http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56047

The history of gun control, part 1
Posted: June 7, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Sandy Froman
© 2007

Philosopher George Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it. It's true. One of the reasons to study history
is to avoid repeating past mistakes. When it comes to freedom, we cannot
afford to forget the lessons of the past. So you and I need to know the
history of gun control, because history teaches us there is a terrible
price to pay when we lose our right to keep and bear arms.

Over 200 years ago, when the Founding Fathers drafted the Second
Amendment, no one questioned the need for private gun ownership. The
Framers considered private firearms to be essential to protecting personal
liberty, both as a means of opposing foreign threats and also as a check
against excessive government power. The Framers were passionately devoted
to the idea that a self-sufficient armed citizenry is the best means of
preserving liberty.

But many on the left do not want you to know this. They keep the truth
from being taught in public schools, and they even write books laden with
falsehoods in a dishonest attempt to rewrite history.

Seven years ago, Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles published a
book purportedly proving there were few guns and gun owners in early
America. The book garnered Columbia University's coveted Bancroft Prize.
Two years later, primarily due to the efforts of a brilliant young
research historian, Clayton Cramer, who had studied that period in history
extensively, the book was revealed to be a total fraud, full of lies and
fabrications. Bellesiles was forced to resign from Emory University and,
for the first time in history, Columbia University rescinded the Bancroft
Prize.

Every American who values his or her constitutional rights should know
something about these frauds that gun control advocates perpetrate so we
can be watchful and teach the truth to our young ones.

Early Americans were gun owners. Private firearm ownership was widespread
from the coasts to the frontier, in both the North and the South.

Our ancestors not only knew the value of gun rights, they actually
practiced those rights. Many early Americans provided for their family
through their skill with a firearm, and many more Americans had a gun
hanging over the hearth or in the bedroom to protect the house and the
children against wild animals or criminals. These firearms were also seen
as an insurance policy against American Indians, the British or French,
and even against our own central government.

This honored tradition went completely unchallenged until the 1900s. Then
New York passed the Sullivan Act in 1911, one of the first gun control
laws. This law required that firearms small enough to be concealed on a
person be registered. This state law became a test measure for future gun
control laws.

Opponents of the Second Amendment started to mobilize at the federal level
in the 1930s. It came during the New Deal, when the federal government was
growing rapidly. Two laws enacted during this period, the National
Firearms Act of 1934 and the Federal Firearms Act of 1938, established the
first federal gun controls. While most of these regulations were
uncontroversial by current standards (such as licensing gun dealers and
regulating possession of machine guns), they introduced the concept of
national regulation of firearms.

It was also during this time President Franklin Roosevelt appointed a
number of liberals to the United States Supreme Court. Starting in 1937,
the high court began moving in a liberal direction, and by the 1960s had
become a court favoring full judicial activism, a judicial philosophy that
has threatened our Second Amendment rights ever since.

During this period, anti-Second Amendment politicians began testing the
waters on gun control. The highest-ranking official to do this was FDR's
anti-gun attorney general, Homer Cummings. Attorney General Cummings
started planning for federal gun control measures such as a national
registry in the hands of the central government for guns and gun owners.

But then World War II broke out, and Germany and Japan invaded their
neighbors. The American people were reminded how important it is to have a
firearm handy when you need one. Cummings' early attempts to regulate guns
and gun owners suddenly became unpopular. Gun control advocates lowered
their voices until a more opportune time.

Most American leaders in both political parties were pro-gun. In fact,
Democratic presidents Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy were NRA members.
Gun control advocates were always present in policy debates, but did not
have much political clout.

In the 1960s, gun control came back with a vengeance. Modern liberalism
became the dominant political philosophy in this country. And after the
deaths of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., an all-out
national push for gun control was launched.

This period in the late 1960s was the beginning of significant gun control
in America. Liberal activist judges, led by the Warren Court, enacted a
widespread liberal agenda. American society was being secularized.
President Johnson was forcing a hard-left agenda through the Great
Society. And the Vietnam War was becoming increasingly unpopular. It was
against that backdrop the left finally launched an open, concerted effort
to implement national gun control.

And that's what we'll talk about next week, remembering that if we ignore
the lessons that history offers us, our children will pay the price with
their freedom.

Sandy Froman is immediate past president of the National Rifle Association
of America and a longtime member of the NRA board of directors. A
practicing attorney in Tucson, Ariz., Froman is an international speaker
on the right to keep and bear arms and an advocate for federal judges who
will interpret the Constitution according to its original meaning.

--
The concept of pacifism as it pertains to crime is generally predicated
on the concept that all life is of value, and that using violence to
injure or kill in defense of mere property is disproportionate - the
value of the material is much less than the value of the life of the
person attempting to take the material. Surprise! I concur. The life of a
human being is of greater value than, say, the contents of my wallet. But
this ignores something more important - the fact that the contents of my
wallet are the least things at risk. Because someone willing to threaten
bodily injury or death in order to take my wallet violates the tenets
of the society in which both of us live. He puts in fear not only me,
but the entire society. He has proffered a new social contract - "Give
me what I want, and I won't hurt you."
- Jeffrey Snyder