posted 09-12-2003 06:51 PM            

The screenplay to outlaw the possession of firearms in the United States was written and put into motion long before any shots rang out at Columbine High School in Colorado. The Columbine shootings, along with the school shootings in Oregon in 1998, are just part of Act I; the latest installment in a PLANNED series of shooting massacre/atrocities in America that are designed to rile up the American public to a fevered pitch of hysteria and consequently create a mass DEMAND for the banning of all firearms in this country. Act II will include far more horrendous atrocities and acts of brutality by 'crazed' lone gunmen mowing down scores of innocents in schools buildings, or churches, or playgrounds, or community picnics, or fast food establishments or wherever young people might gather in the ordinary activities of American life. The more innocent and 'protected' the environment where these atocities WILL take place, the "better"- at least from the planners point of view. The goal is to sufficiently SHOCK the American public into accepting the 'necessity' of total gun control. As the months roll on and these shooting atrocities spread across the news, Clinton (1, 2, 3, 4) and Reno will be holding press conferences and calling for 'sane and reasonable controls' in order to put an "End to the Slaughter of Our Children". To help pull the net tighter, other government agencies will get in the act, including the IRS who will push to tax and register all firearms.

Act III will cluminate with the passage of federal law which will outlaw the possission of all firearms.

A complete ban on ALL firearms in the United States??

Yes. And it's going to HAPPEN unless a large enough segment of the American public QUICKLY wake up to the deceit and treachery being perpetrated and take VIGOROUS action to abort it.

What's So Bad About Gun Control?
The connection between gun control laws and the wholesale genocide of the affected populace was well illustrated in a November '99 article by Uri Dowbenko. The parallel in wording between Nazi Germany's 1938 Weapons Law and the the 1968 US Gun Control Act is unnerving.

The big push to outlaw guns in America is part of a larger agenda to dismantle and destroy the United States of America from within. One part of that plan is population control which the executive committee of the New World Order, The Committee of 300, wants firmly in place.

Other control mechanisms that are in the pipeline include the replacement of cash with plastic smartcards and foolproof ID/personal history files utilizing implantable microchips, retina scans, and DNA mapping. The smartcards and ID technologies are already being rapidly introduced in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada..

These and other "emergency measures" will be quickly instituted to meet the demands of a manufactured and orchestrated 'crisis' or series of disastrous events (Y2K, domestic biological attack, big earthquakes, stock market crash, war, food shortages, etc.) The London-based Committee of 300 requires that their crowd control measures be in place before they can proceed with their plans for the breakup and dissolution of the United States which they plan to incorporate with Canada and Mexico into a new 10 sector New States of America region.

Banning guns in England, Australia, and New Zealand was, relatively speaking, a peice of cake for the Committee of 300. The technique used in those countries is virtually the same that is now being applied in the United States. It's done with mind control technologies which have greatly advanced since the early years of Nazi and Japanese experiments during World War II. The CIA's MK Ultra mind control project was developed into fruition by former Nazis-such as Dr Josef Mengele of Auschwitz notority-imported into the United States under Operation Paper Clip. "MK", by the way, is the German abbreviation for mind control.

The details of how people are brought under Total Mind Control is discussed on another page, but relative to the issue of gun control, the scenario goes like this: A mind-controlled individual(s) is 'programmed' to slaughter a classroom, nursery school, or playground filled with young children. The media covers the story to the hilt. Of course, the killers almost always conveniently commit suicide, so no one ever gets to question to them. Public emotions are pumped up with lots of video and close up photos of shocked and greiving survivors, bloodstained halls, and sobbing friends at the gravesite of the victims. Soon, the media is grinding out the anti-gun propaganda. The "polls" all agree that 'enough is enough' and voila, before you can say "Hey, isn't this what Hitler did in the 1930's?" the controlled politicians and their anti-gun lobbyists 'friends' arrange to quickly ram through the (already pre-drafted) legislation and in a flash, Total Gun Control is a fait d'acompli. Seems to work every time.

It worked in the UK after a mind-controlled individual killed 16 small children and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland on March 13, 1996. About 10 months later, parliamentary laws were passed that said that possessing a gun in the UK meant 10 years in prison. Legislation was passed even faster in Australia when a gunman armed with an assault rifle killed 35 and wounded 19 in a massacre in Tasmania, Australia on March 28, 1996-just two weeks after the Dunblane shootings. (Coincidence that these two massacres occured in quick succession of each other? Hardly.)

Gun control won't go down so easily or quickly in the United States, though. The United States has a much larger population than England or Australia and a 225 year tradition of NOT turning in their guns to the government. It's called The Second Amendment to The United States Constitution. The drafters of the US Constitution realized the potential for totalitarian abuse by the Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branches of the Federal government and wanted to insure that the ULTIMATE POWER of the government would REMAIN in the hands of the PEOPLE and NOT the POLITICIANS of the United States government. The "people" of the United States means just that- the people or the citizens of the country. It doesn't mean the National Guard, or the Armed Forces, or the local police, or Fedearal police forces such as the FBI, BATF, DEA, etc. It means the PEOPLE, the common civilians and citizens of this country. Many deceitful politicians and anti-gun organizations wish the American public to think otherwise.

The RIGHT to Bear Arms was seen by the Founding Fathers as one of the NECESSARY SELF DEFENSE mechanisms REQUIRED by citizens of a free confederated REPUBLIC, which is what the framers of the US Constitution created. The Founding Fathers of America did not create a Democracy, as the media and liberal politicians would have us believe. They actually created a Republic; an important distinction.

It's going to take a lot more slaughtered children splashed across the evening news to overcome the reluctance of Americans to give up their constututional right to bear arms ...And more slaughtered children there will be... But just bear in mind who is REALLY responsible for those deaths: The Committee of 300 and the traitorous individuals in our government who are working on their behalf. .
The shooters at these massacres are merely PAWNS in a much larger game.

posted 11-16-2003 07:50 AM            

In a 1998-Sep-11 declaration, Mr. Jeffries writes (full text at http://www.gunowners.com/ip01.htm):

BATF has a documented 30-year history of citizen abuse, civil rights violations, and insult to the judicial system. See, e.g., United States v. Bagley, 473 U.S. 667 (1985) (BATF entered contingent reward agreements with informant witnesses against the defendant which were withheld from the defendant at trial; informants submitted false affidavits regarding their compensation); United States V. Buchanan, 787 F.2d 477 (10th Cir. 1986) (sexual relatilonship between BATF case agent and defendant's former wife); Endicott v. United States, 869 F.2d 452 (9th Cir. 1989) (witness tampering and concealment of Brady material by BATF case agent); United States v. Gonzalez, 719 F.2d 1516 (llth Cir. 1983) (mistrial caused by BATF case agent's misleading failure to produce defendant's arrest record). See also, U.S. Department of Justice, Report to the Attorney General on the Events at Waco, Texas, February 28 to April 19, 1993 (Washington, D.C.; October 8, 1993 (redacted version); U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility, Department of Justice Report Regarding Internal Investigation of Shootings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, During Arrest of Randy Weaver (undated; available on LEXIS Counsel Connect). See also, Senate Committee on Appropriations, Oversight Hearings on Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, 96th Cong., 1st Sess. (GPO; Washington, D.C.; 1979); id., 96th Cong., 2d Sess. (GPO; Washington, D.C.; 1980); U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Senate Report No. 97-476, Federal Firearms Owners Protection Act: Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, to Accompany S. 1030, together with Supplemental, Additional, and Minority Views, 97th Cong., 2d Sess. (GPO; Washington, D.C.; June 18, 1982); id., Senate Report No. 98-583, Federal Firearms Owners Protection Act: Report together with Additional and Supplemental Views, 98th Cong., 2d Sess. (GPO; Washington, D.C.; August 8, 1984); Colloquy, 131 Cong. Rec. 16984 - 17003 (June 24, 1985); U.S. House of Representatives, Judiciary Committee, House Report No. 99-495, Firearms Owners' Protection Act, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. (GPO; Washington, D.C.; March 14, 1986); Colloquy, 132 Cong. Rec. H1649 - H1803 (daily ed., April 9, 1986); Transcript of Joint Hearing of the Crime Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee and the National Security, International Affairs and Criminal Justice Subcommittee of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Review of the Siege of the Branch Davidians' Compound in Waco, Texas, 104th Cong., 2d Sess. (Federal News Service; Washington, D.C.; July 19, 1995 - August 1, 1995); House Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Government Reform and oversight, Materials Relating to the Investigation into the Activities of Federal Law Enforcement Agencies toward the Branch Davidians, 104th Cong., 2d Sess. (GPO; Washington, D.C.; August 1996); Transcript of Hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Federal Law Enforcement and the Good 0l', Boys Roundup (Federal News Service; Washington, D.C.; July 21, 1995); id., Federal Raid at Waco (Federal News Service; Washington, D.C.; October 31, November 1, 1995); Transcript of Hearing of the Terrorism, Technology, and Government Information Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Federal Raid in Idaho (Ruby Ridge) (Federal News Service; Washington, D.C.; September 6 - September 14, 1995). See also, David T. Hardy, The BATF's War on Civil Liberties: The Assault on Gun Owners (Second Amendment Foundation; Bellevue, Wash.; 1979).

Mr. Jeffries recently wrote the following letter to the director of the ATF:

JAMES H. JEFFRIES, III ATTORNEY AT LAW
3019 LAKE FOREST DRIVE GREENSBORO, NC 27408
TELEPHONE: (336) 282-6024

30 June, 2000

Honorable Bradley A. Buckles, Director
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
United States Department of the Treasury
650 Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest
Washington, D.C. 20226

Re: Mr. John Ross
St. Louis, Missouri

Dear Mr. Buckles:

I represent Mr. John Ross of St. Louis, Missouri. Mr. Ross is an investment broker and financial adviser with a respected investment firm in St. Louis. He has degrees in English and Economics from Amherst College. Mr. Ross is very active in community and public affairs. He is the grandson of President Harry Truman's press secretary, Charles Ross, and was himself the Democratic Party candidate for the United States House of Representatives from the Second District of Missouri in 1998. In short, Mr. Ross is an upstanding and productive member of his community.

Mr. Ross has had a lifelong interest in firearms and is both a Federal Firearms Licensee and a Special Occupational Taxpayer under the National Firearms Act. Of central importance to the purpose of this letter is the fact that Mr. Ross is also the author of Unintended Consequences, a highly popular novel about the trials and tribulations of legal gun owners and dealers in the United States. Although the book is manifestly a work of fiction, it accurately depicts documented historical events in the long and sordid history of misconduct by personnel of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The book is in its fifth hardcover printing with some 50,000 copies in circulation and has become enormously popular among the gun owners of the United States. Because the book is highly critical of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, it appears that some in your agency have undertaken to suppress it and to intimidate its author. For example, in 1997 the book's publisher became aware that individuals purporting to be BATF agents had threatened vendors of the book in at least three different states with "problems" if they did not cease their sales of the book. A full-page ad in Shotgun News offering a $10,000 reward for the identity of these individuals put a stop to that particular business.

Now we have learned that in late May of this year agents from your St. Louis field office have engaged in an official effort to enlist Mrs. Ross, who is amicably separated from her husband as an informant against her husband. On or about May 24 2000, at about 7:30 a.m. two agents approached Mrs. Ross on the street while she was walking her dog, identified themselves by displaying their BATF credentials, and proceeded to inquire what she thought about her husband's book. When she was noncommittal the agents terminated the conversation and departed. This contact had been preceded in previous weeks by pretext telephone calls to Mrs. Ross, by what were undoubtedly your agents, in an attempt to draw her out about her husband's book. An agent, using the pseudonym of Peter Nettleson, and pretending to be a great fan of Unintended Consequences, sought Mrs. Ross's agreement that the book was, in fact, "a manual for the murder of federal agents." [1]

I note in passing that best-selling author Tom Clancy in recent books has murdered a Director of the FBI, the President of the United States, the entire Congress, the Supreme Court, the entire cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a few lesser functionaries. I presume he has not thereby become subject to investigation by your literary critics.

1. As an experienced federal prosecutor I am fully aware of what is going on here. Disgruntled former spouses are a prime source of intelligence for law enforcement, having as they frequently do both a strong bias against the subject of the investigation and the proximity and intimacy to know many things not available to others. A structured approach such as this required, according to your manuals, formal agency approval. It required the investment of time and effort in setting up the approach: determining Mrs. Ross's new address, learning her new telephone number, physical surveillance to determine her routine so that she could be approached in a way that she could not simply shut the door and where there would be less risk of confirming witnesses, the use of a female agent to lessen any apprehension at being approached publicly by strangers, etc.

What kind of people are you? Is there no honor within the ranks of your agency? It has long been clear, from repeated court decisions and congressional committee reports, that your agents have no familiarity with the Second, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Now it appears that they have not even been introduced to the very first Article of the Bill of Rights.

I am writing to express our outrage about this conduct and to formally demand that your agency cease and desist from this unconstitutional abuse of power. I am contemporaneously making formal Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act demands upon BATF for the records and files pertaining to Mr. Ross, his book, and these events.

By copies of this letter I am requesting the Inspector General of the Treasury Department to formally investigate this unlawful conduct and the Attorney General to investigate to determine whether Mr. Ross's civil rights are being violated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Sincerely yours,
[signed]
James H. Jeffries, III

cc: Attorney General of the United States
Inspector General, Department of the Treasury

posted 11-16-2003 07:51 AM            

https://www.mega.nu/ampp/disarm1.html#metatop

The Citizen Disarmament Agenda - Part 1

``Knighthood flourished before the time of guns and gunpowder when battles still were won by hand-to-hand conflicts of heavy-armored knights. Even in peacetime knights looked for conflicts in which to engage. Fighting was almost an everyday occurrence, and the common people generally could not protect themselves against an invading foe. In times of danger they fled to the castles or strongholds owned by the nobles. To obtain protection the poorer folk became the serfs or villeins of their powerful neighbors, and those in turn were the vassals of those still more powerful. The institution of knighthood was part of this feudal system.''
-Encyclopedia Britannica, entry on knighthood, from http://search.ebi.eb.com/ebi/printArticle/0,8447,35027,00.html

``In the Middle Ages, alchemists in Europe [...] learned (probably from the Chinese) how to mix sulfur, charcoal and saltpeter to make gunpowder, the chemical product that more than any other single thing led to the end of the feudal system and the birth of the modern world.''
-from the script of Chemists at Work, part 1: "A Brief History of Chemistry", by Hawkhill Live Action Videos, from http://www.hawkhill.com/602s.html

In a war, the primary objective of a combatant is to destroy the capacity of the enemy to wage war. The preferred method of achieving this objective is with minimal destruction of the enemy's assets, since assets that survive the war enrich the victor. Destruction can be avoided by pursuing a psychological strategy rather than a strategy of violent confrontation. In particular, a psychological strategy can be pursued which prompts the voluntary disarmament of the enemy.

Today, as throughout the history of historical civilization, the establishment is waging war on the rest of the world's population. Psychological strategy is foremost. The establishment seeks to disarm the enemy - those people who are not within or aligned with the establishment - by convincing the enemy that it is in its interests to disarm. Wherever this disarmament transpires, the enemy itself becomes an asset of the victor - of the establishment. That is to say, those defeated by the psychological warfare become slaves of the victors. The establishment largely disarms itself, of course, and indeed members of the establishment are slaves to other members of the establishment. At no point does the principle of freedom rouse them from their stupor.

The mass media is a conduit for an eternal avalanche of intense renditions of psychopathic violence, much of it involving firearms. From the perspective of the establishment, the purpose of this campaign is to assure that wherever large numbers of ordinary citizens are in possession of firearms, psychopathic firearm violence regularly rips through the community, thereby destroying the community and concomitantly destroying the political capital of its former members. This strategy is a plain and pathetic failure, and always will be, since contrary to the wishes of the establishment, human nature is far less fundamentably mutable than is necessary for television and movies to transform basically respectful people into raging psychopaths - even part-time ones. The pathological media do, however, foster in many a pathological fear of weapons, which is second in its usefulness to the establishment disarmament campaign only to actual mass carnage.

With the War on Drugs and judicial practices that routinely release known recidivist violent criminals, the establishment assures that - at least in large cities - there is a steady, daily stream of firearms violence, which is selectively covered by television news. The law enforcement apparatus is utterly pathological: this phenomenon of recidivism and incessant criminal violence is artificial, a deliberate strategy of the establishment.

*

As long as the establishment believes that the common citizenry is equipped with weaponry that is sufficiently effective to repel any imposition of force by the state, the establishment will not attempt to impose that force injudiciously (chiefly, toward the end of overt deconstitutionalization), and so the power structure is stable. Once the establishment believes the citizenry no longer possesses the means to forcibly repel the state, the establishment will proceed with deconstitutionalization imposed with force. Nonetheless, the citizenry will likely still be equipped and impelled to repel them, and the violence that follows will topple the status quo power structure catastrophically. If through uncharacteristic competence and efficiency the state were to successfully disarm the common citizenry, the state itself would factionalize, and the various armed factions of the state would engage each other in brutal wars of attrition, fighting for supremacy. In particular, the Department of Defense would engage the Departments of Justice and the Treasury in an immensely violent and destructive conflict. Thus, any consistently self-interested beneficiary of the status quo will adamantly safeguard the means of the common citizenry to repel grossly unconstitutional affronts by the state, and moreover will assure that the establishment fully appreciates this capability of the common citizenry, and is not able to remove it by exploiting registration databases and through other machinations. Members of the establishment are not consistent, and are not truly self-interested, and so the aforementioned conflagrations are inevitable.

A state monopoly on armament is the most dramatic and absolute form of state power at the expense of citizen power. As the citizenry loses power to the state, the citizenry's capacity and tendency to innovate and produce declines in similar measure. As innovation and production decline, the capacity of the nation to sustain itself economically and defend itself militarily decline in similar measure. Eventually, the nation succumbs to collapse from within, and exploitation and invasion from without. This is the fate of all empires and all totalitarian regimes.

*

Important introductory reading:

View my report on S.505. Print and mail it to your representative and senators!

Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews, by practicing (and prevailing repeatedly in SCOTUS) constitutional attorney Stephen P. Halbrook (PhD, JD), published in the Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, No. 3, 483-535 (2000)

Also, an excellent case study from 1990: Ten Years Later: An Analysis of the Effects of New York City's Mandatory Sentencing Law, by Talcott J. Franklin, sociologist at the University of Washington, and research director for the Second Amendment Foundation.

*

The second amendment of the US constitution, which has been a part of the document since its 1791-Dec-15 ratification (the initial body of the document became effective 1789-Mar-4, and the Bill of Rights was passed by the House and Senate on 1789-Aug-24 and 1789-Sep-9 respectively), reads:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

If this is restated in more precise modern language, it reads:

Safeguarding of a state that respects the rights of the nation's citizens depends on those citizens being individually equipped with military pattern weapons, and their being practiced and competent in their use in uncoordinated and coordinated warfare against those who violate those rights, whoever they may be. Consistent with but not dependent on this observation, no law can diminish the right of each citizen to fabricate, sell, purchase, own, carry, and practice with such weapons, particularly including firearms.

It is entirely reasonable to expect certain restrictions on who can own and carry firearms. Violent criminals are excluded consistent with the US Constitution because these people have deprived others involuntarily of constitutionally recognized rights, thereby forfeiting the rights they would otherwise enjoy under that constitution (they have breached the contract).

Restriction on where, how, and which firearms can be possessed and carried (excluding ``assault rifles'', ``Saturday night specials'', ``school zones'', or concealed carry, for example) are not consistent with the constitution.

To be specific, current gun control measures in place (all of the following are unconstitutional, which is to say, illegal) are:

The National Firearms Act of 1934 provides for discretionary local government licensing, central federal government registration, and onerous excise taxation ($200 per item) of transfers of a variety of basic firearms items:

report suppressors (which protect hearing and reduce noise pollution around firing ranges, though do not come remotely close to completely eliminating the noise of the gun)
automatic weapons (protected by the Second Amendment prima facie)
large bore rifles (greater than .5" bore, the type used in the Revolutionary War, also protected by the Second Amendment prima facie)
shotguns with barrels shorter than 18 inches
various other standard military weapons protected by the Second Amendment
The Act also absolutely prohibits importation of any of these items for transfer to citizens.

The constitutionality of NFA1934 was upheld in a ridiculous ruling in U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), by FDR's liberal-packed court (James Jeffries (on whom more below) calls it ``an opinion so opaque that inferior courts, practitioners and scholastics are still arguing about the holding of the case''). The defendant was not represented in the proceeding, there was no certiorari, and the appeal was directly from a district court to the Supreme Court, each of which is uncannily bizarre. In its decision, the court implied that Amendment 2 applied only to the militia, found that the general citizenry (or at least, able men 18 to 40) is the militia, and recognized that the militia was expected to be able to appear ``bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time'' (in armies), then supplied a flotilla of quotations of centuries-old state documents describing arms in common use centuries ago, then concluded absolutely bizarrely that since the type of weapon at issue in the case (a sawed-off shotgun) did not appear in these museum inventories, it was lawful for the corporate United States to put someone in prison for a decade or more for possessing or transporting it without the permission of the corporate United States. This is obvious reversible error, but there is no body but the selfsame Court to reverse it, and so the decision sits there attracting flies.

The decision is wholly without merit and unconstitutional on its face. Short barrel shotguns are in regular use in components of the US military. The standard rifle for the US military is the AR15, designated the M16. Millions of these rifles have been issued to troops in the US, and to those of its allies. This rifle is banned by NFA1934, by GOPA1986 (more below), by the 1993 assault weapon ban (more below), and by VCCLEA1994 (more below). All of these bans are in absolute, facial, violent, and astonishingly direct opposition to the Constitution of the United States in its most plain, obvious, and presently relevant meaning. As a consequence, the corporate United States has, since 1934, been an obvious lawless and criminal regime on this basis alone.

posted 11-20-2003 12:13 PM            

Posted on Wed, Nov. 19, 2003
FLORIDA LEGISLATURE

Records on gun owners assailed
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/7294898.htm

Lawmakers consider a bill that would stop police from tracking some gun sales, a tactic that prosecutors say helps convict criminals.
BY MARC CAPUTO
mcaputo@herald.com

TALLAHASSEE - Invoking Adolf Hitler's and Fidel Castro's atrocities, a handful of conservative lawmakers have filed a bill to prohibit police from compiling gun-owner and gun-sale lists, saying it infringes on citizens' rights to privacy and to own firearms.

The proposal, supported by the National Rifle Association, says the records are not legitimate law-enforcement tools and are instead part of ``a phony excuse to harass and abuse American citizens.''

The bill will be heard today in a House judiciary committee alongside two other measures likely to provoke controversy.

One would ''immunize'' gun ranges from environmental lawsuits concerning lead and arsenic poisoning from ammunition. The other seeks to amend the state Constitution's right of privacy to give parents potential authority over an underage daughter's abortion.

If approved by the committee, they could be among the first bills passed by the House in 2004.

Rep. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican, said he's troubled by the idea that police agencies across the state are tracking people who are exercising a right enshrined in the state and U.S. constitutions.

PRIME SPONSOR

Baxley said he's the prime sponsor of the NRA-backed bill limiting the liabilities of the 400 gun ranges in Florida because he wants to prevent ''environmental extremism.'' He's also co-sponsoring the gun-tracking bill with Rep. Lindsay Harrington, R-Punta Gorda.

A government employee who violates the provisions of the gun-tracking bill could face a five-year prison sentence and a fine of $5,000. The agency involved could be fined another $250,000 but wouldn't be required to furnish the employee with a taxpayer-backed lawyer.

''We're at a point in our history where the government is trying to slowly take away our rights, piece by piece, and I'm trying to stop that,'' Baxley said. ``By accumulating all this data, it could fall into the wrong hands. And that could be a treacherous thing.''

To drive the point home, the gun-tracking bill mentions Hitler and Castro by name and says both favored gun control and registration to maintain control over the population.

''It's clear what's going on here. These are polarizing social issues designed to excite conservatives in an election year,'' said Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach. ``But what's really offensive is the way they're going about it. The most outrageous thing is invoking the atrocities of the Holocaust to pass what's really an anti law-enforcement bill. It's in bad taste.''

Gelber, a former federal prosecutor, said that prohibiting police and prosecutors from tracking gun ownership will hamper law enforcement agencies, which often collect gun-sale information from pawnshops, gun stores and even federal authorities. They then use that data to establish a chain of custody in gun-crime cases to prove that a weapon was in a perpetrator's hand.

Police track the gun's serial number in a fashion similar to the way they can track a car's license plate.

The Miami-Dade state attorney's office said Tuesday that gun-tracking records have helped prosecutors catch and convict criminals.

In one case, a group of Miami police officers who stole a gun from a drug dealer and planted it on a suspect were caught after police tracked the gun to a previous arrest made by one of the officers. In another instance, prosecutors tracked a gun to the father of a man accused of shooting three of his Miami Beach neighbors in June after a birthday party kept him awake. The father told police he had given his son the gun.

The state attorney's office executive director, Theodore Mannelli, said the cases underscore the importance of collecting and storing gun-related data. Still, he said, the office has yet to take a position on the bill.

EARLY IN PROCESS

''We're still early in the process, so we want to see how this evolves,'' Mannelli said. ``But we do have some concerns.''

Among them: The bill doesn't clearly spell out when police agencies can collect gun-ownership information. And the measure seems to conflict with a law requiring pawnshops to furnish police with records of gun purchases, which the shop owners must keep for a year.

posted 11-20-2003 03:48 PM            

quote:

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''If you don't have to register your television sets and your steak knives, which aren't protected by the Constitution, why do police have the right to track this?'' NRA board member Marion Hammer said.

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