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The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report
Issue 030
June, 1997
Special Report: Review of Alarming California Trends The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report is brought to you electronically about one month after publication. To help support the Report, and to receive it when it is current, subscribe by calling 425-454-7012 (and make sure you mention that you heard about it on the Internet!). More information on how to subscribe is available at the end of this page.
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Dear Subscriber,
“As California goes, so goes the nation.” If that bit of political wisdom is true, gun owners across the country are in for some troubled times. The reason? Our most populous state recently erupted into a multiple-issue battleground over guns, bullets, concealed carry permits and local ordinances. This special report explains the disturbing trend.
The California Senate is leading the anti-gun assault with a dangerous bill aimed at essentially one man: it’s a bill to prohibit city police chiefs — such as Isleton Chief Eugene Byrd — from issuing concealed weapon permits to people living outside their respective cities.
SB 146, authored by Sen. Pat Johnston, is the latest development in a long-running battle over Byrd’s practice of issuing concealed weapon permits across Sacramento County. Even though a similar bill died in the Assembly two years ago, the new bill was approved by the state Senate Public Safety Committee in a 7-0 vote. Its backers think it has a good chance of reaching the desk of Gov. Pete Wilson this year.
Chief BYRD strongly defends his actions, saying he has acted responsibly in approving permits for people outside his little Sacramento River Delta town of about 500 registered voters. BYRD has issued concealed gun permits to about 1,000 Sacramento County residents. BYRD is now a candidate for Sacramento County sheriff and promises that, if elected, he will apply his gun policy county-wide.
However, current sheriff Glen Craig and other law enforcement officials urged senators to pass the new bill. Craig asserts that law enforcement officials’ permitting power should be limited to the jurisdictions that employ them.
Craig said the county’s standard for issuing concealed weapons permits is “being usurped by one individual who has decided to set the policy for the entire county.”
BYRD shot back, “It is just another way of trying to stop me from issuing (permits) into the county. The Constitution says you have the right to bear arms and the right to self-protection. I don’t see that has changed.”
The issue supposedly boils down to the question of why a police chief should have permit authority outside of his or her own jurisdiction.
However, during a senate hearing, Sheriff Craig acknowledged that his office in the past has issued a small number of permits to people who either lived outside the county or subsequently moved outside the county. Craig quickly added that currently “we have no outstanding permits outside the county at all.”
Gov. Pete Wilson said he was “inclined favorably” toward the bill if that is how law enforcement officials wanted to delineate gun permit powers.
MORE DENVER OFFICERS HAVE TO SURRENDER THEIR GUNS
A new interpretation of the federal law forbidding people convicted of domestic violence to own a gun has affected more Denver, Colorado, police officers.
Capt. JOHN LAMB of the Police Department’s civil liabilities bureau said, “We think we’re talking three to four more.”
An amendment last year to the Federal Gun Control Act of 1968 forbids anyone — police, military or civilian — from owning a gun if he or she ever had a felony or misdemeanor domestic violence conviction.
At first, the Bureau of Alcohol, tobacco and Firearms interpreted that to mean people convicted of felonies or misdemeanor domestic violence, but not violations of city ordinances.
That required Denver police brass to order officers ALEX WOODS Jr and JAMES HUFF to turn in their weapons. The two were assigned to desk jobs and could be fired if Congress doesn’t amend the law.
However, the Rocky Mountain News has reported that guidelines issued recently to Colorado law officers may end up in emptying the holsters of more cops.
The new interpretation requires that city ordinance violations must be treated the same as a misdemeanor conviction.
Denver police have handled almost 6,000 domestic violence ordinance violations under the law, almost all in cases that did not involve serious injury.
LAMB said, “This is not a law against police officers. It is a law that all citizens who own guns need to be aware of.”
While the police department said the new interpretation will affect only a few officers, ALEX WOODS Sr, president of the union respresenting Denver police officers, said the ruling could affect more than that.
He said he saw a list with 26 officers’ names on WOODS’s is one of the officers disarmed by the law. WOODS said of him, “He’s very angry and very frustrated.”
NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF WOMEN ISSUES ALERT TO KEEP DV GUN BAN
“Batterers should not have guns!” That’s the first line in an action alert put out recently by NOW, the National Organization of Women.
The alert was part of NOW’s effort “to protect the domestic violence offender gun ban which is under attack by the National Rifle Association and several police unions.”
The NOW alert explained that attempts to remove the retroactivity provision of the law were their central concern. If that were to happen, then “anyone who was convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence offense (some states classify these serious offenses as misdemenaors, rather than felonies) at any point in the past will still be able to purchase and possess a gun. Under a different law, persons convicted of a felony offense are not permitted to own or carry a firearm.”
NOW seemed unconcerned about the ex post facto constitutional question, or the rehabilitation of long-ago offenders. The message was absolutist: don’t remove the retroactivity for application of the ban on firearms for misdemeanor domestic violence offenders.
“We are opposed to changing the retroactivity feature in any way because this means that batterers will still have access to guns. We know that the presence of guns in domestic violence situations increases the possibility of homicide. No change on retroactivity in the domestic violence gun ban and no guns for batterers.”
The political savvy of NOW was clear from their instructions to suporters on who on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime should receive fax and phone messages during markup session, including chairman Bob McCollum (R-FL).
“We have to put a stop now to weakening the ban.”
POLICE GUN TRANSACTION WITH BASEBALL FIGURE DRAWS FIRE — AGAIN
A Cleveland, Ohio, police officer named Francisco Sanchez last year sold a used Beretta 9mm semiautomatic pistol to Jose Mesa, reliever for the Indians baseball team. The officer had bought the gun at Abele-Davis, a Brooklyn, Ohio gun dealership that caters to law enforcement officials. Cleveland police officials investigated the transaction at the time and found no wrongdoing.
Lakewood, Ohio, police discovered the gun when they arrested MESA and charged him with sexual assault in December 1996. The weapon was concealed in MESA’s vehicle.
MESA was subsequently acquitted of rape and other charges. He was then put on trial for carrying a concealed weapon. That trial was put on hold when Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Thomas Curran ruled that the gun was illegally seized. Curran’s opinion will likely be appealed.
SANCHEZ had bought the gun for off-duty use, but then sold it to MESA. SANCHEZ went about everything properly — he thought.
He had a proper reason for buying the off-duty gun: He had received threatening phone calls and hangups on the phone to his home.
He properly submitted a request to purchase a 9mm semiautomatic Beretta handgun for off-duty use, which was approved by his commander, Parker Adrine. A letter of authorization was then signed by deputy chief for special operations Ronald James.
However, Sgt. Kathleen McComb recognized that a departmental regulation in a 1992 General Police Order specified that Cleveland police officers carrying 9mm handguns must use Smith & Wesson models. She wrote of SANCHEZ’s choice, “This is not a weapon which can be approved for off-duty use.
That fact never got to SANCHEZ.
He bought the gun on August 9, 1996, paying $248.24 for it.
And SANCHEZ evidently never submitted the gun to the department for required inspection, testing and firing before it was put in service. A police department letter stated that SANCHEZ “had no weapons inspected or repaired at the Cleveland Police Department’s range” in 1996.
SANCHEZ sold the gun to MESA after the baseball season ended for “around $300” in cash. However, it is not clear whether SANCHEZ notified the department of the sale as required by police regulations.
Then the gun turned up in MESA’s vehicle when he was arrested and the police traced it to SANCHEZ. They went through a routine investigation of SANCHEZ and his part in the situation.
Sanchez continued in his police capacity and also continued to work as a security officer in his off-duty hours during Indians games at Jacobs Field.
However, the inquiry into the gun deal was “reopened” recently, according to Cleveland Mayor Michael White’s office. Now an internal affairs investigator has the case, which has become very complicated.
When confiscated by Lakewood police, MESA’s gun was loaded with 15 Winchester 9mm Luger subsonic bullet, according to arrest documents.
Lakewood detectives John Crane and Patricia Bury visited that Cleveland Police Department’s firing range March 12 to determine if the bullets were the same type used by Cleveland police in the line of duty.
They were. BURY said, “the ammunition which was in MESA’s gun was a match.”
If the bullets came from Cleveland’s arsenal, SANCHEZ, a SWAT team member with nearly 16 years on the force, could face charges of theft-in-office before a grand jury.
Now Lt. Henry Tekancic, an internal affairs investigator with the Cleveland Police Department, has begun to gather evidence in the case, but has refused to speak with reporters.
Internal affairs did not interview SANCHEZ during the earlier routine investigation. Sgt. MARK HASTINGS, the department’s public information officer, said, “That doesn’t mean he won’t be questioned.”
Cuyahoga County Assistant Prosecutor Frank Gasper said, “We always complain about too many guns on the street. A police officer should never sell a weapon to a citizen.”
DOCTOR TALKS COMMON SENSE ON GUN OWNERSHIP
Timothy Wheeler, MD, recently wrote a remarkable article for California Physician, the monthly magazine of the California Medical Association, a journal with a professional circulation of about 30,000 doctors in the state.
The tone of the article is direct and factual. Its message is one gun owners have been hoping to hear from a competent medical doctor: Gun ownership is not only safe, but is a positive benefit in that it helps protect innocent human life.
Dr. Wheeler begins with a two-centuries-old quotation from early criminologist Cesare Beccaria:
“False is the idea of utility that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.”
Modern criminologists, says Dr. Wheeler, are now reaching the same conclusions. “In a landmark study to be published in the Journal of Legal Studies and already available on the Internet (http://law.lib.uchicago.edu/faculty/lott/guns.html) University of Chicago researchers John Lott and David Mustard found that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths.”
That study covered 3,054 counties in the United States using controls for time periods, demographic differences, and changes in firearms laws over the study period. In states that passed unrestrictive concealed carry permit laws, the murder rate fell by 8.5%, and rapes and aggravated assaults fell by 5% and 7% respectively.
Dr. Wheeler gently prodded his colleagues, “Physicians who follow the public health firearms debate may be shocked by these statistics. But the Lott study is no surprise to those who read the criminology literature. Similar studies go back as far as the Carter administration, which funded an extensive literature review on weapons and violent crime, published as the book Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime and Violence in America. Authors James Wright, Peter Rossi, and Kathleen Daly’s summation was that there is no compelling evidence that the private ownership of firearms among the general population is, per se, an important cause of criminal violence.”
Why, gun owners wonder, have doctors not learned these basic facts about guns and crime? Why do some of them insist upon calling gun injuries and deaths a “disease” as if it were measles or AIDS?
Dr. Wheeler has an explanation: “Most doctors have never considered gun crime to be germane to medicine, and have therefore not studied the subject. But the large body of research amassed by criminologists during the past 20 years mostly confirms what typical gun-owning citizens know intuitively. Gun violence is the work of a small minority of criminal aberrants, most of whom have a lifelong history of violent and antisocial behavior.”
Gun owners have long known the crime-deterrent power of carrying a concealed weapon. Northwestern University’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology some years ago published Kleck and Gertz’s national survey showing as many as 2.5 million annual uses of firearms to defend against imminent violent crime.
The perspective that gun violence is the work of a small minority of criminal aberrants is now accepted by many in the academic community outside of medicine,” Dr. Wheeler said.
He added that charges against the gun lobby “fail to address the scientific issues raised by these reputable researchers and therefore contribute little to our understanding.”
Dr. Wheeler’s short article is so clear that it impressed even us, cutting through the babble we’re so accustomed to hearing from the medical community. He reminds gun owners in the most definite terms of our basic position, which we sometimes forget while trying to deal with the nattering arguments of the gun grabbers: “The evidence increasingly tells us that gun ownership by good citizens is not only safe, but is a positive benefit in that it helps protect innocent human life.”
THE USUAL MEDIA ANTI-GUN TIRADE
In a mirror image of Dr. Timothy Wheeler’s article (see previous page), Jane E. Brody wrote in the New York Times that “gun ownership increases risk of accidental shooting deaths.”
It is so packed with distortions and bad studies it hardly merits comment. But the unwitting public that reads such nonsense can have a political impact of devastating proportions. For example, Brody’s article says that, “The American Academy of Pediatrics, noting the failure of lesser measures to control gun-related tragedies, has suggested amending the constitutional right of citizens to bear arms.”
That’s a radical position indeed. How ironic that it echoes so exactly the two-hundred-year-old quotation of the early criminologist Cesare Beccaria that Dr. Wheeler cited.
Imagine the howl if, because of the failure of lesser measures to control gun-grabber lies, we suggested amending the constitutional right of citizens to free speech. Of course, that will never happen because gun owners respect ALL of the Constitution, not just the parts of particular interest to us.
The crux of BRODY’s story is this: “Deaths caused by firearms, most of them handguns, number about 40,000 each year in the United States. More than 1,600 of them are accidents, and the number of nonfatal injuries caused by gun accidents is four to six times as high.”
Like the professional gun grabber organizations, BRODY leaps from this finding to drastic solutions that are “no remedy but destruction,” to quote Beccaria.
BRODY conveniently leaves out the fact that if 1,600 out of 40,000 handgun deaths are accidental, 38,400 of them must have been on purpose, that is, crimes committed by criminals.
BRODY is blithely unconcerned about the murders and the criminals who committed them, and concentrates only on getting guns out of the hands of “those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes,” to quote Beccaria again.
BRODY’s stock in trade is the scare line. “Gun owners tread perilous ground,” shouts a headline. A paragraph tells us, “According to a report last year in the journal Pediatrics, a publication of the academy, data from ‘several rigorously conducted studies indicate that home ownership of guns’ increased the risk of homicide among teen-agers and young adults more than threefold and the risk of suicide more than tenfold.”
But most reprehensible is a completely irresponsible use of a father’s shock to make an anti-gun point: BRODY wrote, “The belief of many gun advocates that teaching children how to use a gun properly will prevent accidents is belied by one West Coast surgeon’s account. The surgeon left the operating room to tell a young couple that their little boy was dead, having accidentally shot himself while playing with his father’s handgun. The boy’s father, who said he was a member of the National Rifle Association, ‘became visibly angry, saying “I taught the dumb kid how to use it right.”’”
Emergency room doctors see anger aimed at a just-dead loved one all the time. It is a common shock reaction, not a considered judgment. We even see it in the movies, such as The Godfather — recall when MARLON BRANDO’s character Vito Corleone is shot in the street by Mafia rivals and his son Fredo sits on the curb and can only shout angrily at his bleeding father.
To use such a charged moment of personal shock to smear the character of all gun owners as unfeeling monsters is the most flagrant irresponsibility. Since BRODY does not name her “surgeon,” can we even believe that the incident is real?
Gun owners have come to expect such vicious attacks from the media. It will certainly not be the last time such bias sees print.
It makes the article of Dr. WHEELER all the more remarkable.
ENGLAND AND WALES HAVE WORSE CRIME FIGURES THAN THE U.S.
In a surprise result, the 1996 International Crime and Victimization Survey prepared by the Dutch Ministry of Justice and the British Home Office show that England and Wales now have a worse crime record than the United States or other industrialized countries.
More than a third of people in England and Wales have been a victim of crime in the past year, one of the highest rates in the industrialized world.
The real surprise was Northern Ireland, which had the best record of the 11 countries surveyed. The terrorist-plagued country was lowest in common crimes such as burglary and car crime, the survey revealed.
The survey was based on interviews with 20,000 people in 11 countries, covering their experience of crime during 1996. It is the most authoritative research on international crime comparisons.
This is the third edition, the first two having been done in 1989 and 1992. It shows that in England and Wales — and in the Netherlands, which there is a major crisis of confidence in the police — more than 30 percent of people had been crime victims in the past 12 months.
The U.S., Canada, Scotland, France and Switzerland showed a figure of between 24 and 27 per cent, and Sweden, Finland and Austria each had a level of under 20 per cent.
Only 17 per cent in Northern Ireland said they had been a victim of crime in the past year.
The countries differed on what should be done with criminals. Support for imprisonment was greatest in the U.S., England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with about half choosing jail as the most appropriate sentence for a repeat burglar aged 21. Community service orders were more favored in France and Sweden. Support for imprisonment has increased during the 1990s in eight of the 11 countries.
The survey’s final results will be published next month.
ANTI-HUNTERS SEEK $142,000 FEDERAL GRANT
Hold on to your billfold. The Fund for Animals has applied for a $142,000 grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to show schoolchildren a video, “What is Wrong with Hunting.”
Notorious anti-hunter Heidi Prescott of the Fund for Animals said the video’s message is that “hunting is no longer needed in this day and age and we should move toward a more compassionate, respectful world and include animals in that world.”
The anti-hunters want the money from the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Wildlife Restoration Program, which is funded by excise taxes on rifles, shotguns, pistols, revolvers, ammunition, motor boat fuels, fishing equipment and some import duties.
The money is distributed each year under a federal aid program to support both sport fishing and wildlife restoration projects.
The other 67 current applicants are all groups that support hunting, fishing and wildlife management (which is what the agency is supposed to do).
The official mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is “to conserve, protect and enhance fish and wildlife resources and their habitat for the benefit of the American people.”
SAN DIEGO COP SURVEY ON GUN CONTROL
The Informant, a publication of the San Diego Police Officers Association, published their gun control survey. 82.1% do NOT favor an “assault weapons” ban. 82.2% do NOT support a limit on magazine capacity. 84.9% SUPPORT concealed carry permits. 87.8$ feel armed citizens are NOT a threat to peace officers. 94.2% feel gun control laws have not reduced violent crime. 92.1$ support and instant background check. 87.1% believe gun ownership increases public safety. 98.5% don’t support gun buy backs.
IS THIS A MESS, OR WHAT?
A California drug dealer named Willie Yen is killed with one bullet while two men were robbing him. The two men get charged with the murder. Which one fired the single fatal bullet?
It depends on what the prosecutor told the jury.
He told one jury it was John Patrick Winkelman.
And it was Stephen Edmond Davis, the prosecutor told a separate jury at their joint trial.
Both men were convicted of murder, only an hour apart. Now both men face the possibility of a life sentence.
But how can that be? Peter Giannini, defense attorney for Winkelman said, “When you’ve got one bullet in a guy, you cannot argue that two different guys fired that bullet. That’s wrong.”
But that’s exactly what prosecutor Todd D. Rubenstein did. To different juries.
Robert Courtney, defense attorney for Davis, didn’t hear the prosecutor’s arguments to Winkelman’s jury and Giannini didn’t hear the prosecutor’s arguments to the joint Winkelman-Davis jury because he was out of the courtroom while Davis’ part of the case was being argued.
Defense attorneys accused prosecutor Todd D. Rubenstein of misconduct. Rubenstein denies any wrongdoing.
What do the legal experts say? Rubenstein’s argument is solid but troubling.
Laurie Levenson, a Loyola Marymount University law professor and former federal prosecutor said, “From a legal point of view, you may be able to explain this. But from a common-sense point of view, it’s not fair.”
The double jury is strange. Superior Court Judge Francis J. Hourigan allowed the two separate juries because Davis spoke to police while Winkelman did not.
Prosecutor Rubenstein’s arguments are stranger.
Davis told investigators Winkelman fired the fatal shot. Davis said he approached Yen from behind and did fire his gun, but did not fire the fatal bullet. Rubenstein told the Davis jury it was “quite clear” that Davis was the killer, because Yen was shot in the back.
Yet the day before, Rubenstein noted that a witness reported seeing Winkelman shoot Yen, and used that in his closing argument.
There are two convictions, but we still don’t know who fired that shot.
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