FROM THE EDITOR

	"One night I shot an elephant in my pajamas...how he got in my 
pajamas, I'll never know."

	Thus spoke Capt. Jeffrey T. Spaulding (AKA Groucho Marx) in the 
classic film "Animal Crackers."  Since the Brothers Marx were famous for 
their ad-libbing prowess, it's unclear whether Groucho or screenwriters 
Morrie Ryskind and George S. Kaufman get credit for the line.  It is, 
nevertheless, immortal.

	I was reminded of it recently when another African animal was 
much in the news...the Black Rhino.  Actually, I don't know that much 
about rhinocerii, I'm a hippopotamus fan myself; so I don't know if there 
are specific colors of the critters or if the color was used by the 
"manufacturer" in much the same way clothing catalogs seem hell bent on 
"aubergine" when a perfectly good English word, "eggplant," will suffice.

	This particular Black Rhino charged on to the scene via a 
two-paragraph story in Newsweek a week before Christmas in that 
publication's "Periscope" section.  That section is the magazine's 
equivelent of a gossip column, wit little on-dits about politics and so 
on.  As later became clear, the writer of the piece had found mention of 
the product on a computer network, called the "manufacturer," David Keen 
and ran the item, noting that it posed a threat to law enforcement 
personnel, since the product allegedly possessed "armor-piercing" 
capabilities.  (With due deference to my publisher, who this month 
celebrates the joys of going on-line on the infobahn, CAVAET EMPTOR seem 
to be an appropriate watchwords.)

		Anyway, Keen told the Newsweek writer that the Rhino, and 
its more frightening sibling the Black Rhino, were the bee's knees in 
ammunition, the writer ran with it and everyone had Christmas breakfast 
in peace.

	Christmas Day, the august New York Times, bear leader in 
journalistic fashions, hit the porches with a story about the fearsome 
Black Rhino, and the slightly-less-fierce regular Rhino.  By Boxing Day, 
when most sensible people were combing the paper for sales, the front pages 
were filled with "Chicken Little" stories, with input from local police 
officials who, to put it mildly, decried a country in which Rhinocerii 
Negri were about to run rampant.

	The television networks, bored with running heart-warming holiday 
pieces, jumped on the bandwagon.  Everybody was talking about the Black 
Rhino.

	Gunowners, who had thought the November elections had earned them 
the right to take a week or so of, where doing radio talk shows, local 
and national television and mobilizing their fax machines with 
informational releases explaining, not the fine points, but the rudiments 
of ballistics, firearms and related product manufacturing and the like.

	Among the points made by gunowners:

	* No one had seen any of the Rhinos, so performance reports were 
actually "manufacturer's" claims.

	* Keen, who was, as he claimed, a former defense contractor, was 
not a "manufacturer" of bullets--he had applied for, but no received a 
license t manufacturer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobbaco and Firearms 
(BATF).

	* He had not yet submitted samples to the BATF, who would 
ultimately decide whether the rounds were legal.

	* All this talk about "armor piercing bullets, especially by 
clueless reporters, was doing more to jeapordize law enforcement 
personnel than any bullet could ever hope to.

	This did not stop people like Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY) from 
springing out at the media in a succession of fetching sweaters to 
jesticulate wildly in front of cameras.

	Meanwhile, it seemed to me that th normal work week between 
Christmas and New Year's, when we generally try to do what we laughingly 
refer to as "catch-up," was being spent on the phone to everyone and her 
sister talking about the mythical rhino.

	As some in the media began to emerge from their holiday stupor, 
they began to get back to basics, asking a lot of who, what, where, why 
and how questions.

	ABC-TV's "Nightline" devoted a program to the Rhino controversy 
on Dec. 29, and using the independant testing laboratory in Maryland, 
H. B. White, to test the marketer's claims on the Rhino rounds (Keen said 
he was "withdrawing" the Black Rhino).  H. B. White found the Rhino to be 
quite similar to a host of other conventional rounds, and that it had no 
"armor-piercing" capabilities, nor as Keen had claimed, any amazing wound 
channel-making properties.  Indeed, said the lab, there is no such thing 
as "instant stopping power;" even a shot to the heart gives a few seconds 
in which someone could conceivably return fire.

	Yet, even while they were proclaiming the whole episode a "hoax," 
ABC gave more air time to Schumer (in a lovely purple cable stitch) to 
rant about the big, bad gun lobby and how they wanted to put law 
enforcement at risk by allowing something that didn't exist to come on to 
the market.

	Nonsense, responded Tanya Metaksa, the whole thing was indeed a 
hoax, and the media and the likes of Rep. Schumer were making a dangerous 
mountain out of an invisible mole hill.

	Schumer, who rudely insisted on calling Mrs. Metaksa "Tanya," 
throughout the exchange, persisted in a view that even though the bullets 
did not live up to their claim, they were inherently evil, and besides, 
the whole thing was the National Rifle Association's fault.  A logic 
process that would make the characters in Alice in Wonderland run for 
aspirin bottle.

	Given the way in which the media built up the story, only to tear 
it down when it suited them, the progun side did as well as could be 
expected.  But there should have been some lessons learned by us all.

	First, the media giveth and taketh away on whims that would leave 
the most hard-hearted coquette breathless.  If you ever suspected that 
the media had little regard for any other than selling newspapers, Ginsu 
knives and soap, this should be affirmation.  One doesn't have to be 
paranoid to know we have real--and powerful--enemies.

	That the other major gun-related story of the week of Dec. 29 
went largely unnoticed might be coincidence, but I doubt it.  In case you 
missed it, the BATF's agent-architects of the diasterous and deadly Waco 
raid, Philip Chojnacki and Charles Sarabyn, were re-hired by the Bureau, 
albeit slightly demoted but with back pay and benefits, lost during 
their suspension, restored.

	In some respects the Rhino hoax was a lot like the previous 
month's gun story--the reports on the Violence Policy Center's "study" 
titled Female Persuasion that ran unremarked through the media in early 
December.  

	Apparently the media and anti-gun politicians like Charles 
Schumer are content to let government bureaucracy run amok or report 
findings that are unscientific (and ripped off from other, older 
sources), unchallenged, but are more than willing to trumpet, hype and 
parade erroroneous "information" to their readers and viewers at will.

	The second lesson from the Rhino hoax story is an old one, but 
one that bears repeating.  If eternal vigelance is the price of freedom, 
as Edmund Burke wrote 200 years ago, so, too, is eternal paranoia, as Len 
Deighton wrote just a few years ago.

	There is not much point in whining that the media is unfair.  Nor 
is there much to be gained from telling the likes of Charles Schumer the 
truth.  The former doesn't much care.  The latter doesn't either, and he 
will sneer and dis you in response.

	But the media is a on-going, somewhat amorphous thing: it is up 
to us to directly challenge it when it is so blatantly wrong.  No matter 
how bad the first story or report is, we need to respond.

	It would also be nice if we were not always in the position of 
fighting back, however laudable that might be.  We should be eternally 
vigilant, eternally paranoid, and eternally on the offensive.


Peggy Tartaro
Executive Editor