-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! CONGRESS ACTION: January 7, 2001 ================= INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT: "When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it." -- Bill Clinton. Note the egomaniacal "we wrote", and the freedom that he thinks was given to Americans -- in Clinton's world-view, given by government. And what government gives, government can take away. It was precisely to inhibit power hungry tyrants in government that the Founders of this country made clear that our rights and our freedom came from a source higher than government -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.". On December 31, Bill Clinton tried to relegate the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights into irrelevance, by directing the United States to become a signatory to the International Criminal Court. Never before has an American President demonstrated such a breathtaking contempt for the fundamental principles of individual liberty that form the foundation of this republic. Clinton's agreement to the ICC has been applauded by the usual globalists who think that global governance by unaccountable international bureaucrats is just great, and who think that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights pose intolerable burdens (except when used to obstruct the just punishment of some depraved criminal) to implementing their vision of a socialist utopia. How bad is this International Criminal Court? By our Constitution and Bill of Rights, Americans are guaranteed certain fundamental rights that the Founders of this country deemed important enough to fight a revolutionary war over. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders detailed a "history of repeated injuries and usurpations" that justified the American revolution. Included in those "injuries and usurpations" were the following -- "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation." "For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses." Clinton has agreed to abide by an International Criminal Court that subjects U.S. citizens to "a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution", a Court that is authorized to transport American citizens to foreign jurisdictions for criminal trials on "pretended offenses". In agreeing to the authority of the ICC, Clinton claimed that there is no risk to American citizens because the ICC "is authorized to take action against a suspect only if the country of nationality is unwilling or unable to investigate allegations.". Yet if some anti-American government makes a patently ludicrous charge against a U.S. citizen operating on some peacekeeping mission, for example, and the U.S. government refuses to prosecute those charges, the ICC may then, by Clinton's own admission, initiate prosecution. And the judges of the ICC themselves are the final arbiters of the extent and legitimacy of their own jurisdiction. In the American criminal justice system, public prosecutors are bound by an Ethical Canon stating that their "duty is to seek justice, not merely to convict." The ICC prosecutors are bound by no such limitation, which is symbolic of the pernicious potential of this entire undertaking. ".nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.". -- Bill of Rights, Fifth Amendment. The ICC allows multiple retrials of acquittals, until a conviction is obtained. There is no right of appeal for a conviction outside of the ICC itself. "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, .to be confronted with the witnesses against him.". -- Bill of Rights, Sixth Amendment. The ICC does not require a public trial (secret trials are the norm for previous tribunals upon which the ICC was patterned); there is no right to a jury trial (guilt is decided solely by judges); and hearsay "evidence" from secret and unidentified witnesses is permitted. If Clinton wasn't leaving office in two weeks, this contempt for our Constitution would alone justify his impeachment and removal from office. The agreement to be bound by the ICC must be submitted to the Senate for ratification, but as with so many of his globalist schemes that he knows are unacceptable to a majority of Americans, Clinton has given no indication that he will submit the ICC to the Senate during his remaining tenure. The signing was for show, simply another way to demonstrate his utter contempt for our Constitution and our national sovereignty. If it ever is submitted for ratification, any Senators who vote in favor of this insult to our civil liberties should themselves be impeached. BRADY BILL -- CRIMINAL'S BEST FRIEND: Bill Clinton has proclaimed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act to be a resounding success. Al Gore's pre-election website proclaimed, "Gore Fought for Enactment of Brady Bill". He was quoted, "We stood up to the gun lobby, to pass the Brady Bill.". The left-wing Brookings Institution proclaimed the Brady Bill to be a crucial component of one of the "Government's 50 Greatest Endeavors of the Past Half Century" in the area of reducing crime. When a politician calls a piece of legislation a success, it must be assumed he means that the legislation has accomplished exactly what was intended for it. So let's see what a "success" the Brady Bill has been, and by Clinton's, Gore's, and the left's own definition, what they intended it to accomplish. On August 2, 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a study titled "Homicide and Suicide Rates Associated With Implementation of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act". The objective of the study was to ".determine whether implementation of the Brady Act was associated with reductions in homicide and suicide rates." Reducing homicide and suicide rates were, after all, the alleged purposes of the Brady Bill in the first place -- the reduction of gun-related deaths. JAMA concluded, "Changes in rates of homicide and suicide for treatment and control states were not significantly different, except for firearm suicides among persons aged 55 years or older. ." Further, ". implementation of the Brady Act appears to have been associated with reductions in the firearm suicide rate for persons aged 55 years or older but not with reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates." In other words, even according to the rabidly anti-firearm American Medical Association, the Brady Bill has been virtually useless in accomplishing its intended purpose -- reducing homicides and gun deaths. So what has been accomplished by the Brady Bill? In November, 2000, the Violence Policy Center published a study called "Less Gun Dealers, Less Crime". The Violence Policy Center study concluded, "The number of federally licensed gun dealers buying and selling firearms off of their kitchen tables has dropped dramatically in the Midwest as a result of the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (the "Brady Law") and the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. In nine midwestern states, the number of Type 1 Federal Firearms License (FFL) holders fell an average of 70 percent as a result of enforcement of little known provisions of these laws." The inclusion of the phrase "buying and selling firearms off of their kitchen tables" was no doubt intended to imply something terribly nefarious about these gun dealers, but clearly note -- these were federally licensed and therefore perfectly legal gun dealers who were driven out of business by those laws. The U.S. Treasury Department, in a report titled "Treasury, ATF Release Firearms Report, Gun Trafficking Actions", dated February 4, 2000, confirms this trend, finding that there has been ".a substantial drop in the number of firearms licensees, from approximately 284,000 in 1992 to 104,000 today." The number of fully legal and licensed firearms dealers nationwide has been cut by nearly two-thirds. So who has really been affected by the Brady Bill? Put another way, who buys guns from federally licensed and legal gun dealers -- those gun dealers who are being driven out of business by the Brady Bill? A May, 1997, study published by the National Institute of Justice titled "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms", concluded that "A major theme highlighted in a 1986 survey of incarcerated felons was that theft was an important means of obtaining firearms for those with criminal intentions...". A Justice Department study showed that 93% of handgun predators had obtained their most recent guns "off-the-record." So for the most part, criminals do not buy their guns from federally licensed and legal gun dealers -- honest citizens do. There is one more piece of the puzzle necessary to understand the enormity of the pernicious assault on lawful gun owners, on the age-old right of self defense, and on the Second Amendment by the anti-firearms extremists. A study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, called "Guns and Crime: Handgun Victimization, Firearm Self-Defense, and Firearm Theft", concluded, "On average in 1987-92 about 83,000 crime victims per year used a firearm to defend themselves or their property." A more recent study by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) concluded, on the basis of data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey, that firearms were used defensively at least 108,000 per year. The NIJ went on to surmise that defensive use of guns may reasonably be as high as 4.7 million annually, and finally concluded, "According to these results, guns are used far more often to defend against crime than to perpetrate crime." To summarize -- the Brady Bill has utterly failed to reduce criminal gun use, suicide, or gun deaths; and it has driven the majority of lawful gun dealers out of business. Criminals rarely buy their guns from licensed gun dealers, which means that criminals have hardly been inconvenienced at all by the Brady Bill. Law abiding gun owners -- the people who buy from those legal gun dealers -- are the people who have found it far more difficult to legally buy a firearm, and who have been effectively disarmed as a result. So criminals proceed on their merry way, preying on their innocent and increasingly disarmed victims, while honest citizens who want a firearm for perfectly lawful and Constitutionally protected reasons are finding it increasingly difficult to buy one legally. Armed criminals and disarmed victims -- the definition of "success" according to the gun control nuts. BUSH NOMINEES: The demagoguery of President elect Bush's cabinet nominees is moving into high gear, with Linda Chavez (Labor Secretary), Gale Norton (Interior Secretary), and especially John Ashroft (Attorney General) as high priority targets of left-wing extremists. But note the tactics employed in these attacks -- misrepresentations, name calling, distortions, and outright lies. Nowhere are the nominees being challenged on a true recitation of their records or their beliefs. Which is quite revealing. The ideology of the left is so intellectually bankrupt and morally debased that lies are all they have left. Yet Senator Trent Lott is offering a patina of legitimacy to those bankrupt leftists by offering to share power with them on Senate committees. What are you getting in return, Mr. Lott? Have the democrats at least agreed to simply start telling the truth? FOR MORE INFORMATION. ======================== International Criminal Court: http://www.un.org/law/icc/index.html Journal of the American Medical Association: http://jama.ama-assn.org/ Brady Act study: http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v284n5/abs/joc91749.html Violence Policy Center: http://www.vpc.org/ Dealers eliminated study: http://www.vpc.org/studies/fflcont.htm U.S. Treasury Department: "Treasury, ATF Release Firearms Report, Gun Trafficking Actions": http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/ps373.htm National Institute of Justice Research in Brief: http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/165476.txt Bureau of Justice Statistics; "National Crime Victimization Survey": http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/hvfsdaft.txt Brookings Institution ("Government's 50 Greatest Endeavors of the Past Half Century"): http://www.brook.edu/gs/cps/50ge/50ge_hp.htm ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mr. Kim Weissman [EMAIL PROTECTED] *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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