Oct

TERRORISM AND GUNS

On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center was destroyed, the Pentagon was severely damaged and nearly 7,000 people were murdered by terrorists – without a single gun.

As the BUSH administration mobilizes the nation’s armed services for a new kind of war, many are asking how that day of horror will affect Second Amendment rights in America.

This issue of the Gottlieb-Tartaro Report devotes its front section to that question and its emerging answers.

While airline pilots are calling for new laws allowing them to fly armed and to legally resist hijackers by lethal force, the gun control lobby is exploiting public fear and grief by aggressively pressing its anti-gun agenda among lawmakers.

Pilots With Guns

The Airline Pilots Association is pressing for federal legislation that would allow pilots to carry firearms in cockpits, a move the union says could prevent hijackings.

The Federal Aviation Administration prohibits pilots from being armed.

Union spokesman JOHN MAZOR said armed pilots in cockpits would be a radical step for the union, but the idea is supported overwhelmingly by its pilot members.

“Under the old model of hijackings,” MAZOR said, “the system worked well. That strategy was to accommodate, negotiate and do not escalate.”

That was before the world realized that terrorists were preparing to conduct suicide attacks, what Taliban clerics call “martyrdom operations.”

The union’s president, Captain DUANE WOERTH, testified before the House Transportation aviation subcommittee in support of arming pilots.

WOERTH allayed fears of bullets penetrating the aircraft fuselage and causing a disastrous depressurization at cruise altitude. The bullets that would be supplied to pilots “basically come apart at first impact,” he said. “They’re very destructive to human tissue but it’s very unlikely that would do any serious damage to the fuselage and not cause a depressurization.”

The union has asked the FBI to handle a voluntary screening and training program for arming pilots. President BUSH is reportedly cool to the idea.

Aviation consultant MICHAEL BOYD of the Boyd group in Evergreen, Colorado, said, “These men and women operate $100 million pieces of equipment. They can sure learn to operate a .38 snub-nose if they want to. I’d rather have the gun in the hand of the pilot than the gun in the hand of some guy who wants to kill people.”

The union has urged pilots to act aggressively in terrorist situations. For example, all cockpits are equipped with a crash ax capable of cutting through aluminum airframes. The union advised its members to consider using it as a weapon in a suicidal hijacking.

The union represents more than 67,000 pilots at 47 airlines.

Thwarting Hijackers

Israel’s state airline, El Al, has not experienced a hijacking for 31 years. It has armed pilots, guards on each flight, and hardened cockpit doors.

According to the Wall Street Journal, one of its pilots, Capt. URI BAR-LEVI, set an example a week after hijackers seized control of four airliners over Europe and flew them to Jordan, where they blew them up. Fortunately the passengers were freed first, but only after being used as bargaining chips to force the release of Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists from European prisons.

Capt. URI BAR-LEV’s flight from Amsterdam to New York was the next hijacking target, but his bravery stopped it. Before takeoff, security agents told him of four suspicious passengers. He ejected two men in first class and searched a blonde couple in economy, then took off.

The search wasn’t good enough. When the plane reached cruising altitude, the blond man held a gun to the head of a stewardess and the blond woman pulled grenades from her brassiere. A steward attacked the man, who shot him five times.

The terrorists demanded Capt. BAR-LEV open the cockpit door. A crew member suggested he comply, because the rules said he should, in order to protect the welfare of his passengers.

Capt. BAR-LEV decided he would have no control over passenger safety if he opened the door, so he said, “Sit down, we are not going to be hijacked.”

Realizing that everyone except the hijackers and flight attendants would be strapped in, he put the Boeing 707 into a negative-G dive, just like the astronaut weightless-training airplane known as the “Vomit Comet.” Sure enough, the hijackers found themselves floating in mid-cabin, then smashed against the floor when the plane pulled up.

It was enough to allow two plainclothes El Al marshals on board to overpower them. The male hijacker was killed and the woman knocked unconscious. She turned out to be the notorious LEILA KHALED, who had hijacked a TWA plane to Damascus the previous year in a failed attempt to kidnap then-Israeli Ambassador to Washington, YITZHAK RABIN – he had changed flights.

Capt. Bar-LEV landed in London to save his bleeding steward, but police detained him and the crew for questioning in the hijacker’s death. Nobody seemed to know how he died, for the marshals had slipped out a hidden maintenance door unseen and entered an El Al flight bound for Israel by the same means.

The police finally released the crew when assured that the hijacker had not died in British airspace.

The first and last successful hijacking of an El Al airliner was in 1968. But international laws still allow flight crews to be prosecuted and sued for harming hijackers. After the 9/11 attacks, that must change, says BAR-LEV.

Flight crews need the legal tools to fight “martyrdom operations” by fanatics who believe they will go instantly to heaven if they die killing thousands for their religion.

Most of Islam rejects “martyrdom operations,” but as long as such extremists exist, the problem will exist.

A well-known firearms instructor of Middle Eastern descent, MASSAD AYOOB, saluted the success of El Al in preventing hijackings, and even managed to inject a spark of humor into a grim subject.

He recently told some 600 attendees at the Gun Rights Policy Conference near Cincinnati, sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, “El Al’s security is the best in the world.”

AYOOB flies frequently for his firearms training program for police, security guards, and private citizens.

“But I rarely fly El Al. Do you think I’m going to walk up to the Israelis and say: ‘I’m MASSAD AYOOB and I’ve got guns?’”

He brought the house down.

Anti-Terrorist Legislation

Rep. RON PAUL (R-TX) recently introduced H.R. 2896, the proposed Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, which would allow airlines to establish policies for arming pilots or sky marshals so that they can protect their own lives and the lives of their passengers.

JOHN M. SNYDER of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms announced his support, and noted that participants at the Gun Rights Policy Conference unanimously endorsed Rep. PAUL’s airline safety bill.

However, there are indications that the gun control lobby is preparing to exploit fear and grief shrouding the 9/11 terrorist attack to create fear and hatred of guns (though none were used in the attacks) and push for stringent regulations, licensing and registrations schemes.

For example, U.S. Rep. JOHN CONYERS (D-MI) wrote a recent op-ed column for the Washington Post to launch his own barely disguised blast at the “gun lobby.”

SARAH BRADY, chair of the gun-ban lobby formerly known as Handgun Control Inc. shamelessly exploited the terrorist attack on America along with the tragic accidental death of a three-year-old child as an opportunity to spread anti-gun misinformation in order to convince law-abiding citizens they should not buy firearms for personal protection.

BRADY’s organization also attacked legal gun shows, as did an editorial in the Boston Globe titled, “Lax Gun Laws Help Terrorists.”

The Globe editorial, by staff writer THOMAS OLIPHANT, was particularly nasty. OLIPHANT called gun shows “the ideal shopping mall for criminals in general and terrorists in particular,” as if honest people never showed up.

OLIPHANT based his accusations on a single recent Detroit conviction of two brothers, ALI and MOHAMED BOUMELHEM, on a variety of federal firearms law violations, plus conspiracy to ship weapons to the terrorist organization Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The brothers were arrested before the shipment of firearms left the country.

The editorial gave no credit to law enforcement for preventing the weapons from getting to the Hezbollah, and even belittled Attorney General JOHN ASHCROFT as “a pro-gun fanatic.”

OLIPHANT insisted that the McCAIN-LIBERMAN gun show ban is the real solution to terrorism(!). It’s a “bipartisan” solution, he said, not noticing that McCAIN has been considering a switch to the Democratic party.

But perhaps the most personally obnoxious response to the terrorist attacks is the proposal to require a national identification card.

Such a document presents serious threats to individual privacy, particularly for law-abiding gun owners.

Gun ownership information can easily be coded into a credit card-size ID with modern chip technology – along with your medical records, bank account information and grocery list, pets’ names and what-not.

National ID cards could also degenerate into “internal passports” such as those once used in the Soviet Union and other repressive regimes.

Without such ID, Soviet citizens could not buy train tickets or stay in a hotel. If you annoyed the authorities, you couldn’t even walk to places where some commissar had not approved your movements.

In the United Kingdom, Home Secretary DAVID BLUNKETT said he was “very seriously” considering an ID card system as a response to terrorism.

Civil liberties groups and politicians expressed dismay that terrorist attacks could inspire such heavy-handed threats to individual liberties.