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Thugs still reign in Taxachusetts "At which point I noticed an 18-wheeler looming in my rearview mirror,"
Ms. Hamilton writes. "He drove up to within 10 feet of my Blazer, and then
lunged his truck at my vehicle as if he was going to ram it. He pulled out
as if to pass me -- we were on a two-lane road -- and then pulled back in
behind me. He repeated this behavior four times.
"I was in fear for my life. For over a quarter mile there is no place to
pull over. There were no other people around."
So, Hamilton took out the snubnosed .38 Rossi she's licensed by the state
to carry. "I put it in my right hand and put my hand back on the steering
wheel. The truck driver immediately backed off. I pulled in at the first
place there were people and a pay phone. I called the Shelburne State
Police barracks and told them of the incident, thinking, of course, that
they could intercept the trucker before he hurt someone.
"As soon as I mentioned what I had done with my gun, I was put on the
defensive by the officer on the phone. Instead of thanking me for handling
the situation in a responsible way, which protected me and hurt no one, the
issue suddenly became the gun and only the gun, and not the fact that lives
were in jeopardy from an out-of-control trucker. The trooper said to me,
'You should not have drawn your gun; a complaint could be filed.' "
"Excuuuse me," Ms. Hamilton writes, "but why on earth am I carrying a
gun? To keep my hip warm?"
The cops know who the trucker was, but won't tell Linda Hamilton or her
husband Russ. Instead, a couple of lady troopers named Robertson and Curran
flagged Ms. Hamilton down, asked her permission to search her vehicle,
searched it anyway when she refused permission, found and seized her
legally licensed revolver.
Fortunately, Russ Hamilton tells me Massachusetts (unlike many states)
has no easily misinterpreted law against "brandishing" a weapon. The Gun
Owners Action League referred the Hamiltons to attorney Robert Chesbro in
Williamstown. The Hamiltons plan to sue the state for assault and battery
(Mrs. Hamilton was frisked without evidence of any crime), theft of her
revolver (which the police still have) and concealing the name of the truck
driver who started the whole thing.
"I put them on notice they were leaving me defenseless, and that I wanted
a police escort home," Mrs. Hamilton adds. "They refused."
Taxachusetts, of course, has so far abandoned the tradition of Lexington
and Concord (where Redcoat efforts to seize civilian arms were not well
received) that their welcoming billboards now read: "Have A Gun, Go To
Jail."
While Russ Hamilton says the cops are dead wrong -- "Under Massachusetts
law you can keep a loaded firearm in your vehicle if you're a licensed
owner; you can have it taped to the window if you so desire," he also
admits: "We stopped one mile short. We found a piece of land we liked, but
it's one mile short of Vermont. In Vermont there are no gun laws
whatsoever, and it has the lowest crime rate in the U.S. We kick ourselves
in the butt that we missed it by one mile."
Tina Terry offers more -- including a photostat of Linda Hamilton's
handgun permit -- at
www.sierratimes.com/artt030600.htm.
Meantime, maybe the Second Amendment isn't dead in courts, after all.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals -- which overturned the original
"gun-free school zones" law -- has announced it will hear oral arguments
this spring in the Emerson case.
Federal Judge Sam Cummings of the Northern District of Texas last year
dismissed an indictment against Timothy Joe Emerson for possession of a
firearm while under a temporary restraining order routinely issued during
his divorce case. In doing so, Judge Cummings specifically rejected the
government's claim that the Second Amendment is some kind of "collective"
right pertaining only to the National Guard.
Judge Cummings' ruling refutes the bogus "collective rights" theory, and
demonstrates in detail why the individual-right interpretation,
significantly known as the "Standard Model" in the academic literature and
now embraced even by liberals like Harvard's Laurence Tribe, is proper.
Specifically, Judge Cummings ruled that the subordinate "militia" clause
in no way negates or limits the independent "right of the people" clause,
and further notes the U.S. Supreme Court has determined "the people" should
be interpreted similarly in the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth
amendments.
"This decision helps protect gun owners from the ever-increasing classes
of people prohibited from gun ownership," comments Alan Gottlieb, head of
the Second Amendment Foundation. "Without a court willing to step in and
put a halt to this practice, eventually anyone with a parking or speeding
ticket could be prevented from gun ownership. This could be the pure Second
Amendment case that gun owners have been praying for over the past
half-century."
More details:
www.saf.org/EmersonViewOptions.html.
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