the eve of the Second World War at a time when it exhibiting pro-Nazi sentiments. The Lithuanians never consented to be governed by the Soviet Union and have a valid moral right to resist Soviet authority. Gen. Jaruzelski's regime was forcibly imposed on Poland in 1945 by the Red Army. Taking up arms against intolerable political power is not a simple matter as any serious revolutionary will testify. Private individuals clutching guns are powerless in a contest with political authority. A revolutionary movement has to concentrate forces in a revolutionary army which then becomes a target for attack. In a genuine revolution, it does not matter if the state has the revolutionaries' guns on a list. If the revolutionaries prevail in armed conflict, they get the list of the loyalists' guns. The list is immaterial. The poor slob of neutral or suspect commitments is likely to be shot by either side with no appeal to justice.
Lithuania and Poland under the heel of Soviet Russia are no
comparison to the United States of America. States who enter
the union of the United States consent willingly to be governed
under the laws of the United States, accept the authority of
rule of law established by the
Constitution, and accept the terms and conditions established in
the legal political process to affect peaceful political change.
To withdraw that consent in overt acts of defiance against public
authority and the rule of law makes one an outlaw, in the
language of political theory, and no longer entitled to the
protections of the law and the political community. These are
fundamental concepts that have to be introduced into political
discourse before any progress will be made against gun violence
or private armies.
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