Re: 4th ammendment and Cryptography

["Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>]

This is a rant. It doesn't belong in cypherpunks. Anyone who wants to
discuss this further is invited to send me mail.

Phil Karn says:
> Well, according to the authors, "The courts have overwhelmingly
> supported the collective-rights interpretation" of the Second
> Amendment.

"... 'the people' seems to have been a term of art employed in
select parts of the Constitution.  The Preamble declares that the
Constitution is ordained, and established by 'the people of the
the U.S.'  The Second Amendment protects the right of the people
to keep and bear Arms ...."
	- Supreme Court of the U.S.,  U.S. v. Uerdugo-Uriquidez (1990).

I keep up with this stuff. There is every indication that the court
damn well knows that there is one and only one way to interpret the
paragraph in question and just refuses for political reasons to take a
case.

> the federal government, keeping it from passing legislation that would
> infringe on a state's right to arm and train its militia [...] On
> December 6, 1982, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
> affirmed [...] Under the controlling authority of the only Supreme
> Court case to address the scope of the Second Amendment, US v Miller,
> the court concluded that 'the right to keep and bear handguns is not
> guaranteed by the Second Amendment'. The US Supreme Court declined to
> hear the case, letting the lower-court rulings stand."

Miller was about a sawed off shotgun, not handguns. Miller explicitly
stated that ownership of military weapons was protected and that the
narrow grounds for finding against Miller was that no evidence was
presented that shotguns were a military weapon. Since .45ACP have been
military sidearms for the better part of a century, the logic in
question is, well, questionable.

> You may well disagree with this state of affairs, but can you say that
> any of this factual information about court rulings is reported
> incorrectly?

Yes. Thats precisely what I'm saying, Phil. I've been to Handgun
Control Incorporated meetings, Phil, and they virtually tell their
members to lie. I say this from personal knowledge. They operate a
mindless propaganda machine in which virtually no one questions that
any tactic no matter how underhanded is perfectly acceptable to the
holy cause of total bans on possession of firearms. You don't have to
believe me, either. Hear it from their own words:

"We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step
is necessarily -- given the political realities -- going to be very
modest ... So then we'll have to start working again to strengthen
the law, and then again to strengthen the next law, and maybe again
and again.  Right now, though, we'd be satisfied not with half a loaf
but with a slice.  Our ultimate goal -- total control of handguns in
the United States -- is going to take time ....  The first problem is
to slow down the increasing number of guns being produced and sold in
this country.  The second problem is to get handguns registered.  And
the final problem is to make the possession of *all* handguns and
*all* handgun ammunition -- except for the military, policemen,
licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun
collectors -- totally illegal."
	- Pete Shields, Chairman Emeritus, Handgun Control, Inc.
	( "The New Yorker", July 26, 1976 )

The amount of propaganda being spread about guns is astonishing. At
this point, the public barely knows the difference between automatic
weapons (machine guns and the like), semi-automatics (which merely
means a gun that fires a bullet every time you pull the trigger) and
the mythical class of "assault weapons." For everyone's information,
an "assault weapon" in military terminology can refer only to a fully
automatic weapon, and virtually none are sold in the U.S. To my
knowledge, no legally owned fully automatic weapon has been used in a
crime in the U.S. in decades.

HCI constantly pretends that the NRA and others are arguing for the
right to "hunt" and claims that there is no "sporting purpose" to
"assault weapons". In fact, the NRA, which is not allowed by any of
the networks or major magazines or newspapers to place any ads (not a
joke!) defends the ownership of guns as part of the right to self
defense and in any case there is no such thing as a "hunting rifle"
versus a "military weapon" in any feature of design or manufacture.
There are also constant lies about "newer more potent guns" when no
significant change in gun design this century. The standard military
sidearm of the U.S. Army untill a few years ago, the M1911, was
designed in, you guessed it, 1911! (The evil "black talon" ammo they
were mouthing off about recently was nothing more than ordinary hollow
point ammo with a creative name. Dum-Dum ammo has been around since
the middle of the last century!)

The fact of the matter is that the guns available to the public have
been getting less and less powerful over the years, while the crime
rate has been rising. The fact also is that jurisdictions that permit
concealed carry almost immediately get a reduction in crime rate --
the murder rate in Florida dropped 30% after a nondiscretionary carry
permit law was put into place -- where jurisdictions that ban guns
experience increases in the rates.

If you want, I'll recommend five or six books on this subject.

> That the Supreme Court declined to hear the case can only mean that
> they agreed with the Appeals Court decision and almost certainly
> would have voted to uphold it. Otherwise enough justices would have
> voted to hear it on appeal.

Thats untrue. From the early 1960s until a few years ago the court
constantly refused to hear cases on flag burning EVEN THOUGH it was
obvious what the opinion of the court would be given dozens of
symbolic speech cases. Sure enough, as soon as they heard such a case,
they threw out the law. Why didn't they hear the cases before then?
The usual speculation is that the court didn't want the political
flack that they were sure would come from the decision.

> Once again, I would like to say that tying cryptography to the Second
> Amendment is exceptionally bad strategy for the Cypherpunks.

This is not an unreasonable opinion given the insane climate we have
now in this country. However, this is NOT to say that the second
amendment does not say what it means and mean what it says.

> Worst of all are the complete loonies (some apparently on this list)
> who assert that guns are an essential protection against a tyrannical
> US Federal Government. Those who believe this have apparently never
> heard of the US Civil War, because the South tried exactly this over
> 130 years ago. (They failed, BTW.)

They failed after conducting a war that lasted for years. I would
argue that they fairly well demonstrated that it is possible to
conduct a fairly solid resistance even without sophisticated weapons.

> It succeeded only in destroying most of an entire generation of
> Americans, along with much of the country. And that was before some
> rather significant advances in US military weaponry, vis a vis
> privately owned weapons.

The Vietnamese managed to beat the American Army even though they had
no such weapons.

Perry