Deceptions and True Intentions of the so-called
Million Mom March
Santa Clara MMM meeting - not
"open to the public"
by Michael Pelletier
mike@aidoann.com
February 3, 2001
On Monday, January 29th, in the words of their
press release, "The Santa Clara County chapter of the Million Mom March
invites the public to attend..." their first meeting. This was published in
the San Jose Mercury News, and Janet Conn, a project manager at Cisco Systems (http://www.cisco.com/),
made an appearance on television news that morning promoting the meeting.
Featured speakers were to be San Jose Police
Chief Willam Lansdowne, Los Gatos Police Chief Larry Todd, and Santa Clara
County District Attorney Stan Voyles.
Silicon Valley NRA Members' Council president
Daryl Davis spoke with Ms. Conn, who just days before the meeting had said that
gun-rights supporters would be admitted on a space-available basis in the
200-seat ballroom, and would be allowed to sit and listen if they were not
disruptive. Based on the conduct of self-defense supporters at the Santa Cruz
meeting of the MMM, she had absolutely no reason to expect otherwise.
But when nearly 100 supporters of the right to
armed self-defense arrived at 6:00pm, and the MMM faced the prospect of being
outnumbered two to one by self-defense advocates, the rules of the game changed.
The meeting was no longer "open to the
public," but instead, what Duane Darr described as an ideological
"brown paper bag" test was administered at the door. Just as in the
Jim Crow south, where you were denied entry if you were darker than a brown
paper bag pinned to the door, here you were denied entry if you were less than
an enthusiastic supporter or member of the MMM.
One woman, who lost her cousin to the infamous
"Night Stalker" serial killer in Los Angeles, and who as a result
believes that every woman deserves the choice to use firearms in self-defense,
was told, "you're not the kind of victim we're looking for." She was
rebuffed even after she offered to pay $20 and join the MMM just to get in the
meeting.
Another woman was asked by Janet Conn to turn
off a tape recorder she was using to record the meeting.
What are they afraid of the public finding out,
I wonder? Based on these comments from an anonymous attendee of the meeting, it
would appear that it's the utter hypocrisy of our public officials:
"The second speaker, Chief Lansdowne,
was easy to understand -- he seems to change his firearms stance based on the
audience he is speaking to. At this MMM meeting, he used many superlatives
describing the MMM efforts to pass strong anti-gun ownership legislation. He
also spoke of his efforts to shut down gun dealers and gun shows in the San
Francisco East Bay while chief of police in Richmond. When he spoke at the
Silicon Valley NRA Members' Council this past year, he strongly supported the
firearms group."
Chief Lansdowne is the former Chief of the
Richmond, California police department, which is being sued along with the
Contra Costa county Sheriff by Jim March over discriminatory practices,
cronyism, and racial redlining in the issuance of concealed carry permits. http://www.dd-b.net/~equalccw/
"Chief Todd was the third speaker. He
talked about strategy in passing gun control legislation. He said the MMMers
should not vote for all gun control proposals, but rather vote for selected
bills. He says the goal is to eliminate the gun culture in the this country,
and that it needs to be done slowly, to avoid angering the people who disagree
with gun control. Chief Todd is a member of several police organizations, and
active on their respective gun control policy committees. He said it is good
to have a mixture of doctors, police and victims as part of the MMM
contingent. I found it odd that he also thought it was nice that people were
rising up against gun control like people did in the '70's against the Vietnam
War. Again, for those who care, he wore his shield on his left breast pocket
while making the presentation in a gray jacket and tie. If he appears in
public on duty in this outfit, he was in uniform while making this
presentation."
[ For a flyer to pass around about Police
Chief Larry "Oath Breaker" Todd, choose one of the following
formats, and send it far and wide: .html
- .pdf ]
Chief Todd is one of the more outspoken
gun-haters in our region of the country. However, he has the distinction of
running a department that recorded the actual commission of a grisly murder on a
911 tape, while the unarmed victim was waiting for the good guys with guns,
Chief Todd's employees, to arrive.
Chief Todd says that the goal is to
"eliminate the gun culture," hmm, where have we heard that before? Ah
yes, Hitler's goal was to eliminate the Jewish culture in Europe. And indeed, he
proceeded towards that goal slowly and behind closed doors, to avoid angering
the people who disagreed with it.
Who says that the gun-banners haven't learned
anything from history?
With respect to the "in uniform"
question - California Government Code section 3206 reads:
3206. No officer or employee of a local agency
shall participate in political activities of any kind while in uniform.
"Assistant Santa Clara District Attorney
Stan Voyles was perhaps the most inflammatory of the speakers. He presented
the facts and statistics that the MMM uses to justify its cause. He cited
numbers showing gun homicides in the US versus other industrialized countries.
He reiterated that over 3,000 children are killed with firearms each year in
the US. He then went on to contrast those values with numbers killed in wars.
Voyles then illustrated that the weapon of choice in California for a majority
of crimes was the handgun. Then he went on the offensive against the NRA and
stated that what the NRA has to say about the Second Amendment amounts to
fraud. Could the MMM's be planning a new law suit strategy against the NRA? He
went on to claim that there are no court cases supporting the individual
ownership interpretation and that NRA has abandoned any Second Amendment
arguments to oppose gun control."
The firearms rights contingent is being accused
of "fraud" while he's calling 17, 18, and 19 year-old gang members
"children."
He's accusing us of "fraud" when the
MMM claims in their flyer - http://www.scmillionmommarch.org/flyer2.pdf
- that 77% of all incidents of school violence involve guns, when the study they
cite - http://www.nssc1.org/savd/savd.htm
- only touches on DEATHS, not "all incidents," and the 77% is out of
281 incidents over 8 years, or 75 millionths of one percent of the 47 million
public school students.
"MMM Founder Mary Leigh Blek was the
next speaker. We could not stay for much of her presentation. However, we
found it strange that she is a professed Republican yet a huge supporter of
Hillary Rodham Clinton and efforts to pass stronger gun control legislation in
the US Senate."
Who's REALLY being fraudulent, I wonder? Who
was really lying to the 50 attendees of that meeting, District Attorney Stan
Voyles, Mary Leigh Blek, or the 100 people standing 100 yards away from the
hotel entrance on the public sidewalk, carrying signs that read "Armed
Women Prevent Rape?"
I can't adequately express my pride at being
associated with the crowd of stalwart self-defense supporters who braved the
chilly night air for three hours to stand out on the sidewalk in front of the
Marriott holding signs and waving at honking passerby.
These people, individuals of all races, from
all walks of life, are the true patriots. And though they were not allowed in to
the meeting to hear what their elected public officials had to say, and indeed
were not even allowed on the property of the hotel, working together we scored a
victory for freedom and against those who would conspire behind closed doors to
take away our right to choose.
Predictably, press coverage was minimal -
Channel 11, even after being called and told of the hundred assembled freedom
advocates in front of the hotel, did not show up. Channel 4 took some tape, but
aired a cursory report the following morning. Reportedly, the Mercury News was
there, but I have yet to see a report on the exclusion of the public from this
meeting.
What's important to note is that California has
had some of the most stringent gun control laws in the nation, nearly every
point of legislation that the MMM calls for, yet the leading tool of choice for
criminals here is still the handgun.
The failure to recognize this fact leads me to
conclude that the efforts of the MMM in California are not primarily about crime
and violence prevention, but rather nothing short of a cultural war against
law-abiding gun owners. Where will this lead? Certainly not to less crime and
violence.
The insights gained at this meeting are
valuable, as they help us know what we are up against -- a deliberately slow,
systematic, destruction of the law-abiding gun-owner's way of life through
stealthy and innocuous legislation crafted behind a rope barrier, an idealogical
litmus test, and closed doors, in a meeting that was fraudulently advertised as
"open to the public."
When you are standing in line for the showers,
it's too late to object.
We need to get active, loud, and involved. Join
your local NRA Members' Council in California - http://www.ca-rkba.org/.
If there's not one in your area, start one! Don't wait for someone else to take
action before you "have time" to defend your freedoms.
Stand up against the systematic destruction of
the "gun culture," *your* culture! Get in the game, because Chief Todd
sure is.
Michael Pelletier
Self Defense is Common Sense
http://www.a-human-right.com/
http://www.firearmsfreedom.net/guncontrol/
For a flyer to pass around about Police Chief
Larry "Oath Breaker" Todd, choose one of the following formats, and
send it far and wide: .html
- .pdf.
For more information about the gun bigots
falsely calling themselves the "Million Mom March," feel free to read
any of the following:
