Hindsight from The New Gun Week April 1, 1999
A Potpourri of Perversity
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive EditorEvery once in a while the gun issue gets hotter than usual and seems linked to a brief era of broad-based perversity.
Mid-March 1999 seems to be one of those periods in which the gun debate is not only hot but illogically wacky. It might be April Fool's funny if it wasn't also so serious.
Here's one example.
On March 10, The Washington Post devoted about 80 column inches of its newspaper to a story by staff writer John Mintz that linked the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon with a relatively new and well respected firearms manufacturer, Kahr Arms.
The headline of the story which opened on Page 1 and jumped to the whole top of Page 10 was "Moon Empire Gets a Bang for Its Buck."
"With parts of its sprawling business empire in decline, the Unification Church headed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon is finding profits in one of the least-known of its commercial ventures: making guns," the story opened breathlessly. Apparently The Post believes its readers are as confused about real life and the centuries-old religious and philosophical principles of self-defense and justifiable homicide as its writers and editors. (The first manufacture of gun powder in Europe is credited to a Catholic clergyman during the Middle Ages.) Or perhaps the notoriously anti-gun Post was blending its abhorrence for self-defense with a sneaky attempt to embarrass the rival Washington, DC, newspaper The Washington Times, which has been known to be linked to the Unification Church for years, but which is probably the only independent but conservative, or libertarian voice in the Capital.
The revelation that one of several businesses connected to the Unification Church was a quality gun manufacturer did not surprise me so much as the naïveté and hypocrisy of The Post. Other news outlets may also follow up The Post "scoop" since my daughter, Peggy, editor of Women & Guns magazine, got a call from an ABC-TV news producer a few days after the story was published, asking for samples of Kahr ads and other information for a planned TV magazine version of the same story.
Their article made it clear that the reason Moon's four-year-old Kahr Arms was prospering was because of the "glowing reviews for the workmanship of its small but potent pistols." The Post also reported that Kahr Arms had recently expanded with the purchase of another old-line Northeastern gun manufacturer, Auto Ordinance, which manufactures 1911-style .45 autoloading pistols as well as the fabled Tommy Gun.
It also claimed that one of the Rev. Moon's sons, Justin Moon, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, headed up Kahr Arms and was the principle designer of the Kahr K9 pistol and its later successors, holding several design patents related to the compact pistols.
What was surprising to me was that although Mintz and The Post contacted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for information about the link between Kahr Arms and the Unification Church, it either failed to ask certain other questions or buried the facts once known.
But just in case The Post didn't know about it, I will add the missing element to the story: almost the entire eight-story building where the headquarters of the ATF is located is rented from a company connected to the Unification Church. In fact, ATF headquarters at 650 Massachusetts Ave., NW, is almost entirely occupied by ATF except for a small amount of space used by a video production company linked to the Moon church. My sources indicate that the ATF lease was negotiated by the General Services Administration.
One wonders what perversity by The Washington Post makes it newsworthy that a quality gun manufacturer has ties to the Unification Church while the bigger news that a major branch of the US Treasury Department rents from the same church is not.
Speaking about ATF, here's another item that further illuminates my view about the perversity of the media and politicians.
Design by ATF
A bill filed in the Senate and House on March 2 would give the government power to regulate the design, manufacture, sale and distribution of firearms as it does for other products through the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC). Indeed, Tom Diaz in his book, Making a Killing, pushes for control of guns by CPSC.
The measure, sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) and in the House by Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), would give the ATF new authority to develop safety standards and evaluate product safety for all firearms. It would also grant that agency the power to ban any guns that it considers an "unreasonable risk."
The ATF would also have the power to levy fines against gunmakers who fail to comply with its rulings, and design and manufacturing criteria. The anti-gunners, especially Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D-CA) brain trust, have been trying for years to get the government to ban US-manufactured firearms that do not meet the statutory criteria used by ATF to determine whether foreign-made firearms can be legally imported into the US.
That standard is the so-called sporting use criteria set in bureaucratic concrete by the Gun Control Act of 1968. It is the reason many fine quality, foreign-made handguns have some of the design features they do, like thumb rests and adjustable sights. Point-by-point, guns are made and sold that have been designed to meet those arbitrary "sporting" specifications, whether or not the features are needed on a particular gun.
So far, the gun grabbers haven't been successful in selling Boxer's ideas in Congress, but if they manage to sell this anti-gun wolf lurking in the sheep's clothing of safety and quality, the same standards will be applied to all US-manufactured guns, as well as some which may be even more arbitrary.
Back in the 1970s, the anti-gunners were unsuccessful in their attempts to put the CPSC in control of gun design and manufacture, but the new proposal is a direct outgrowth of the new campaign against manufacturers which has been launched in the courts as well as Congress. The big difference with this scheme is that once passed, total control will be in the hands of bureaucrats who don't answer to the people.
People, Si, Plants, No!
Another bit of perplexing perversity can be seen in the US military's willingness to avoid disturbing the flora and fauna of a fragile ecosystem, but no similar concern about the sensibilities of human beings.
A mid-March Associated Press story from San Francisco reported that the Pentagon had agreed to ferry hundreds of Marines in an urban amphibious training exercise by helicopter instead of by amphibious assault out of respect for the sensitive waters of Monterey Bay in California.
These are the same kinds of military training exercises which have been alarming citizens in the various cities where they have already been held. Complaints about the notice for the training exercises and the sudden exposure of residents to the sights and sounds of black helicopters, explosions and gunfire have largely been ignored by US military planners.
They justify the training exercises as necessary to hone our "all-volunteer" military for the type of urban combat they are likely to experience in the future. Military apologists point to deployment in places like Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo as examples of why such training is needed. But the idea of a standing army practicing urban warfare on US soil makes many rational, law-abiding people nervous.
But the government ignores such concerns until they are voiced on behalf of rare marine and land-based plants and animals. The California Coastal Commission had objected to Navy and Marine plans to put hundreds of Marines ashore in Monterey Bay using Hovercraft. The commission claimed that the landing craft would disturb gray whales, snowy plovers and sea otters in the bay.
According to the story, the military has canceled the Hovercraft assault and will helicopter the Marines from transport ships to Monterey Peninsula Airport, then bus or truck the troops to training sites in the city.
The gray whales and the snowy plover have breathed a sigh of relief, but the citizens are still perplexed by the military's perversity when it comes to their own complaints.
Finally, on the perversity calendar, I should mention that retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) has launched what may be his final assault on law-abiding gunowners by the January filing of S-154, another of his bills designed to tax away .25, .32 and 9mm ammunition. In addition to his regular strictures against that pistol ammunition, he proposes a special ATF license to manufacture at a cost of $10,000 per year.
The New Gun Week is published three times a month by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) on the 1st, 10th, and 20th. Hindsight is a commentary written by SAF President and Gun Week Executive Editor Joseph P. Tartaro. This commentary may be reprinted so long as credit is given to the author and the publication. For more information or to subscribe, write Gun Week, PO Box 488, Buffalo, NY 14209, or call 716-885-6408 Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, or inquire on Compuserve to John Krull, Production manager-JohnSAF@Compuserve.com or gunweeksaf@broadviewnet.netAlso, check out the New Gun Week at http://www.GunWeek.com