Gun Control and the Plot for a Fascist Police State in America

by David Hammer

On January 17, 1989, Patrick
Purdy, a 25-year-old with a seven-year law enforcement history of weapons
violations, drug abuse, and sexual crimes, entered a school yard in Stockton,
California carrying an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle. Within minutes, he had
slaughtered five children and wounded twenty-nine more. Within days, the term
``assault rifle'' had entered the lexicon of all major U.S. news media. Within
weeks, the most intense push for gun control since the 1968 Gun Control Act
was passed in the wake of the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin
Luther King, was underway.
   By this spring, California had passed the most sweeping gun control law
ever seen in the United States, banning outright some forty types of ``assault
rifles.'' In 22 other states, similar legislation was enacted or proposed. At
the federal level, lifetime National Rifle Association member George Bush
enacted a ban on the importation of forty-three types of semi-automatic
rifles. By mid-summer, Bush's Justice Department had released a set of
draconian ``options'' for gun control, including such heretofore unthinkable
measures as universal indentification cards with fingerprints and other data
electronically imprinted. This card was to be {for everyone}, not just those
owning guns. Also proposed was a national registration of all gun-owners and
their guns.
   Led by the {Washington Post}, the liberal news media clamored incessantly
for gun control, and launched attack after attack on the National Rifle
Association, perhaps the single most powerful grassroots lobby in the country.
California Congressman Fortney Stark charged that the NRA's fundraising
practices were illegal and were aimed to ``exploit the vulnerable senior
citizens of this nation,'' and instigated an investigation by the U.S. Postal
Service. Various state governments tried to get their hands on NRA membership
lists, and there were even whispers that the dreaded RICO (Racketeering
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act might be applied.
   All of these unprecedented developments were presumably the fruit of
natural outrage over the Stockton massacre. Or were they?

Assault on the Republic

   Although the news media would have us believe that there are countless
``lone nuts'' out there in the population who might one day pick up a rifle
and start blowing away America's political leaders or their fellow citizens,
investigations into the Stockton and other massacres, as well as into the cry
for ``gun control'' which has followed in their wake, have established the
following:
   1) All of the celebrated mass murderers or assassins of recent years, the
John Hinckleys and David Berkowitzes, were controlled and deployed by either
a) networks of ``brave new world'' psychiatrists like the ``Nazi doctors''
involved in the CIA's infamous MK-Ultra project, or b) Satanic killer cults.
   Mass murderers and assassins so deployed are no more ``lone assassins,''
than were those earlier ``lone assassins':' Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan,
or James Earl Ray, charged with the murder of President John F. Kennedy, Bobby
Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, respectively. The mere fact of a cover-up of
essential evidence, as obviously happened in the JFK assassination or in the
Stockton or Son of Sam mass murders, {proves} that these and similar cases do
not merely involve ``lone nuts.'' Therefore, the chief rationale for gun
control is fraudulent at the outset.
   2) Gun control is part of a plot to eliminate the constitutional republican
form of government in the United States. The founders and sponsors of the gun
control movement are in the thick of organizing other changes in law and
administration, aimed at transforming the United States into a police state.
In fact, they are most vociferous in their public calls for ``restricting
democracy,'' and ``revising'' or even scrapping the U.S. Constitution.
   Handgun Control, Inc., the leading gun control lobby, demonstrates the
case; it was incorporated in 1974 and has been sponsored ever since by the
powerful Washington, D.C. law firm of Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering. The
firm's senior partner, Lloyd Cutler, through Project 1987 and the Committee
for the Constitutional System, has worked ceaselessly for scrapping the U.S.
Constitution, in favor of a British-style parliamentary system. Cutler is also
a senior figure in the infamous Trilateral Commission, one of the most
important subcommittees of the Eastern Establishment, which has openly called
for ``restricting democracy.''
   3) The gun control movement has been massively aided and abetted by the FBI
and the CIA, in a way that exposes the proclivities of these institutions to
protect the interests of the political and banking Establishment, far more
than those of the nation. This aid has been in part indirect, through covering
up the true causes of the assassinations and mass murders which lend
legitimacy to calls for gun control. But there is direct intelligence
community involvement, as well: Handgun Control, Inc. was founded by a 25-year
veteran of the covert operations division of the Central Intelligence Agency.
    The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects free speech; the
Second Amendment protects the right of the citizenry to bear arms. These two
Amendments were indissolubly linked in the minds of the Founding Fathers, who
had just concluded a revolution against tyranny. Today, these two pillars of
republicanism are under ferocious attack by those who would eliminate our
constitutional republic.

The Trilateral Agenda

   The plans to implement a police state in the United States have been openly
recorded in the policy papers of the supranational Trilateral Commission,
which, since its founding in 1973, has been one of the most important bodies
dictating policy to successive U.S. governments.
   Composed of leading bankers, politicians, and businessmen from the U.S.A.,
Western Europe, and Japan (thus its name, ``trilateral''), the Trilateral
Commission was bankrolled by David Rockefeller and his liberal Eastern
Establishment friends. Its first executive director was a then-obscure
professor from Columbia University in New York, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in
1979 drafted a plan for a one-world government under such rubrics as ``global
strategies for international cooperation,'' and ``a truly global world
system.'' Brzezinski said the creation of this ``global community'' would
``require two broad and overlapping phases. The first of these would involve
the forging of community links among the United States, Western Europe, and
Japan.... The second phase would include the extension of these links to the
communist countries.''
   When Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, an astounding thirteen members
of his administration were Trilateralists, out of a total U.S. Trilateral
membership of only 65. Brzezinski was named Carter's National Security
Adviser.
   The Trilaterals proposed a sweeping series of political and financial
changes to usher in their desired ``global order,'' many of which were
contained in a series of policy papers issued in the mid-1970s, titled {1980s
Project}. One of these, ``Crisis of Democracy'' by French sociologist Michel
Crozier and Harvard academic Samuel Huntington, argued that, ``Democracy is
only one way of constituting authority, and it is not necessarily a
universally applicable one. In many situations, the claims of expertise,
seniority, experience, and special talents may override the claims of
democracy as a way of constituting authority.''
   The authors' crucial point was that the coming economic collapse of the
1980s and 1990s would necessitate restrictions on freedoms, and new forms of
tyranny, to enforce cuts in the standard of living. Since a collapsing economy
would inevitably produce political upheavals, the old style of ``constituency
politics'' was untenable and must be scrapped: ``We have come to recognize
that there are potentially desirable limits to economic growth. There are also
potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political
democracy.... A government which lacks authority ... will have little
ability... to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary.''
   Trilateral Commission member Lloyd Cutler, of the law firm Wilmer, Cutler,
and Pickering, became Jimmy Carter's White House counsel. Cutler had been
chairman of the D.C. Commission on the Administration of Justice Under
Emergency Conditions in 1968, and also in 1968-69, executive director of the
National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, also known as
the Eisenhower Commission.
   Established in the wake of the Kennedy and King assassinations in 1968, the
commission called for radical restrictions on the right to bear arms. Its
executive director was Jim Campbell, handpicked by commission chairman Lloyd
Cutler from his own law firm. Campbell later incorporated the organization
that has become the driving force behind gun control in the United States,
Handgun Control Inc. Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering has guided HCI every step
of the way to becoming a powerful national lobby. The firm has argued, for
free, HCI legal cases all the way up to the Supreme Court.
   Campbell now sits on the board of the HCI's associated tax-exempt
foundation, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence. His partner Cutler, a
``consistent supporter over the years,'' will soon join the distinguished
advisory board of the center. (Cutler otherwise has busied himself as
volunteer lawyer for the environmentalist Soviet espionage front, Greenpeace,
in its lawsuit against the French government, over the 1985 sinking of the
Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior.)

Gun Control Lobby: Made in the CIA

   According to the official history of Handgun Control Inc., their
organization began when a young man named Mark Borinsky, who had been mugged
as a student in Chicago, came to Washington, D.C. and founded the National
Council to Control Handguns. Later that year, the history continues, Borinsky
was joined by a former DuPont executive, Pete Shields, whose son had been
killed in the Zebra racial murders in San Francisco, and the organization just
took off from there.
   There is only one problem with this official history, as expressed in the
HCI's promotional pamphlet--it is a lie.
   On the board of directors of HCI, as vice chairman, sits Edward C. Wells of
Washington, D.C. Contrary to the fairy tale told in HCI handouts, it was
Edward Wells who recruited Pete Shields, now HCI's president and public
spokesman; it was Edward Wells who led the tongue-tied Mark Borinsky around
official Washington, to get the organization off the ground; it was Edward
Wells who guided all the crucial early phases of HCI. Edward Wells also was a
board member and early mover of the nation's other major gun control lobby,
the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. As his friend Jim Campbell of Wilmer,
Cutler, and Pickering understated the matter, ``Ed was present at the
creation.''
   Wells had a great deal of experience in getting things quietly organized.
Before his retirement to take a job in ``public service''--the gun control
project--Wells was a 25-year veteran of the Directorate of Plans of the
Central Intelligence Agency, the ``Company's'' covert operations arm.
   As the Iran-Contra hearings made clear, this side of the CIA specializes
in, among other things, setting up front groups. Those hearings also showed,
via the case of veteran CIA operative Walter Raymond, who ``retired'' to
become Oliver North's de facto controller at the National Security Council,
that CIA ``retirements'' are often arranged to put some political distance
between the ``retiree'' and the ``Company.''
   Ed Wells himself recently described the early days of HCI to a New York
journalist: ``I was the first unpaid volunteer, however you wish to put it,
Executive Director. Now Mark [Borinsky, the ostensible founder of HCI] was at
that time unable to give this job his full time, because he was holding down a
relatively low level job in Washington. And as I say, he was quite a shy
person. I was able to get enough people to join the board, with him of course
because I always took him along and so forth, to make the organization look
reasonably credible. ... So Mark stayed around Washington and was frequently
around with his ideas and was participating, I don't want to give that
impression [that he wasn't doing anything]. He was very interested in
fundraising and had some good ideas, no question about that. But not a public
speaker nor the kind of person who could really get out in front of an
audience or easily meet others involved. I don't mean a shrinking violet ...
but in any event he is a rather reticent person and lacks self-confidence, I
guess is the best way of putting it.''
   Though everything Wells said made it clear that there would have been no
HCI without him, including the recruitment of his old Hotchkiss prep school
mate and fellow Yale graduate ``Pete'' Shields, Wells was most careful to play
down his name and role. And while most of those involved in HCI had compelling
personal motives (Borinsky was mugged, Sara Brady's husband Jim was nearly
assassinated, Pete Shields' son was murdered, etc.), Wells offers a thin-
sounding motivation for his shift into this highly emotional fight: ``It was
more of a question of wanting to do something in the public service area.
Having sort of a determination not to seek a nine-to-five job when I got out
of the Agency, and a desire to stay around Washington, really probably not
much more than that.''
   Wells was not the only CIA-linked man involved in creating the gun control
lobby. Former CIA chief William Colby, who decimated the CIA's
counterintelligence capability with his 1975 sacking of James Jesus Angleton
and many of his staff, threw open his house for gun control fundraising
parties and today serves on the board of the National Coalition to Ban
Handguns. (More recently, Colby has been openly hobnobbing with the KGB in
joint CIA-KGB meetings in California to discuss ``joint strategies'' to fight
terrorism.)
   Colby was hardly impelled into the gun control movement by some
longstanding commitment to curb violence. He had been, after all, the chief
overseer of the bloody Operation Phoenix program which assassinated over
50,000 Vietnamese. Later, (after ``retirement,'' of course), he would be the
lawyer for the infamous Australia-based gun-and-drug running Nugan Hand Bank.
   Nor does the list of CIA supporters of gun control end with Wells and
Colby. HCI spokesman Greg Risch recently laughed a bit nervously when asked if
the ``spooks'' (CIA agents) were supporting HCI, then said, ``Sure there are a
lot of CIA people in it,'' adding that there are quite a few ``ex-CIA who
donate to us.''

Handgun Control, Inc.

   In November 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas,
Texas. The Warren Commission, ostensibly set up to investigate that murder,
was in fact responsible--with the help of prominent commission member and
former CIA head Allen Dulles--for covering it up. This marked a turning point
in American life, and set the precedent for the political assassinations to
follow.
   In 1968, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, Kennedy
because he threatened to become President himself, and would not rest until he
discovered his brother's assassins, and King because he led a mass movement
for civil rights and economic development.
   While the FBI and CIA handled the cover-up of the details of the
assassinations themselves, Lloyd Cutler led the Eisenhower Commission that
studied the ``causes'' of the Kennedy and King murders and resultant violence
in American cities. Cutler's response to these murders, which had been covered
up, if not perpetrated, by his friends in the Establishment, was a further
step on the road to a police state--the recommendations for gun control.
   The CIA's Ed Wells explained how his founding of Handgun Control Inc. built
on the earlier efforts of Cutler, et al.: ``It didn't take us long to get
caught up with Jim Campbell, who was the assistant to Lloyd Cutler, because
Lloyd was the head of the committee which Johnson put together after the
deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. That's very important, that
we were able to get the talents of those people, Campbell particularly. He had
been the staff director for the commission which Cutler was the chairman of.
Cutler was the overall chairman and so he got one of the bright young men in
his law firm to be the director of it.... It [the commission] was on handgun
violence I believe.... And then a series of recommendations came out of it,
part of which were embodied in the 1968 Gun Act. That's very important, I
think. It wasn't just Mark Borinsky getting beat up in Chicago at the point of
a gun. This is something which did have prior history, but in effect we came
in and piggy-backed on that.''
   Campbell volunteered his own reflections on the prior history: ``I was one
of the incorporators of what is now Handgun Control Inc.; We created that in
the early 1970s. A fellow [Borinsky] came into our office. He had been held
up.... After he had been held up he went to the library and began to read
about this and found our violence commission report and said, `Gee, I have a
little bit of money here and uh, I would like to create some sort of
organization to do a little something.' There was really no organized lobby or
political center for gun control and he thought he ought to create it. And he
created it on a shoestring. We created it on a shoestring. Ed Wells was one of
the first people who sort of kept it going, he was the head of it for awhile,
and kept it going in its shoestring days.''
   The shoestring days are over. Big corporations such as Corning Glass and
Johnson Wax, and major foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller, are pouring
in money, to the tune of millions per year, both to the HCI and into its tax-
exempt spinoff, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, which churns out
propaganda for gun control.
   One of the center's most recent activities was the production of an 18-
minute videotape on the Second Amendment, featuring Jimmy Carter's former
press spokesman, Hodding Carter. Wells noted, ``We hope to raise enough money
to get that video cassette into every school in the country, K [kindergarten]
through 12. We have gotten it in over half now. We have raised about $250,000
now if I am not mistaken. It has been very well reviewed, and I think it will
be used in most schools, year after year.''
   The Second Amendment, which specifies the right to bear arms, is of course
the crux of the whole gun control issue. If it can be redefined for a
generation or so of children, long-term victory for the gun-controllers is
almost assured. The film was done in conjunction with the Bicentennial of the
Constitution, one of Cutler's favorite avenues for smuggling in changes to the
U.S. Constitution. A chief adviser for the film was Cutler's law partner, Jim
Campbell. Said Wells, ``I think he is acknowledged as one of the better
informed individuals in the country on the whole question, both from a legal
and a legislative point of view. A very thoughtful individual and a sort of a
tiger. He knows the laws inside out.''

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, in its entirety, ``A
well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.''
   Some sophists have claimed that, because of the mention of the militia, the
right to bear arms is only a conditional right, in the context of a formal
armed force. Yet the intent of the Founding Fathers--who considered that the
militia was the entirety of the citizenry, armed and ready to respond to a
call to mobilize--as this intent is expressed in the {Federalist Papers} and
other locations, was precisely that this armed citizenry be a bulwark against
tyranny, either directed from a foreign power, or, with their recent
experience as subjects of Britain's George III in mind, from their own rulers.
   This function of the right to bear arms as the ultimate check to tyranny
was emphasized by the National Rifle Association in a series of full-page ads
in major newspapers in late June. Under the title ``The Right of the People to
Keep and Bear Arms,'' one ad showed a bloodied Chinese student at Tiananmen
Square, surrounded by soldiers. Like the Chinese people, the ad emphasized,
people in Soviet Georgia have no right to bear arms. The citizens of Georgia
had had guns, but they were registered, as the U.S. Justice Department has
mooted for all guns in America. On April 9, 1989, the Soviet government that
had confiscated all private arms in Georgia, using the registration
information, met a peaceful demonstration with force. Members of the unarmed
crowd, old women and young girls, were slaughtered by Soviet troops with
poison gas and sharpened spades.
   The NRA ad clearly implied that gun control is a step toward a police
state, and is not something that can happen only in China or the Soviet Union,
but could happen in the U.S.A. as well. The merest hint that a police state
might emerge here drove Establishment media outlets wild. ``The NRA has
surpassed its own record for world-class lunacy in its latest advertising
message,'' ranted one {Washington Post} editorial.
   Yet the evidence of the U.S.A.'s slide into a police state is overwhelming.
The most dramatic confirmation of such tendencies came with the frame-up and
jailing on January 27, 1989 of Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. and six associates on
spurious charges of mail fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy. The judge allowed
the LaRouche Seven no defense, and the jury was packed with government agents
directly tied to the ``Get LaRouche'' task force which has been functioning
for over 15 years.
   To this may be added the assault and breaking of limbs of the anti-abortion
Operation Rescue activists in demonstrations around the country, as well as
the use of the RICO statutes (designed for use against racketeers) against
them; the orchestrated scandals and prosecutions of prominent TV preachers;
the government assault on the trade union movement, as in the virtual
government takeover of the Teamsters union; the frame-up of U.S. Congressmen
through Abscam and Brilab and the hounding from office on the thinnest of
pretexts of House Speaker Jim Wright and Majority Whip Tony Coelho; and the
federal government takeover of the savings and loan industry, claiming that
``fraud,'' not years of double digit interest rates, had destroyed that
industry. As the S&L industry is destroyed, so are the prospects of affordable
new housing for American families.

The Maryland Laws

   Overt police state tactics, on top of the propaganda around the Stockton,
Ca. massacre, were applied to achieve the most dramatic advance in gun control
in recent years, the November 1988 defeat of an NRA-backed referendum in
Maryland. This referendum would have overturned a gun control law, HB 1131, on
so-called Saturday Night Specials, which had been jammed through the state
legislature in the closing minutes of one session. Co-sponsored by a member of
ex-CIA chief William Colby's National Coalition to Ban Handguns, the law
ostensibly was to restrict cheap, poorly made handguns. But it was so broadly
worded, that it in fact could ban the sale of any handgun made after 1984. It
also set up a nine-member board to decide what exceptions could be made to
that law.
   Maryland's Governor William Donald Schaefer wanted to see the referendum
defeated and the bill stand, so he deployed his state police to make sure the
referendum failed at all costs. The evening before the election, the police
conducted a warrantless search of the referendum headquarters, which stopped
the election-eve phone bank, terrorized workers, and generally disrupted the
referendum's get-out-the-vote effort. On election day, armed and uniformed
police stationed at many polls passed out sample ballots urging defeat of the
referendum, and harassed, injured, and even arrested pro-referendum poll
workers on bogus charges. And although uniformed police were encouraged to
speak out against the referendum during the campaign, Superintendent of State
Police Elmer Tippett (scheduled to be chairman of the handgun review board)
issued a formal order preventing any policeman in uniform from appearing on
behalf of the referendum, or even identifying themselves as policemen when not
in uniform. Meanwhile, Tippett appeared, in uniform, on TV shows to campaign
against the referendum.
   Due to various intimidation tactics, only half the NRA and other pro-
referendum pollwatchers scheduled for Baltimore, the major population center,
showed up. There were reports of voting machines with levers that could not be
pulled down for the referendum, a classic tactic of vote fraud. The harassment
was so blatant that even the {Baltimore Sun} blasted police behavior in the
raid, and demanded a grand jury investigation, noting that ``police with
political assignments are more dangerous than Saturday Night Specials.''
Though the police with pro-gun control assignments were highly visible in the
weeks before the election, the {Sun} strangely had waited until the day after
it was all over, and gun control confirmed, to comment on the fact.

What Are `Assault Rifles'?

   These police state tactics have been accompanied by a great deal of
Goebbels-style lying, to brainwash people that guns must be ``controlled.''
While the gun-control issue was formerly focused on handguns (as the names of
the two gun control organizations indicate) because these were ostensibly the
``weapons of choice'' of criminals, it seems that now the ``weapons of
choice'' have shifted--just in the last year, mind you--to so-called ``assault
rifles.''
   These ``assault rifles'' are alleged to be the drug dealers' ``weapons of
choice.'' But the figures published by the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), which has more to do with drug dealers than any other
law enforcement body, show that out of 66 shooting incidents against DEA
agents in 1988, only one involved an assault rifle, and that was overseas.
   There is good reason for that. In early February 1989, Lt. James Moran,
commander of the Ballistic Unit of the New York City Police Department, told
the {New York Times}, ``A rifle is not what usually is used by the criminals.
They'll have handguns or sawed-off shotguns. You have more firepower with a 9-
millimeter handgun than you do with an AK-47.... The rifle is big.... These
drug dealers are more inclined to use the 9-millimeter pistol than go to a
cumbersome AK-47 rifle.''
   Furthermore, according to the 1987 Uniform Crime Report, rifles were used
in only 4 percent of all homicides, while cutting weapons of all sorts were
used in 20 percent. If the gun control lobby wants to stop homicides, perhaps
they should begin by banning carving knives.
   An ``assault rifle,'' by definition, is a weapon capable of firing on
either automatic (as long as the trigger is depressed, the gun continues
firing) or on semi-automatic (where the trigger must be pulled for each shot).
In other words, the chief characteristic of an ``assault rifle'' is that it
functions like a machine gun. Machine guns are now virtually outlawed in the
U.S.A., and no machine gun has been used in any of the celebrated mass
murders, like the Stockton case.
   But what the gun control lobby is trying to outlaw are the tens of millions
of regular rifles--which in the main are semi-automatics--that are in the
hands of law-abiding citizens, by branding most or all of them as ``assault
rifles.'' A semi-automatic rifle fires one shot at a time, period. The semi-
automatic action, as opposed to the old bolt action which required manual
loading after each shot, has been in common use for most of the twentieth
century. Whether a semi-automatic {looks} like a military weapon (``assault
rifle'') or not, is irrelevant to the function of the weapon. And it takes a
skilled gunsmith to convert a semi-automatic to an automatic.
   The gun controllers are trying to classify semi-automatics as to whether
they are used (or could be, or should be) mainly for ``sporting purposes.''
But where in the Second Amendment is there any reference to ``sporting
purposes''?
   There is a powerful argument for the right to bear arms, particularly these
days, for self-defense. An estimated 2,000 felons are killed annually and
another 15,000 wounded by civilians, in circumstances classified as
``excusable self-defense.''
   But the true reason for defending this right is that it is enshrined in our
Bill of Rights, put there by the Founding Fathers who could foresee future
dangers to our nation. For such eventualities, they said, the citizens had
better have arms.
   The poet of freedom, ardent republican Friedrich Schiller, expressed the
same principle in his play, ``Wilhelm Tell,'' regarding the revolt of the
Swiss cantons against tyrannical Hapsburg power. Schiller opens the ``Ruetli
oath'' scene with the words, ``No, there is a limit to the tyrant's power,''
and continues, ``As a last resort, when not another means is of avail, the
sword is given him, The highest of all goods we may defend from violence.''

The Satanic Threat

   After the Kennedy and King assassinations, and the 1981 attempt on
President Reagan, the next most dramatic shootings used to justify gun control
were the massacre of schoolchildren by Patrick Purdy in January 1989 in
Stockton, California, and the 1976-77 New York City murders known as the ``Son
of Sam'' killings, for which David Berkowitz was convicted.
   The NRA has often contended, ``Guns don't kill people. People do.'' Today,
this should probably be amended to, ``Guns don't kill people. Satanists do.''
   The crucial feature of both the Purdy and Berkowitz killings was the link
to Satanism, initially covered up in both cases. Satanists, aside from taking
sadistic pleasure in doing evil for evil's sake, believe that human and animal
blood contain ``energy,'' and that the more blood that is spilled and the more
pain and suffering that is inflicted upon their victims, the more ``energy''
will be released to the control of the Satanists. Therefore, the first thing
to look for, in any of the mass murders in the United States in the past two
decades, is evidence of Satanic beliefs. From there, the investigation must
proceed into the Satanic underground which harbors such mass killers.
   The Satanic literature in Purdy's room and the Satanic markings on his
clothes, meant that Satanism was not an ``aberration'' of the case, but the
first thing to be investigated. This was precisely what gun-control advocate,
California Attorney General John Van de Kamp ruled out, in his finding that
``racial hatred'' motivated Purdy.
   The initially successful coverup of the Satanic elements in the Berkowitz
case came unraveled in part due to the work of investigator-author Maury
Terry, as Terry recounts in his book, {The Ultimate Evil}. While Queens
District Attorney Eugene Gold and others insisted that Berkowitz was a lone
killer, Terry catalogues the evidence those officials suppressed, that more
than one killer participated in each crime, and that Berkowitz himself acted
as a member of a Satanic cult. Just before the first murder, Berkowitz wrote a
warning to the police, suppressed by them for years: ``This is a warning to
all police agencies in the tri-state area: For your information, a Satanic
cult (devil worshippers and practitioners of witchcraft [sic]) ... has been
instructed by their high command (Satan) to begin to systematicaly kill and
slaughter young girls or people of good health and clean blood. They plan to
kill at least 100 young wemon [sic] and men, but mostly wemon [sic] as part of
a satanic ritual which involves shedding of the victims innocent blood.... I,
David Berkowitz, have been chosen since birth, to be one of the executioners
for the cult.''

Psychiatrists of the Brave New World

   On March 30 1981, the mentally disturbed John Hinckley opened fire on
President Ronald Reagan as Reagan and his entourage stepped out of the Hilton
Hotel in Washington. Within seconds, Reagan fell with a bullet lodged an inch
from his heart; his press secretary, James Brady, fell with a bullet in his
brain. In the tragedy's aftermath, Brady's wife Sara took up the gun control
cause, and became the leading spokesperson for HCI. The episode gave a major
boost to gun control efforts, predicated on the assertion that any nut, just
like Hinckley, could just go get a Saturday Night Special and blow away the
President.
   Yet, in the weeks after the shootings, an investigation by {Executive
Intelligence Review} magazine demonstrated that Hinckley had been prepared for
his deed through systematic ``behavior modification'' techniques applied by
psychiatrists whom Hinckley regularly visited, in the towns of Evergreen and
Lakewood, Colorado. Investigations also revealed that Hinckley had been for
years a member of an organization heavily penetrated by the FBI, the National
Socialist Party of America. In October 1980, he had been caught with several
weapons in his possession, stalking President Carter, and presidential
candidate Ronald Reagan. Hinckley was given a $62 fine and let go.
   Though the Nashville police provided his name and circumstances to the FBI,
Hinckley's name was never added to the 25,000 person list of possible
presidential assassins maintained by the Secret Service--an unthinkable
oversight, particularly since he had been kicked out of the FBI-monitored
National Socialist Party for recommending bombings and assassinations.
   Hinckley had been passed from one psychiatrist to another, his intentions
and actions monitored at every point, but he was not the only one. The week
after his attempt on President Reagan, one Edward Richardson was arrested en
route to Washington, D.C. with a .32 pistol. With a background which law
enforcement specialists said ``eerily paralleled'' Hinckley's, Richardson had
sworn in a handwritten note, ``I will finish what Hinckley started. Ronald
Reagan must die.'' Several other Hinckley clones emerged at the same time,
with the same intention.
   The reality that those who deploy the assassins are some of the key
sponsors of the gun control movement is most obvious in the case of Dr. Park
Eliot Dietz, the FBI's top forensic psychiatry specialist. Dietz runs the
Threat Assessment Group in Newport Beach, California, which maintains
extensive computerized files on those judged likely to be mass murderers.
Dietz, who is running operations against the LaRouche political movement,
certified John Hinckley as a ``lone assassin,'' which he, as a skilled
psychiatrist, clearly knew to be a lie.
   A fanatical gun control advocate, Dietz has for the past two years been
studying the NRA and related organizations in the ``gun lobby.'' According to
the 1987 Annual Report of the Institute of Law and Public Policy (ILP) at the
University of Virginia at Charlottesville, with which Dietz has been
associated, ``Dr. Dietz is now studying various factions among American gun
owners, from paranoid subcultures and organized criminal groups to the larger
numbers of conventional Americans who maintain firearms for personal defense
and sporting purposes.'' Dietz's thesis is that owners of firearms constitute
the single most important element of an incipient ``mass fascist movement'' in
the United States; thus, their right to bear arms must be greatly restricted.
   One of Dietz's associates at the ILP is Kenneth Lanning, who, as the FBI's
chief spokesman on occult crimes, maintains that there is no such thing as
ritual Satanic murder in the U.S. today, and in any case, ``Far more crimes
have been committed ... in the name of God and Jesus than in the name of
Satan.''

Registration: It's Been Done Before

   Given the enormous grassroots base of the NRA, and the great passion which
that base feels towards its constitutional right to bear arms, the Eastern
Establishment has apparently been somewhat loath to use the same sort of
obvious frame-up or judicial murder against the NRA it has employed against
many other groups. They no doubt reason that they can exploit Purdy-style
zombies or ``lone assassins'' like Hinckley to achieve the erosion of the
Second Amendment, as such incidents will bring a new legislative surge toward
gun control. And their progress has been dramatic. As Jim Campbell of Wilmer,
Cutler, and Pickering put it, ``I must say there was a long period of time
there where I thought nothing would happen in my lifetime.... But in the last
few years, in a period of time politically when you would think this wouldn't
happen, remarkably, it has begun to happen. Quite something.''
   Campbell elaborated on what still needs to be done: ``We need to get to the
point where a gun is treated as seriously as a car. You know, you have a motor
vehicle registration number on cars, and when you transfer, the state knows
about it. This is not a bad model for guns.... In the more near term, we want
to ban assault weapons.''
   At present, there is no such universal registration of guns. A record is
kept of the sale at the local gunshop where it is sold, but that is it. It is
clear why Campbell has the ``vision'' of universal registration. That was
already put into place once, in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The son of a parent
who fled Hitler, recently described what his parents had told him: ``First of
all, all the guns were registered, and the government knew exactly who had
them. Then one day, the Gestapo came around and said, `We know you have such
and such guns at this address. Give them to us.' And if you tried to say, `No,
I no longer have them,' or something like that, they just said, `Okay, you
come with us' and you went to jail. The same thing happened in Poland. All the
guns were registered there, and when the Nazis came in, they simply took the
registration lists around and collected them all.''
   The same thing happened in the Soviet Union. Registration requirements
introduced in 1926 paved the way for confiscation of all civilian-owned rifles
not long after, particularly in Ukraine. Then, Stalin's police were free to
starve and butcher 10 million Ukrainians in the 1930s.