defense. As a "states' right," it represents an element of sovereignty which the states retained when the federal union was created. A militia, which in historical context means the entire adult male citizenry, may be thought of as a means of self-defense for the states and their various communities. Thus the armed citizen is at once subject to being called upon as a vital last line of defense against crime, federal tyranny, and foreign invasion.

It is my sworn duty as a Member of Congress to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. The Second Amendment is part of that Constitution and must be defended as vigorously as the right to free speech. That is why I have introduced H.R. 3326, proposing the repeal of the Gun Control Act of 1968. Such "gun control" as is necessary is properly within the police powers of the individual states. But the federal government has no more right to legislate gun control than it has a right to legislate speech control or religion control or press control. To permit the one is to invite federal control of any or all of the others and strikes directly at the heart of American liberty. I am proud to support the constitutional guarantee of the rights to worship as we choose, to speak freely, publish without fear, assemble peaceably without harassment, and to keep and bear arms. I am willing to trust the people with free speech, a free press, and the right to keep and bear arms. I am here to defend their rights as well as my own. And I am willing to accept and live with the knowledge that, should this government of ours become unbearable, it will find itself in trouble with those armed citizens out there who love liberty and think the Constitution of the United States is worth fighting for. That's what the Second Amendment is all about.

What is it that gun-control proponents are out to "control"?

It is estimated that about fifty million Americans-one in four-perhaps one in three who are of age-possess their own guns. The number of firearms in private hands is simply unknown. This fact, alone, horrifies the gun-controllers. All are agreed that the number must be in excess of one hundred million; perhaps as high as two hundred million, as my colleague Representative Steven Symms of Idaho suggested in his recent and brilliant testimony against restrictive gun laws.

This year's objective seems to be limited to handguns, in hopes that so limited an objective will prove attainable. If it is not, then the gun-controllers hope for at least a precedent-setting ban on whatever hardware they choose to dub a "Saturday Night Special," the object which otherwise intelligent "Liberals" blame for street crime. The number of handguns is not known. There might be twenty-four million; there might be as many of forty million pistols and revolvers in private hands. Handguns are thought to be about a third of the total-whatever the total number of firearms may be.

Allegedly in order to control the acts of our criminal minority, the gun-controllers demand that tens of millions of law-abiding Americans be restricted, harassed, and eventually deprived of their constitution right as well as their legal property. In defiance of all logic, such gun-controllers express a far greater fear of those tens of millions of Americans who are not criminals than they do of the hoodlums actively terrorizing our cities. The reason is that their attitudes and opinions are not the product of logic but of ideology.

The strategy of this year's gun-control campaign is evident. Those in charge realize, from scarring defeats in the past, that they cannot have the whole loaf-complete registration, followed by complete confiscation. They have settled upon partial registration and partial confiscation as their objectives. All fire is to be directed onto "handguns." The fallback position, I believe, will be a ban on those mythical "Saturday Night Specials" which we are told leap out of dark alleys, aim themselves at passers-by, and pull their own triggers. If "Liberal" demonology is to be believed, they may even carry off wallets. "Liberals" simply hate being reminded that it is not guns but people who kill people. In the tradition of "compromise," Congressmen opposed to the most oppressive gun-control measures which have been introduced so far are being asked to "be reasonable." They are being asked to "compromise" by giving the gun-controllers, if not half a loaf, then at least a quarter of a loaf. After all, how many votes can anyone win by defending the mythical "Saturday Night Special"?

Well, we Conservatives in the Congress are not interested in helping the guncontrollers to achieve even their most minimal objectives. We know-as the radical proponents of gun control know-that any law which delivers up to the

bureaucracy the authority to decide that handguns must be a certain size, or cost more than a certain price, or melt above a certain temperature, is merely a device to reduce the supply of handguns as a precedent for confiscation.

Some of us in the Congress do not propose to compromise at all. Tests have shown that many inexpensive pistols are quite worthy products, and there is no reason to deny firearms to all but those who can afford the expensive models. As a matter of fact, most murder victims are poorer people, often black, living in the large cities. Conservatives would no more deny them the right of self-defense than they would deny that right to any other citizen. The collectivists pushing this ugly business are apparently not only elitists but racists as well.

The continuing attempt to ban handgun sales by having the Consumer Product Safety Commission declare ammunition "hazardous" is typical of the underhanded methods being employed by these anti-gun collectivists. They will go to any lengths to get their way. Since they consider Congress bothersome, they will try, as in this case, to make an end run via the federal courts and the bureaucracy. Pay attention to how it works. A small group of people with a fancy name and a tax-free income petition a federal court, demanding that the federal judge tell the C.P.S.C. to see whether ammunition is "hazardous" and therefore subject to its control. The Commission, of course, has had no trouble in the past in finding baby cribs and tricycles hazardous, so the tactic should have worked easily.

However, opposition to gun control is so strong that the Consumer Product Safety Commission found its phone lines jammed with calls, opposing this backdoor approach. Congress, too, has been annoyed, since it instructed the Consumer Product Safety Commission from the beginning to keep its fingers out of the anti-gun campaign.

The fact that the whole scheme involved handgun ammunition, which is no more "hazardous" than long-gun ammunition, shows that it was part of this year's orchestrated drive for handgun restrictions. It was not spontaneous, it was part of the program which just happens to include anti-handgun propaganda turning up in various television police dramas, the usual biased “documentaries," and assorted horror tales in national magazines. We have been through this so often before that we find ourselves wondering who will be assassinated this time.1

The Consumer Product Safety Commission hardly has to remind us that there are dangers in having guns around the house. We have to be careful of them, just as we must be careful of ladders, knives, open flames, electrical wiring, ammonia, iodine, and children's toys, any and all of which are to be found around most houses, and which have been the cause of many accidental deaths. Fortunately, no one has proposed registration and confiscation of these items and substances as a solution-although we will apparently have to restrain the hand of the C.P.S.C. safety crafts. Needless to say, I am supporting pending legislation to prevent the zealots of the Commission from banning ammunition now that they have discovered that cartridges can be placed in firearms and fired.

The figures show that accidental deaths from gunshot wounds have since 1903 remained remarkably constant in number, while due to increases in population the rate of such deaths has been cut in half. Approximately twenty-five hundred people die each year due to accidents with firearms. Each of these deaths, of course, represents a great personal tragedy. But let us put the matter in perspective.

Fifty times as many people die from other types of accidents. Automobiles, alone, account for well over fifty thousand deaths a year-twenty times as many as firearms. Highway police estimate that about half of these auto failures are due to what may be unkindly but accurately described as drunken

1 That is not a joking remark. Every time you have to go through all the rigamarole required to buy a box of 22 cartridges, remember the Communist who killed Senator Robert Kennedy and brought on the Gun Control Act of 1968. The nonsense about .22 ammunition was kept in the law at the insistence of the late Representative Emanuel Celler. Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, because "a 22 bullet killed Senator Kennedy." The attempted assassination of Governor George Wallace of Alabama in May, 1972, unleashed a similar torrent of gun-control propaganda which seems to have been all ready to go. Governor Wallace failed to cooperate. Not only did he refuse to die, but he spoke up against the calculated attempt to use yet another “lone assassin” plot to ram through yet another gun-control law, which neither he nor his supporters wanted to see.

drivers. So we may say that drunken drivers alone kill ten times as many people as are killed by firearms. That is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that there are more firearms than motor vehicles. It would seem that our people are more careful with firearms than they are with motor vehicles, for which we require operators' tests and registration.

In addition, a person is seven and one half times as likely to die of a fall, than to be shot to death accidentally, and is even more likely to be burned to death or to drown, than to be shot to death accidentally. Firearms are thus a relatively insignificant source of accidental death. If we consider that the accident rate represents one out of perhaps fifty thousand firearms, or one in twenty thousand firearms owners, I think we may conclude that guns are being handled with care.

One would never know it from the "Liberal" propagandists. In efforts to inflate so-called "gun deaths" to horrendous totals, it is a popular practice among gun-controllers to include suicides by firearms. I await with interest efforts to build a case against the automobile by including the number of people who kill themselves by idling the motor in a closed garage. One almost expect "Liberals" to argue for the registration of bathtubs by citing the num ber of people who leap off bridges into assorted bodies of water.2 Obviously there are a wide variety of methods available to those who intend to commit suicide. That some people prefer to shoot themselves is hardly an argument for gun control.

The homicide rate has doubled since 1960, and shows little if any sign of tapering off. Gun-controllers cry that the number killed with guns has doubled, whereas in truth, the numbers killed by stabbing, strangulation, clubbing, stomping, and burning have also doubled. The weapons "mix" has remained remarkably uniform-regardless of the nature of local gun-control laws. It is really feeble-minded to argue that, by registering the weapon preferred in sixty percent of homicides, we will eliminate sixty percent of those homicides. The problem lies in the criminal, not the weapon.

The type of homicide which is increasing most sharply, and which calls forth the greatest need for privately owned firearms as a final defense, is socalled "felony homicide"-murders committed in the course of other felonies, primarily robbery. It is the felony homicide rate which produces the greatest sense of insecurity in our large population centers. This type of crime is generally the work of hoodlums who have been provided with no substantial discouragement by our criminal justice system, having been neither rehabilitated nor taken out of circulation.

"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" is the current bumper-sticker wisdom. It is getting to be the only kind we have. The United States Supreme Court has actually ruled in Haynes vs. U.S. that since persons with a felony conviction are barred from possessing firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968, they cannot be required to register their weapons, since to do so would be self-incrimination! In effect, the Supreme Court has exempted from any registration provisions all those convicted felons who possess a weapon illegally!

A recent contribution to the anti-handgun campaign appeared in Reader's Digest for February 1975. It declared: "The millions of guns 'protecting' millions of American homes are a real threat, all right-not to an army of unseen intruders, but to the gun owners themselves." Snide reference to the "army of unseen intruders" is a professional touch, an attempt to convert the very real and justified fears of millions of people into some paranoid fantasy. The conclusion is predictable. It is that the problem is not the criminals who kill, the criminals who terrorize city people into installing multiple locks on the doors and bars on their windows, but:

*** millions of lawful, if misguided. gun owners-ordinary householders who feel safer with a gun by their bedside. What these people need to know

One tactic that I have noticed recently in the gun-control propaganda is that of tacking an extra zero onto "gun death" figures, putting them in the hundred-thousand range, and presenting these as ten-year totals. Indeed, in some desperation. the propagandists often go back two hundred years in order to stagger you with figures putting "gun deaths" in the millions. Carried away by these necessarily fanciful body counts (since the information simply does not exist), enthusiasts in the propaganda factories sometimes inform us that "gun deaths" exceed the total of all combat deaths in American history. One can only wince and wonder at the towering Sierra of "Liberal" arrogance.

is that in the vast majority of instances a weapon offers only an illusion of protection, not the real thing.

"If you want to protect yourself and your family, don't wait for stern measures to be handed down from Washington. Start your own gun-control program, and start it now. If there's a gun in your home, turn it over to local authorities. Get rid of it, before it gets rid of you."

Now, isn't that childish? Don't even wait for the father-figure in Washington to "hand down stern measures," but give your gun to the authorities before it leaps from the closet and shoots you as you sleep. Disarm yourself, and save Washington the trouble. Then you won't even have the "illusion" of protection.

The Digest article, already well-circulated to housewives through Good Housekeeping magazine, follows one of the collectivist propaganda lines in H.R. 40, the oppressive gun-control bill introduced by Representative Johnathan Bingham of New York. For example, in Paragraph 1, Section (d) of H.R. 40, the following statement is proposed as a "finding" of the Congress: "that handguns in the home are of less value than is commonly thought in defending against intruders." Such a statement is so unconvincing and flimsy as to produce embarrassed laughter. The basis for the statement is a speculative study seized upon by Mr. Franklin Zimring when he was head of a “task force" of the Eisenhower Commission back in 1968. Zimring is among those who maintain that any attempt at self-defense merely "provokes" the assaliant to violence, thus marvelously transferring guilt to the victim-a trick at which "Liberal" propagandists are most adept. When questioned, back in 1968, on his contention that household weapons are either useless or dangerous. Mr. Zimring admitted that he was still working up a body count of those killed attempting to defend their homes, but that he had no intention of tallying dead intruders as well. Which means, of course, that there was never any basis for this oft-repeated canard.

It is a daily occurrence that guns are used—successfully—to defend homes and places of business against armed criminals. If the defender does not always win the contest, that is still no reason to deny him-or her a fighting chance. People are entitled to that-under the Second Amendment, common law, and common sense. What we need, I believe, is a survey taken among victims of violent crime, asking them whether they found being unarmed an advantage!

Many of the proposed handgun-control bills include sections which may, perhaps, be intended to placate outraged target shooters and others by provid ing that they may continue to own pistols if they belong to pistol clubs. However, it generally turns out that these pistol clubs are supposed to be under the control of the Treasury Department or subject to the authority of the Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and that they are intended to be custodial in nature. The gun-controllers want to have the handguns belonging to members of pistol clubs locked away in vaults except under supervised conditions. It is a system which greatly resembles that of the Soviet Union and its satellites, where membership in gun clubs is restricted to the politically reliable and the weapons remain under government control. Confiscation, should it prove necessary, is then a simple matter of formalities. Precisely that method was used to disarm Hungary in 1946, before the open Communist takeover there. Conservatives can support no legislation which will open the door to that sort of thing in the United States. The proposal of federally supervised gun clubs to control all handguns is simply unacceptable, degrading, inconvenient, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.

States and localities have had various forms of "gun-control" for a long time, and I think their experience is instructive. both as to the effectiveness and enforceability. There has been, really, no demonstrable effect on crime. And the more punitive and restrictive they are, the less enforceable they are. New York City, with its long-standing Sullivan Law, has only about twentyfive thousand registered handguns among a population of 7.5 million. Everybody knows there are far more weapons than that. Police there report that the weapons used by felons aren't registered. Criminals don't register their guns, and people who register their weapons are not criminals.

Recently, the City of New York attempted to extend gun-control measures to long guns. This has been a total failure. Only a small fraction of the estimated number of long guns surfaced for registration purposes. Why? I sug

gest that New Yorkers are now wise to the rhetoric of the gun-control fanatics. They suspect, or perhaps have reason to know, that registration is a mere preliminary to worse measures. They would rather break the law than give up their guns and place themselves at the mercy of illegally armed felons. As a result, the New York City statute requiring the registration of long guns is meaningless except as a means of making technical criminals out of frightened householders. It cannot be enforced without the adoption of Gestapo-like measures, such as house-to-house searches. How soon it will come to that is a matter of conjecture.

Certainly the threat of confiscation is real enough. Legislation was proposed in the Council of the District of Columbia in February which, if approved by Congress, would confiscate all registered handguns and shotguns there. Councilman John Wilson declared: "People think I want to take everybody's gun away-and they're perfectly right." Told that such confiscation would break faith with law-abiding citizens who had earlier registered their guns, Wilson remarked: "That doesn't bother me. I didn't promise them anything." He claimed "too many guns are legally [sic] held . . ." Yet The American Rifleman for April 1975 reports that only sixteen to eighteen legally registered firearms are taken in connection with crime investigations in the District over an entire year. On the other hand, approximately half of Washington's homicides, a record 295 in 1975, involved handguns-virtually all of which were unregistered despite the District's super-stiff gun controls. As Senator James McClure has observed of the proposed gun confiscation in the federal city:

"The proposal is far more graphic an illustration of the inherent dangers of firearms registration to the rights of all Americans than any statements or any speeches made by any opponent of registration. It proves beyond doubt the point that we have been making since the registration issue surfaced in the Congress-that gun registration is the first step toward ultimate and total confiscation-the first step in a complete destruction of a cornerstone of our Bill of Rights.

"It is purely and simply crazy. Yet it is symptomatic of our times. The most deeply disturbing aspect of this shabby and frightening business is the almost deafening silence of the news media. If these same small men or any government council were talking seriously about revoking the First Amendment rights or the Fifth Amendment rights guaranteed all of us, there would be an outcry of almost unprecedented proportions. Yet there has been almost no outery in the media, and that in itself should be seen as a national shame." Criminals just don't register their guns. When honest people do, the next step is confiscation. And the consequence is a well-armed criminal class preying upon a disarmed public made helpless by infringement on their rights under the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It is proposed that we deprive of their rights and property people who have done nothing wrong. It is proposed that we brand as criminals and sentence to imprisonment people who refuse to give up their property and their rights. It is proposed, in short, that we punish law-abiding people, or push them outside the law, claiming all the while to be fighting crime!

I will have no part of it, on principle. But I suggest that, in any event, it isn't going to work. The harder this government tries to disarm the people, the more firmly will more people become convinced that gun control is a part of some tyrannical conspiracy.

An editorial in Guns & Ammo for December 1974 expressed a feeling which is becoming quite widespread in this country. After noting, as so many have over the years, that our problem is not gun control but crime control, they ask of gun-control advocates, "What is it they have in mind for us, that our possession of guns makes them nervous?"

The mood of the people has been cleverly expressed by Mr. and Mrs. W. D. Ferguson of Albany, California, who wrote to my colleague, Congressman Steven Symms, to praise him for moving to head off the ammunition grab by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The Fergusons added: "Samson slew a thousand with the jawbone of an ass. Maybe you can introduce legislation to register and confiscate the jawbones of asses-and we can start with these liberal politicians."

The widespread and relatively uncontrolled possession of firearms by lawabiding citizens is not a problem. It is not a cause of crime, and could in fact be