One dark and foggy Georgia night, I heard a knocking on my front door. I rushed to the door, only to hear the echo of horse hooves galloping off in the distance. From the faint glimpse of the rider that I was able to see, he appeared to be wearing a three corner hat and a long flowing cloak. As I turned to go back inside the protective confines of my warm house on that damp and foggy evening, I noticed a parchment scroll attached to our large brass doorknocker. Reading it by the warm glow of the fireplace, I soon realized that the scroll contained a message of great importance. Quickly, I sat down at my computer to generate an ascii file that would help spread the word much more quickly than the mysterious rider who had appeared at my door that evening. Let's all do our part to help that rider, whoever he was, and help spread the word far and wide across the land for all to see and hear WHY THE STAGGERS INSTANT BACKGROUND CHECK IS NOT A HARMLESS ALTERNATIVE TO THE BRADY BILL and THE DAMAGE BEING DONE BY THOSE WHO ARE SUPPORTING IT by PUBLIUS Many gun owners are embracing the notion of the instant background check as if it were some kind of life preserver in the stormy seas of gun control. Rather than putting on a life jacket, they are trying to swim with a rock! The instant background check is itself gun control. It is something that would normally be unacceptable those who we find to be supporting it. The people supporting the measure can only whine in its defense, "Well, isn't it better than the Brady Bill?" Who said we had to choose? The National Rifle Association, which many of us have supported as a bulwark against gun control, has been promoting the instant background check as "Gun Control That Works!" as if we had been supporting the NRA in a search for that "perfect" gun control law. When questioned on this issue, NRA representatives say, "We are going to get something; it's better than the Brady Bill." Be careful what you wish for; you might get it. Their support of Staggers puts the anti-gun lobby in a position to say, "See, now even the NRA admits we need waiting periods and background checks!" Anyone who has ever set up an ambush or been caught in one should be able to see what has happened. Upon recognizing the threat of the Brady Bill on one side of the road, gun owners, under the leadership of the NRA are diving for cover in the booby-trap filled ditches on the other side of the road. Either way we've had it. The only way to survive an ambush is not to walk into it. We have already walked into it. If you do find yourself in a kill zone, your only hope to salvage anything is to attack. Sometimes, you must attack in two directions. Anyone reading this article will know that the Brady Bill is wrong and illegal. We will now set forth some arguments against the Staggers Instant Background Check. The biggest difference between the Brady Bill and the Staggers Instant Background Check is about 168 hours, assuming the Staggers process is actually instant which is not guaranteed in its language. No right thinking citizen will deny that the Brady Bill infringes on his Constitutionally guaranteed rights. Does the Staggers Bill pass the constitutional test since it infringes your right "instantly?" Just because it's fast doesn't mean it's Constitutional. Both bills convert your right into a privilege held hostage to the whim of bureaucrats and government employees. To quote Senator Joe Biden, "As the Supreme Court has written, 'The fact that a given procedure is efficient, convenient, and useful in facilitating the functions of the Government will not save it if it is contrary to the Constitution.' "-- Congressional Record, January 10, 1991, page S121. Many are under the impression that the database to be compiled under the Staggers Bill will include only prohibited people. Nowhere in the bill is the compilation of data restricted to prohibited persons. The language of the Staggers Bill grants broad, sweeping powers to the Attorney General when it comes to his mandate to create the database he will need to interdict sales of handguns to prohibited persons. The Staggers Bill gives the Attorney General the power to collect data "NOTWITHSTANDING ANY OTHER PROVISION OF LAW." Under Staggers, nothing will be confidential. If the bill is to ever accomplish its stated purpose, at some point in the future, it will have to be determined that one's absence from the database will have to be cause for rejection. The reason for this is that if you are not in the database, you might be an illegal alien, who is restricted but would not be on any database, or you might be using false credentials to avoid being rejected. Thus, if you are not on the database, you will have to be rejected since you can not prove your eligibility to purchase. Anyone who gives a false name and social security number that doesn't happen to match the data on a restricted person will be able to walk out with a gun. Therefore, the database will have to include all citizens who would not be rejected should they try to purchase a gun as well as those who would be rejected. If it is set up this way, it constitutes a major civil rights problem with many privacy issues at stake. If it is not set up this way, they can not promise that it will be instant or "effective." Either way, the bill and its promises are frauds. Some of you are asking, "Well, if they're gonna lie, they'll get a gun anyway, right?" RIGHT! So if THEY're going to lie, why bother checking US? Remember, whenever the Government constructs something that doesn't work, they never throw it out, they try to fix it. Given the cultural paradigms we are facing, crime will continue to increase with or without gun control; if this bill is in place and the rate goes up, they will try to "improve" it. You can do a lot of "improving" if you are mandated and licensed to do so "NOTWITHSTANDING ANY OTHER PROVISION OF LAW!" As to the accuracy of the database, we can only speculate and look to other government agencies or private credit reporting services as examples of how accurate these records might be and what might be involved in correcting errors. To comment further is probably unnecessary. The bill as written only applies to handguns. It is called, "The Felon Handgun Purchase Prevention Act of 1991." Since the same restrictions that prevent restricted people from owning handguns also prevent them from owning any guns, how long do you think it will be before we have the "Felon Firearms Purchase Prevention Act of 19XX?" This might not be necessary, however, because the bill as written perpetuates the ambiguous definition of "handgun" from the Gun Control Act of 1968 to include "a firearm... designed and intended to be fired by the use of a single hand." The question of "intent" is always a tricky legal point. Many people shoot pistols with two hands; certain movie stars have been known to fire M-60 belt-fed machine guns with one hand. Unfortunately, the technical experts of the NRA have left enough ambiguity in this definition for the anti-gun faction to exploit to our disadvantage. Then, as the crime rate continues to soar, they might substitute another term for "Felon," ad infinitum. Deep inside, gun owners and activists know this is the anti-gun agenda, yet we find them supporting the bill. Along with illegal aliens and convicted felons, the following classes of people are prohibited from purchasing firearms under section 922 (g) of title 18, United States Code, which is referenced in the Staggers Bill: 1) Any Fugitive from Justice. 2) Anyone who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance. 3) Anyone who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution. 4) Anybody Dishonorably Discharged from the Armed Forces. 5) Anyone who has renounced his U.S. Citizenship. 6) Anyone who has been indicted by a Grand Jury or accused by a Prosecuting Attorney of a Felony. The Attorney General is mandated by the Staggers Bill to prohibit any and all of the above classes of people from purchasing a handgun by so identifying them on the Hotline. He is authorized to collect, compile and use this information. As the Staggers Bill provides, "NOTWITHSTANDING ANY OTHER PROVISION OF LAW, the Attorney General may secure directly from any department or agency of the United States such information on persons for whom the receipt of a handgun would violate section 922(g) of Title 18, United States Code." Given the scope of the information required and the sources from which it might be obtained, one can clearly see that no aspect of anyone's life will be safe from the scrutiny of the Department of Justice. In case you might one day wish to buy a gun, the Attorney General will have the authority to compile on you a file that will include a review of your military record, medical (mental health) records, census data, NCIC and criminal records, and social security number, which will be your Federal Identification Number for handgun purchases under Staggers. It would not be outside the mandate of the Attorney General to require testing of blood or urine samples at the point of sale to prove that you are not an unlawful user of or addicted to controlled substances. Nor would it be outside his mandate to require that you take a loyalty oath or pledge allegiance to the flag to demonstrate that you have not renounced your United States Citizenship. At this point, some of you understand that the Staggers Bill is not as harmless as it appears and you oppose it. Most of you, however, are lapsing into denial. You are saying, "I don't care what they find out about me, I don't have anything to hide ." Or, "Sure such a database could be abused if it fell into the wrong hands, but it can't happen here, this is America. We have Constitutionally protected rights. Besides, the Staggers bill is specific in its instructions that the data collected can not be used for any other purpose or shared with any other agencies!" We won't bore you with the predictable, worn out comparisons to Nazi Germany. After all, that can't happen here. The following passage, however, might give you a new slant on something that did happen here. "That same day Dr. Henry Field...was summoned to Grace Tully's office...She told Field that the President was ordering him to produce, in the shortest time possible, the full names and addresses of each American-born and foreign-born Japanese listed by locality within each state...She explained it was to be done by using the 1930 and 1940 censuses... ...The project had begun less than 90 Minutes after Grace Tully had given the assignment. Field telephoned her that all was going well but he needed security from the Marine Corps. Soon each entrance to the Census Building was guarded by an armed Marine. In the meantime a bank of IBM sorting machines was set up to extract the Orientals for each state from 110,000,000 cards; then they were to be resorted for the Japanese. The Census Bureau finally had the name and address of every Japanese in the United States, a total of 126,947...Copies were distributed to the FBI and the governors and military commanders in each state. --From Infamy by John Toland, Berkley Books, New York, 1982. According to author Toland, the above occurred around November 26, 1941; eleven days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was, then, no state of emergency. This must have been done by Executive Order or bureaucratic whim. If you doubt the above, have you ever wondered how the Government was able to find all the Japanese so quickly after the attack? The wording of the Census Act guaranteed that the above could not happen. The guarantees of the Staggers Bill regarding the confidentiality of the database that it would create are every bit as strong. The question, then, is that if we can not guarantee, even by law, that such a database will not be abused, why create it? Especially, why allow it to be compiled when the expressed intention of such a database is to infringe one of our rights? With the Staggers machinery for denial in place, it would only take a stroke of a pen to build a waiting period into it or to include parameters for rejection that do not at this moment exist. For example, crime in the cities could be stopped by denying permission to purchase to people of a particular Zip Code, or of a particular race; or how about this for a safety measure: No handgun sales to people with children under 12. There are people who would support that. If we had had this machinery in place during the War in the Gulf recently, we could have denied all Arab Americans access to guns. Remember, under Staggers, "NOTWITHSTANDING ANY OTHER PROVISION OF LAW," the Attorney General will have access to all the census records we filled out last year. Those of you who are still in denial are thinking, "Well, that's extreme. It wouldn't happen. We might have detained ethnic minorities in camps back in the 40's, but that was then. This is now; there are organizations that would stop that kind of thing. The ACLU, the SCLC, the NAACP, the ADL, would intervene if firearms purchases were denied on the basis of race, ethnic background, religion, Zip Code, or anything like that." This is wishful thinking. Every major "Civil Rights" organization in this country is rabidly dedicated to disarming anyone they can, regardless of race, color, creed, or national origin. While the Brady Bill is specific in its infringement of our rights, the Staggers Bill is more like a computer with many expansion ports. As written, it may not seem that powerful. But give the bureaucrats some more of our money, and a little time, and they will build it into an infringement machine that will leave the authors of the Brady Bill with their heads spinning in disbelief and marveling at its efficiency. To sum up the argument: In order to avoid being subjected to the prior restraint of the Brady Bill, which itself is unacceptable, unlawful, and unconstitutional, we are being asked to accept the prior restraint of the Staggers Bill which converts our right into a privilege and creates a database/bureaucracy which could be used to further infringe our Second Amendment Right and all our other rights. If Staggers is passed with our help, or our approval, or without our trying to stop it, they can not only claim victory but our sanction as well. And that is the greatest victory we could ever give them. They might be able to deny our rights through force or deception, but we don't truly lose our rights until we give our sanction and blessing by supporting legislation like the Staggers Bill. PUBLIUS is a pseudonym for The Big Truth, Inc., an organization dedicated to the proposition that if you can tell the TRUTH OFTEN enough and LOUDLY enough, people will come to believe it.