Assemblyman Tom Bordonaro of California stopped by our Washington, D. C. office early last month to say hello and to reassure us of his total support of the individual Second Amendment civil right to keep and bear arms.
Tom has been nominated to succeed the late U. S. Rep. Walter H. Capps of California’s 22nd congressional district in a special election to be held this month.
On the international firearms legislative front, John Michael Snyder, CCRKBA Public Affairs Director, met in Washington, D. C. recently with a member of the national legislature of Venezuela, Congressman Luis Carlos Serra Carmona, who is Chairman of a special committee to restructure Venezuelan gun laws.
Serra Carmona said through an interpreter that he believes in freedom, especially since in his own lifetime his countrymen had thrown off a dictatorship, and in the right to keep and bear arms. He also said he believes in the responsibility of government to keep criminals from getting guns and that government, therefore, should be able to keep track of firearms and firearm owners.
Snyder told Serra Carmona that maintaining the individual right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms is one of the ways societies can prevent tyrannical governments from taking and consolidating political power, that general registration and licensing in the past often has led to citizen disarmament and subsequent genocide, and that criminal acts with firearms, rather than firearms ownership in and of itself, is actually the proper object of criminal law in a free society.
Serra Carmona said he had never before realized this and asked Snyder to send him some further information, which he did.
In Maryland, hunters donated more than 7,500 pounds of venison to food banks throughout the state during the past deer season, according to THE WASHINGTON TIMES.
Several private groups organized venison giveaways last fall to replace Hunters Harvestshare, an earlier statewide program that had grown too big and costly to maintain.
A statewide program raised $4,450 to process and distribute over 4,200 pounds of deer meat.
Hunters Feeding the Hungry, a Hagerstown, Maryland organization, distributed at least 3,250 pounds of processed venison.
Dr. Tim Wheeler of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership in a POINT BLANK interview last month questioned the ethics of recent publication of anti-gun survey propaganda in a supposedly professional medical journal. He also questioned as most unlikely the generalized accuracy of the purported findings.
The disputed survey in the ANNALS OF INTERNAL MEDICINE purported to find that 87 percent of surgeons and 94 percent of internists across the country believe it is time to consider gunshot wounds a public health menace, akin to AIDS, alcoholism and tobacco use.
A position paper accompanying the disputed survey argued that doctors should play a more active role in trying to prevent the injuries, whether by supporting more restrictive gun control laws or by counseling patients.
President Bill Clinton, who has set up the most anti-gun administration in history as far as law-abiding American citizens are concerned, hypocritically has failed to stem the flow of weapons of mass destruction and missiles around the world, according to a recently released Senate report.
The report, based on a series of findings by the U.S. Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Proliferation, provides detailed examples of how nations such as Russia, China and North Korea have been selling nuclear, chemical and biological weapons technology and missile know-how.
“The Clinton Administration has not been willing to take the tough actions necessary to back up its rhetoric in executive orders and other statements,” Subcommittee Chairman Thad Cochran of Mississippi, a CCRKBA Congressional Advisor, stated in a Capitol Hill press conference to release the 111-page report.