My letter regarding the Wall Street Journal Editorial by Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Mark Helprin: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/mhelprin/?id=65000222 WRITTEN ON WATER A Compromise on Guns Second Amendment absolutists are wrong. So are those who would ignore the right to bear arms. BY MARK HELPRIN Tuesday, September 5, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT __ [Sending letter to WSJ editor via their web page and Helprin via Claremont Institute] Editor, While Mark Helprin's September 5 Wall Street Journal editorial about trading mandated training for already Constitutionally guaranteed access to firearms is provocative, it's based on several misinformed concepts. The author presupposes the common flawed assumption that gun control can somehow restrain criminals. It does not. "In some places, such as the City of New York, Republican mayor or not, the [Second] amendment has not been upheld. In others, perhaps it is upheld too extravagantly, with the result that criminals find access to firearms more readily than anyone except criminals would want." Helprin repeats this flawed assumption in raising his main issue, exchanging more uniform access to arms for formalized training, i.e. creating the "well regulated" militia: "An obvious compromise is to trade the increased regulation of the right for its expansion and guarantee. That is, closer scrutiny and thorough training, so as to keep firearms from the hands of criminals and incompetents, in return for the assured and expanded access of law-abiding citizens to these means required for self-protection and to effect the not inconsequential balance between the powers of the citizenry and the powers of the state." Again, this is a false equation since training requirements and background checks do not in any significant way diminish or affect criminal access to guns. James Wright's research for the National Institute of Justice has repeatedly proven that 90%+ of criminals do not acquire their guns through legal means. Therefore gun control affects them little if at all. It's worth noting that violent crime and criminal access to guns, including submachineguns, is skyrocketing in Great Britain since the government there confiscated most arms from the law-abiding, so near-total gun bans don't work either. As we have seen in California Assemblyman Jack Scott's proposed handgun owner licensing and training bill, AB 273, the vague and underspecified training requirements are a significant burden to both local law enforcement and honest citizens seeking the safest and most effective means of self-defense. Worse, while training is desirable and currently broadly available from long-established voluntary training and safety groups such as NRA, when mandated by government such a requirement can easily be abused. In a manner reminiscent of the "literacy tests" used to bar pre-civil-rights blacks from voting in the South, gun tests could be easily made so obscure, remote, infrequent, or expensive as to effectively bar access to effective self-defense. On another level should we even be asking this question? Would we accept government licensing of journalists, priests, printing presses, or web servers? If not, what makes government licensing of this explicit right of the people any more palatable? Given that these and other roadblocks to self-defense do little to diminish crime and may even facilitate it by disarming victims, is this really a desirable goal? Jeff Chan