Printed in the USA.
The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report
Issue 053
May, 1999
LITTLETON SHOOTINGS LAUNCH ANTI-GUN VENDETTA
The shootings at Littleton, Colorado have sparked a firestorm of anti-gun activity. The Columbine High killing of 12 students, a teacher, and the killers’ suicides has driven virtually all other gun news from the headlines. It lit the fuse President Clinton needed to fire a salvo of gun control proposals that look like a total ban, frightened off state legislators from pro-gun bills, and provided the media a platform for a powerful anti-gun barrage.
As usual, the blame was put on guns, not the gunners, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17 — and also not on the bombs, although more than 50 bombs were involved in the incident.
Also as usual, the call was for more gun control laws when existing laws already forbade the two killers from their actions.
But the Columbine High killings were different. Columbine is a nice middle class school. Nothing like this could happen here. The killers were weird outsiders armed like something out of a science-fiction movie. The public response of sympathy for the dead, the wounded, and the traumatized was overwhelming.
And it has turned into anger, a rage against guns that we have not seen before. This is dangerous.
The anti-gun momentum gathering in the wake of the brutal killings is seriously alarming.
President Clinton’s gun control package looks like a legislative lynching of gun owners.
The National Rifle Association’s annual meeting, scheduled for Denver long before the Littleton tragedy, couldn’t have had worse timing. It became a focus for anti-gun invective. Even Denver Mayor Wellington Webb told the NRA it was not welcome and asked them to cancel. The Colorado Coalition Against Gun Violence organized a protest demonstration encircling the site of the reduced NRA convention, cut back from three days to one, without the usual dinner festivities or gun exhibition hall.
The Columbine High tragedy also sparked a vicious campaign against pro-gun lawmakers in the Colorado legislature. Many legislators received hate calls, and House Majority leader Doug Dean (R-Colorado Springs), received threats. In addition, someone put nails and screws under the tires of his wife’s car. DEAN had sponsored a concealed carry bill in the Colorado House, but it was tabled after the Columbine High shootings.
Legislative proposals to block cities from suing gun manufacturers were stymied, at least temporarily, in Alabama, Arizona, and Florida.
Republican governors in Arizona, Illinois, Ohio, Utah and Virginia sided with the gun control faction, coming out for prohibiting concealed carry to barring guns in schools.
Things are definitely different after the Columbine High shootings. The gun rights community is under siege and its future depends on its courage.
LITTLETON SHOOTINGS: WHAT HAPPENED?
Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, hid weapons under black trench coats and killed 13 people and wounded 23 others at Columbine High School before killing themselves. They had four guns and left more than 50 bombs at the school and in their homes. A diary indicates the plot had been planned for a year.
Among the guns was a semiautomatic TEC DC-9.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents visited the Blackjack Pizza shop where Harris and Klebold worked. Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone said investigators believed someone who worked at that pizza shop acted as a contact for the young men to a weapons seller.
Authorities interviewed a man who may have sold the semi-automatic handgun to the youths.
The man could be charged with violating a law against selling handguns to minors. The sale of the TEC DC-9 was a private transaction made before the older gunman turned 18 earlier this year.
Authorities say the three other guns - two shotguns and a rifle - used in the massacre were bought by Robyn Anderson, Klebold’s girlfriend, shortly after she turned 18 last November.
They describe her as a witness rather than a suspect in the rampage, because it is not illegal to provide a shotgun or a rifle to a minor.
"She did buy the long guns," sheriffs spokesman Steve Davis said. "Did she supply the weapons to them with some idea of what they were planning to do with them? That’s still one of the major things we want to find out."
Investigators said at least one gun was bought at a gun show. Federal law allows 18-year-olds to buy rifles and shotguns from licensed dealers, but not handguns.
Anderson, who attended the prom with Klebold days before the shootings, is just one of 600-plus leads being pursued in Colorado’s largest-ever criminal probe.
WARNINGS ABOUT LITTLETON SHOOTERS IGNORED
Randy Brown, a neighbor of teenage gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, said he warned police that the young men bragged about making bombs and threatened his son’s life. Police did nothing.
Brown said he filed one report in early March about HARRIS, but the Sheriff’s department lost it, so he filed a second. He said he and his wife followed up with seven or eight telephone calls to police, but nothing happened.
BROWN said he copied nearly 20 pages from a Website HARRIS created, showing how he and KLEBOLD made several pipe bombs. BROWN said the Website also contained threats against his 17-year-old son BROOKS, a Columbine classmate who lived several blocks away.
For some reason, just before the shooting, Harris walked past Brooks, who was standing outside the high school, told him to go home, then entered the cafeteria and opened fire.
"We were pretty lucky there," BROWN said. "My other son was shot at several times by ERIC while he was running up the stairs and he missed him."
AARON, the fifteen-year old son, escaped unharmed from the massacre.
LITTLETON BAD, BUT NOT THE WORST SCHOOL MASSACRE
Despite media claims, Littleton was not America’s worst school massacre. The New York Times ran a story saying the Littleton incident was "the largest death toll in an act of terrorism at one of the nation’s schools."
United Press International repeated the error, calling it "The worst school massacre in U.S. history."
It wasn’t. On May 18, 1927, 45 people were killed, including 38 elementary school students, by dynamite explosions at the Bath, Michigan School. The "maniac bomber" was ANDREW KEHOE, a school board member and farmer. After blowing up the school he killed himself and the Bath School superintendent by blowing up his pickup truck. The Littleton tragedy is bad enough, but the media have lost their fact checking ability in their ghoulish rush to magnify recent events and forget worse past events.
STRICT GUN LAWS DON’T STOP SCHOOL SHOOTINGS IN CANADA OR BRITAIN
The Littleton tragedy has evoked calls for stricter guns laws in the United States, but lessons from other countries show they don’t work.
Eight days after the Columbine High shootings, a 14-year-old boy walked into W. R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta, Canada, with a .22-caliber rifle and shot one student dead while wounding another before a teacher wrestled him to the ground. Canada has extremely strict gun laws, and has enacted a ban on handguns.
In Britain, a 16-year-old boy fired three shots into a classroom at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology, a specialized high school in southwestern England. The United Kingdom has very strict gun laws.
They don’t stop the determined criminal.
GIRLFRIEND BOUGHT SOME GUNS FOR LITTLETON SHOOTERS
The 18-year-old girlfriend of Columbine High School gunman Dylan Klebold apparently bought at least two of the weapons used in the attack at a Denver-area gun show, police claimed.
The girlfriend, Robyn K. Anderson, bought three weapons not long after her 18th birthday in November.
Prosecutors said the weapons may have been purchased legally.
"We think three of them were provided by the girlfriend of Klebold," Mark Paulter, a Jefferson County chief district attorney, told reporters. "She bought them because she was older. She was 18 at the time.
"We’re not sure she committed a crime under Colorado statute. If you provide a handgun to a person under 18, that’s a violation of the statute. If you provide a shotgun or a rifle, that’s not a violation."
STUDY SAYS CONCEALED CARRY LAWS COULD STOP MASS MURDERS
JOHN R. LOTT, JR. and WILLIAM M. LANDES of the University of Chicago and University of Chicago Law School have released a study that casts light on the Littleton massacre.
A summary of their study says, "Few events obtain the same instant worldwide news coverage as multiple victim public shootings. These crimes allow us to study the alternative methods used to kill a large number of people (e.g., shootings versus bombings), marginal deterrence and the severity of the crime, substitutability of penalties, private versus public methods of deterrence and incapacitation, and whether attacks produce "copycats."
"Our results are surprising and dramatic. Our results find that the only policy factor to influence multiple victim public shootings is the passage of concealed handgun laws. We explain why public shootings are more sensitive than other, violent crimes to concealed handguns, why the laws reduce both the number of shootings as well as their severity, and why other penalties like executions have differential deterrent effects depending upon the type of murder."
Find the full paper at: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=161637
While the Bodies were still warm Clinton planNED attack on Guns
The White House spin doctors worked overtime to figure out how to capitalize on the Littleton shootings. They found the perfect setting: A week after the tragedy, President Clinton held a White House ceremony to announce his gun-control package, which he sent to Capitol Hill.
It contained some of his most insincere remarks since his impeachment. He presented himself as a product of the gun culture and said he understood the fear that many had that any restrictions were a first step toward taking away their firearms.
Then he asked hunters and sportsmen who make up much of the nation’s gun culture to accept regulations and restrictions as a tradeoff to stop the easy access to firearms and try to save lives.
"I want to make a plea to everybody who is waiting for the next deer season in my home state to think about this in terms of what our reasonable obligations to the larger community of America are," Clinton said.
The assertion of Clinton’s speech was that the Littleton shootings grew out of both the culture of violence and the gun culture, but he blamed the latter and told Americans to reach out to sportsmen and appeal to their common sense.
His proposed legislation includes a measure to restrict the purchase of handguns to one a month per person and to restore a waiting period. We’ve seen those proposals before and they went nowhere.
The package also included:
l raising the minimum age for buying a handgun from 18 to 21
l banning possession of semiautomatic assault rifles by juveniles
l requiring background checks on people who want to buy explosives
l and on people who buy guns at gun shows.
l impose felony penalties on adults who knowingly or recklessly allow a child to have access to a gun that is used to commit a crime.
l ban the import of large-capacity ammunition clips.
On Capitol Hill, Republican leaders showed little interest in Clinton’s proposals.
Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the House Republican whip who was threatened last year by a gunman in the Capitol, accused Clinton of trying to exploit a tragedy for political benefit. "Only one thought came to mind when watching the president unveil his proposal: How dare you?"
DeLay added: "I can only say to the president that your legislation, no matter how well it polls, will not solve the problems we face."
Some of those who lined up with the president blamed the gun lobby outright for school shootings.
Sen. John Chafee, (R-RI), said the term "school violence" glossed over the problem. "This isn’t about schools," he said. "It’s about guns. This is about the insanely easy access Americans, including American children, have to guns. This is about the distorted interpretation of the Constitution that convinces otherwise rational citizens that it’s their inalienable right to be armed to the teeth."
Hillary Rodham Clinton opened the White House event talking about cultural causes. "All of us here are searching for answers to what happened in Littleton," Mrs. Clinton said. "But that does not mean that we are either hopeless or helpless in the face of this tragedy."
She pointed to the availability of guns but also said a media culture that "glorifies violence on TV, in the movies, on the Internet, in songs" and in video games could desensitize children so that they "lose their empathy for fellow human beings."
NOT ALL DEMOCRATS LINE UP BEHIND CLINTON’S NEW GUN BAN
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, who represents South Dakota, where guns are popular among ranchers and sportsmen, was skeptical about passing any new restrictions.
"I’m not sure that gun legislation is what we need," Daschle told reporters Monday. He suggested the school shootings were a societal problem stemming from parental and teacher neglect and violence in the media and on the Internet.
"Those are the kinds of things we better be looking at," Daschle said.
Another Democratic senator, Charles Schumer of New York, said he wants to plug an Internet loophole that allows gun buyers to circumvent the Brady law. "The firepower that can be acquired simply by going online is chilling," Schumer said.
Newsweek polls finds Support for handgun ban at 17-year high
More Americans support a ban on handguns today than at any time since 1982, a recent Newsweek poll said in the aftermath of the Columbine High shootings.
50 percent of Americans polled now favor legal curbs on handgun possession except by police and other authorized persons, a 17-year high, the magazine reported.But while three-quarters of those polled think stricter gun control would reduce violent crime in the United States, 73 percent believe a lack of parental oversight contributed "a lot" to the Littleton school shooting.
On why kids commit such violence, 36 percent blame poor upbringing, and one-third cite exposure to violence in the media, according to a poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates.
An overwhelming 95 percent said parents play a key role in preventing such incidents, while 86 percent said kids themselves are responsible. Some 82 percent said teachers should play a major role in preventing such incidents.
About 65 percent said churches and community groups should play a bigger role, while 57 percent said local government could do more.
Around 76 percent said they wanted to see more monitoring of Internet websites to identify potentially violent offenders — by Internet service providers.
The Newsweek poll surveyed 757 adults and reported a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.
Gun Owners Sue Over Target Restrictions
Massachusetts gun club patrons have gone to court for the right to shoot at images of Adolf Hitler and other people during target practice, which is banned at some clubs by a new state law.
"It is the first time in United States history that there has been an attempt to censor images printed on targets," said Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer for the Gun Owners Action League.
The law applies only to gun clubs that allow unlicensed gun enthusiasts to practice with semiautomatic and assault weapons without supervision.On Wednesday, GOAL asked U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. to stop the implementation of the law approved in October, Halbrook argued that telling target shooters what they can and cannot aim at violates their right to free expression.
Shooting at an image of Hitler "is a political message protected by the First Amendment," Halbrook said, comparing it to burning draft cards.
But Assistant Attorney General Edward DeAngelo defended the law,
"We’re talking about targets shaped like human bodies, he said. "By shooting at them, they’re practicing to shoot at people."
DeAngelo also argued that the gun owners did not show that shooting at targets such as those depicting Hitler constitutes speech.
O’Toole did not immediately issue a ruling.
Development To Offer Shooting Range
In the midst of broiling desert, in a town not yet built, Ignatius Piazza envisions a gated community offering residents an array of 13 shooting ranges.
Its name is Front Sight, Nevada.
The 550-acre, master-planned community, straddling two counties will offer prospective buyers 177 one-acre custom-home lots and 350 town homes.
Front Sight will have its own community center, school and landing strip - at a cost of almost $25 million.
Plus, of course, the handy gun ranges to fire off a few rounds.
"It’s the Pebble Beach of firearms training," Piazza boasts, wearing the Front Sight uniform of navy fatigues and black boots.Piazza insists he and others involved in the project are not affiliated with any militia group. He says most of the students who have taken his classes here or in Bakersfield, Calif., are professionals, law enforcement officers and housewives.
And he understands that just the concept of Front Sight will offend some people after the massacre in Littleton, Colo., where two high school students used a semi-automatic rifle, two sawed-off shotguns, a pistol and homemade bombs to kill 12 fellow students and a teacher before taking their own lives.
He maintains, however, that a familiarity with guns, Front Sight’s goal, could have reduced the bloodshed at Columbine High School.
"Had any of the adults in Colorado at the school been armed with a concealed weapon, it would not have been a six-hour siege by two very disturbed individuals," he says. "The problem would have been handled immediately. Lives would have been saved."
In fact, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy Neil Gardner, assigned full-time to Columbine High, exchanged gunfire with the attackers early in the assault and radioed for backup. A few students carrying their own self defense might have made a difference.
Piazza expects Front Sight’s first phase - more training ranges and classrooms - to be ready by year’s end. New residents will be welcomed by the end of 2000, he says.
For now, the planned community is just a maze of gravel and dust with some tents to hold classes, which have drawn 2,000 students since they began in January. The site, roughly halfway between Death Valley and Las Vegas, as yet has neither water nor power.
Gun Control Advocates Split on Tactics for Goals
"Gun control groups have seized on the mass shooting at Columbine High School as a new opportunity to gain command of the nation’s firearms debate, but the massacre has also intensified long-running divisions among the allies over the best way to reduce deaths from firearms."
That’s the way the New York Times played the latest gun control story. In fact, what’s really going on is not a division, but a deliberate game of "good cop-bad cop" played by Handgun Control Inc., based in Washington, which, according to the Times, "applauded the broad package of gun control measures announced by President Clinton," and the Violence Policy Center, "a small activist group in Washington that favors a ban on handgun sales."The spokeswoman for Handgun Control, Naomi Paiss, said HCI does not favor a such a ban. Coming from a group that has pushed for every gun ban since it was founded, that ranks up there with "I never had sex with that woman."
HCI is pawning itself off on the public as "moderate," while the Violence Policy Center pretends to be just one step to the left.
What a joke. Both organizations do everything they can to eliminate gun rights completely. Don’t be fooled.
Remember, you can’t spell HYPOCRISY without HCI.
Many bills await fate in committees
More than 50 gun bills, mostly dealing with gun control, have been introduced in the 106th Congress. Most of the bills are pending before the House and Senate Judiciary committees, where their fate is uncertain.
Gun-industry liability: Six bills are pending in the House and Senate that either bar or affirm the right of cities and individuals to sue gun manufacturers for gun-related violence.
Child safety: At least five bills have been introduced to make handguns safer for children, ranging from proposals to require child-safety locks to restricting minors’ access to handguns.
Limit handgun sales: Two bills are pending to limit handgun purchases. Lautenberg has proposed legislation in the Senate to make it illegal for buyers to purchase more than one handgun in a 30-day period.
Concealed weapons: At least three bills to liberalize or clarify state laws have been introduced in the House.
Mandatory waiting period: three bills have been introduced to require a minimum 72-hour waiting period before the purchase of a handgun.
Regulate firearms: Two bills have been introduced to require the U.S. Treasury Department to regulate the manufacture, sale and distribution of firearms.
NATIONAL CLASS ACTION SUIT PLANNED AGAINST GUN MAKERS
Attorneys who won a landmark legal victory over three firearms manufacturers in the Brooklyn case are poised to file a national class-action suit to force gun makers and distributors to pay the financial cost of handgun violence.
The lawyers, Elisa Barnes and Denise Dunleavy, said they plan to file a negligence suit in New York. They will seek to prove that the plaintiffs were injured because of the negligent manner in which gun makers have distributed their wares and that their weapons are defective because they lack safety features such as trigger locks.
The suit would be the first filed nationally against gun manufacturers on behalf of shooting victims. Six U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Cleveland, which just filed recently, have brought actions against weapons makers, seeking to recover millions of dollars for hospital, police and other costs. More than a dozen other cities have said they’re considering filing similar lawsuits.Gunmakers say they’re confident they would win such a case, and they don’t plan to settle, said Jack Adkins, director of operations for the Atlanta-based American Shooting Sports Council.
New Firearms Auction Web Site Attracts Thousands
Finally, a dedicated auction site for the firearms enthusiast. In a world where online auction behemoths like ebay and Amazon.com compete the shooting sports fan has been left out in the cold!
SellGuns.com has stepped in to fill the gap. SellGuns.com has just recently opened a dedicated firearms auction site at http://www.sellguns.com. Gun collectors, shooters, and hunters can all come together in one place to find what they are looking for.
Selling firearms over the Internet is completely legal, provided you comply with Federal and state regulations. Buyers and sellers can transfer weapons across state lines by shipping to a Federal Firearms Licensed dealer (an F.F.L.) in total compliance with state and Federal law.
SEN. SCHUMER WANTS TO BAN INTERNET GUN SALES
SellGuns.com may find itself just so many electrons in the wind if Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) has his way. He recently introduced the Internet Gun Trafficking Act of 1999. Schumer shamelessly exploited national sympathy for the victims of the Littleton shootings in his plea for attention to his bill, which appears to be headed for defeat.
NOT ME, SAYS BIG MEDIA MOGUL - BLAME GUNS!
Media czar Gerald Levin, whose teacher-son was killed by an ex-student, says the media is innocent of blame in the Colorado school massacre - no matter what culture critics say.
Not me, says the Time Warner chairman. He thinks blame for the April 20 tragedy should be directed at a gun culture - and overly critical politicians.
"I can’t help but think that television is an easy scapegoat," Levin said. "Where is the cry to stop the proliferation of guns?"
Has Levin been living on Mars for the past fifty years?
Levin said the culture critics who have blamed the media and Internet for sparking the gun-and-bomb rampage at Columbine HS have it all wrong. Twelve students and a teacher were killed before two teen gunmen took their own lives.
"I find in this season of political opportunism, a form of moral arrogance with respect to the media. We hear it already in relation to the horrors in Littleton, Colorado," Levin said in a speech Tuesday before the Hollywood Radio and Television Society at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
Now, replay that speech and substitute the word "guns" for the word "media" and see if it isn’t just as valid.
In the wake of the Columbine HS shootings, Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Dan Burton (R-Ind.) and Sens. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and John McCain (R-AZ) have laid at least part of the blame on the media.
Time Warner company is a defendant in a suit filed recently by parents of three students killed in an attack at a Paducah, Ky., high school.
The parents’ $130 million suit blamed the 1995 film "The Basketball Diaries," in which the main character visualizes roaming the halls of his high school firing shotgun blasts, for inspiring the Dec. 1, 1997, rampage by a teen gunman who opened fire on a high school prayer group.
Levin said the nation would be better served by a crusade to support teachers than one directed at the evils of TV or the Internet.
Levin’s son, Jonathan, a 31 year-old teacher at Taft HS in The Bronx, was killed in 1997 during a robbery at his Manhattan apartment. Ex-student Corey Arthur is serving a 25 years-to-life sentence for the murder conviction last November.
Levin took his criticism of politics even further, saying it was time to "get rid of the entire antiquated regulatory system." When questioned afterward, Levin said he would like to eliminate "the FCC, Congress, everything" - but he did not elaborate.
The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report: An Insiders Guide for Gun Owners
$30 for a full year of 12 great issues
This publication is available to be ordered online! Find out how, and start your subscription today!
Printed in the USA.
The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report (ISSN 1079-6169) is published monthly by the:
Second Amendment Foundation
James Madison Building
12500 N.E. 10th Place
Bellevue, WA 98005
Phone (425) 454-7012. FAX (425) 451-3959Please call or write if you have a question regarding your subscription.
Subscriptions $30 per year anywhere in the USA, $35 elsewhere. Single issues $5.00.Send address changes to:
The Gottlieb-Tartaro Report
12500 N.E. 10th Place
Bellevue, WA 98005Publishers: Alan M. Gottlieb and Joseph P. Tartaro
Editor: Ron Arnold
Design: Northwoods Studio
Production: Janet Arnold
Subscriptions: Susan Elings
Published by: Second Amendment FoundationCopyright 1999-2002 by Alan M. Gottlieb and Joseph P. Tartaro.
Photocopying, reproduction or quotation strictly prohibited without written permission of the publishers.
Bulk rates on request. Postage paid at Bellevue, WA.