Actions Speak Louder Than Words
By James J. Fotis
LEAA’s Executive Director

There’s a big difference between what you say and what you do. Here’s an example.

A recent poll exposed that 7 out of 10 Americans said they were willing to give up at least some of their civil liberties to improve security in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That’s what people say!

But the results from that poll are a stark contrast to the activities of individuals who are buying guns in droves, the groundbreaking perspective on individual gun rights being pushed by the US Department of Justice, and the attempts by commercial airline pilots to pack heat in the cockpit to prevent future hijackings. That’s what people do!

The difference is striking!!!

The Poll
The national poll was conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. The poll tracked the changes in attitudes of 613 randomly selected voting age Americans who were first interviewed in a survey conducted by ISR right after the attacks.

Political scientist Michael Traugott, a senior research scientist at ISR who directed the studies, said nearly the same 70 percent Americans polled supported a law requiring all adults to carry a national identification card that would include their photograph and Social Security number. About half of those surveyed said they supported random police searches in public places, while fewer than half favored allowing wiretaps of conversations between terrorist suspects and their attorneys. One in four supported giving police the power to conduct random searches of "anyone who appears to be Arab or Muslim," according to the report published in the Washington Post.

It is disturbing to me that a majority of people would be willing to relinquish basic rights. Looking beyond the poll and watching what people are doing tells another story. Frankly, the attitudes of people, according to the poll, seem to be at odds with what people are really doing. Americans are not rallying to hand off their rights. In fact, the opposite is occurring.

For example, instead of forgoing the right to own a gun, more people are arming themselves. Record numbers of first-time gun buyers understandably flocked to retail gun shops in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Gun shop owners in the suburbs of northern Virginia—just a few miles from the Pentagon where one of the hijacked jets crashed—struggled to keep their shelves stocked and reported sales going up 50 to 75 percent since the attacks. Government officials confirmed what retailers already knew.

Applications to purchase handguns in Maryland more than doubled during the week of the attacks. The Virginia State Police, charged with conducting the criminal background checks on gun buyers, reported a 30 percent increase in the number of purchase applications received during the week of the attacks. The FBI, which conducts on-the-spot criminal background checks on gun sales in half the country’s states, said the number of applications increased 15 percent above normal in the two days following the attacks, according to a Post report.

Clearly, the first-time gun buyers purchasing firearms are actively exercising their civil rights—not giving them up—to improve security. “Gun and ammunition sales across the country have risen sharply since Sept. 11 as more Americans take what many consider to be the most personal step toward feeling safer: arming themselves,” wrote Al Baker in a New York Times article.

9-11 Aftermath
The survey polled the same respondents from research conducted half a year earlier, immediately after the attack. The results showed that the same majority percentage of Americans who were willing to give up basic freedoms for more safety on the heels of the attack last year were still willing to do so six months later. An astonishing 70 percent of those polled are comfortable abandoning some of their personal freedoms for a promise of increased protection. That means 7-out-of-10 people link increased safety with the desertion of basic rights.

If it is true then it is a vile disappointment to me! But I don’t believe it. Here’s why.

Soon after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, I watched Americans respond with shock, anger, grief, and resolve—not the wholesale abandonment of our rights as the poll seems to indicate.

When the astonishment of that first-ever suicide attack—using fully fueled jetliners to bomb the World Trade Center’s twin towers and the Dept. of Defense’s Pentagon—subsided, it gave way righteous anger. Americans, particularly the law enforcement community, were angry at the terrorists and their co-conspirators for hatching such a monstrous act, indeed an act of war. We were grief stricken by the human toll and destruction of our sense of safety. We were resolved to pay more attention to brewing threats, hunt down known terrorists, and tighten up our existing security—no one lined up to toss our personal rights into a bonfire. People were fighting back, not backing down.

Columnist Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote that “Freedom isÉthe source of our security. The institutions of freedom are necessary in times of peace and prosperity, but more so in war, just as the first amendment needs defending more against unpopular than popular speech.” Rockwell is right. I witnessed LEAA Members and almost all other Americans seize our freedoms as fervently as they demanded more national security.

Indeed, the attack heightened our awareness of just how vulnerable we really are and at the same time it galvanized our determination to do something about it. As columnist William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote, “What ripened in the aftermath of Sept. 11 was a sensibility of the individual citizen's dependence...on his own resources.” But the poll indicated that Americans want to discard our civil rights for safety—as if our freedoms are somehow the cause of America’s susceptibility to terrorist attacks. But they are not.

Friendly Skies
Instead of giving up rights, like the poll results concluded, Americans want to seize them, and not just over the retail counters of gun shops across the county but in other places too.

Self-defense in the sky is the objective behind a petition signed by more than 20,000 commercial airline pilots that was sent to lawmakers on Capitol Hill in May insisting that they be permitted to bring guns into their cockpits to protect themselves from hijackers. And LEAA wants pilots to have the option of being armed aboard jetliners to provide another “good-guy” on flights to stop would-be hijackers.

Privacy on the road was the motivation sparking opposition to automated photo-radar enforcement of fast drivers in Hawaii forcing government officials there to abandon the spy-like camera system. Drivers complained the system unfairly assumed the owner of the car was the person behind the wheel. They also said the cameras were an invasion of privacy. As a result of the complaints, the Aloha State’s governor ordered a stop to the use of the Big Brother cameras.

Freedom of speech for cops was the driving force behind a decision in the Big Apple. New York City Police Officers received court-backing to disregard requirements to alert police department brass before speaking as private citizens to government agencies, investigative bodies, or private groups, according to a report in The New York Times. The decision uncorks a de facto gag rule which had a chilling effect on an officer’s free speech.

Everywhere I look there are real people doing real things to secure our basic freedoms—not give them away—like the ISR poll construed. Of course, there are plenty of people, particularly some of our elected officials, who want to take away some of our basic rights, like gun ownership, free speech, or privacy.

Individual Rights Inherent
In the world of public relations perception often is reality. But in the real world actions speak louder than words. The ISR poll is probably an accurate report that an attitude exists among fewer than 700 Americans to forgo basic rights for “more security.” Perhaps, in times of great threat, people will say that they would do almost anything and trade almost anything to save themselves or their family from disaster. But our rights—our freedoms—cannot be traded away, wished away, or taken away. Our rights are intrinsic, essential, and built-in. And the courts continue to back it up.

Despite a long-standing anti-gun provision of the law in the Buckeye state, court challenges ultimately reversed it. An appeals court in Ohio upheld a lower court's ruling that the state's ban on carrying concealed weapons violates the state constitution. The 1st Ohio District Court of Appeals ruled that the decades-old ban, which bars both carrying a concealed weapon and having a loaded weapon in a vehicle, infringes on the right to self-defense, according to an AP report. The appeals court upheld the Hamilton County Common Pleas court earlier ruling that the state ban was unenforceable in the county.

At the federal level the story is the same. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on U.S. v. Emerson and declared that the Constitution's Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. “We have found no historical evidence that the Second Amendment was intended to convey militia power to the states, limit the federal government's power to maintain a standing army, or applies only to members of a select militia while on active duty. All of the evidence indicates that the Second Amendment, like other parts of the Bill of Rights, applies to and protects individual Americans,” concluded the court.

“We reject the collective rights and sophisticated collective rights models for interpreting the Second Amendment,” said the court document.

So do I.

In fact, the Bush administration has told the US Supreme Court that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess a firearm and is not tied to the maintenance of state militias. The Justice Department staked out the position in briefs filed by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson. “It’sÉthe first time that the department, speaking for the federal government, has said in a formal filing with a federal court that the Second Amendment grants an individual the right to bear arms,” according to a Washington Post report.

Do you do what you say?
Personal freedom and civil liberties make America unique. Our civil liberties are the riches that terrorists fear and hate. It’s why they want to destroy us. Trading our civil liberties for a feeling of safety is vile mistake. On its own, no government can protect us; it can only help protect us if we are willing to protect ourselves. When you protect your family you do it yourself, you do not pass that responsibility on to your municipal government.

Imagine what could have happened if the 9-11 battle cry “Let’s roll” was never sounded. Imagine if unarmed passengers onboard one of the skyjacked jets did not fight back and foil the likely attempt by terrorists to crash that jet into the White House or the US Capitol. Imagine if those Americans depended on someone other than themselves.

Abandoning our civil liberties, even just a little bit, makes us that much more dependent on government and reverses the dynamic which rightly makes government a tool of the people, and not the other way around.

First-time gun buyers purchasing firearms are actively exercising their civil rights—not giving them up—to improve security.