Earlier
this year, Eric Holder--along
with Janet Reno and several
other former officials from the
Clinton Department of
Justice--co-signed an amicus
brief in District of Columbia v.
Heller. The brief was filed in
support of DC's ban on all
handguns, and ban on the use of
any firearm for self-defense in
the home. The
brief argued that the Second
Amendment is a "collective"
right, not an individual one,
and asserted that belief in the
collective right had been the
consistent policy of the U.S.
Department of Justice since the
FDR administration. A brief
filed by some other former DOJ
officials (including several
Attorneys General, and Stuart
Gerson, who was Acting Attorney
General until Janet Reno was
confirmed) took issue with the
Reno-Holder brief's
characterization of DOJ's
viewpoint.
But at the least, the
Reno-Holder brief accurately
expressed the position of the
Department of Justice when Janet
Reno was Attorney General and
Eric Holder was Deputy Attorney
General. At the oral argument
before the Fifth Circuit in
United States v. Emerson, the
Assistant U.S. Attorney told the
panel that the Second Amendment
was no barrier to gun
confiscation, not even of the
confiscation of guns from
on-duty National Guardsmen.
As Deputy Attorney General,
Holder was a strong supporter of
restrictive gun control. He
advocated federal licensing of
handgun owners, a three day
waiting period on handgun sales,
rationing handgun sales to no
more than one per month, banning
possession of handguns and
so-called "assault weapons"
(cosmetically incorrect guns) by
anyone under age of 21, a gun
show restriction bill that would
have given the federal
government the power to shut
down all gun shows, national gun
registration, and mandatory
prison sentences for trivial
offenses (e.g., giving your son
an heirloom handgun for
Christmas, if he were two weeks
shy of his 21st birthday). He
also promoted the factoid that
"Every day that goes by, about
12, 13 more children in this
country die from gun
violence"--a statistic is true
only if one counts
18-year-old gangsters who shoot
each other as "children." (Sources:
Holder
testimony before House
Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee
on Crime, May 27,1999;
Holder Weekly Briefing, May
20, 2000. One of the bills that
Holder endorsed is detailed in
my 1999 Issue Paper "Unfair
and Unconstitutional.")
After 9/11, he penned a
Washington Post op-ed,
"Keeping Guns Away From
Terrorists" arguing that a new
law should give "the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms a
record of every firearm sale."
He also stated that prospective
gun buyers should be checked
against the secret "watch lists"
compiled by various government
entities. (In an
Issue Paper on the watch
list proposal, I quote a FBI
spokesman stating that there is
noause to deny gun ownership
to someone simply because she is
on the FBI list.)
After the D.C. Circuit Court of
Appeals ruled that the D.C.
handgun ban and self-defense ban
were unconstitutional in 2007,
Holder
complained that the decision
"opens the door to more people
having more access to guns and
putting guns on the streets."
Holder
played a key role in the
gunpoint, night-time kidnapping
of Elian Gonzalez. The
pretext for the paramilitary
invasion of the six-year-old's
home was that someone in his
family might have been licensed
to carry a handgun under Florida
law. Although a Pulitzer
Prize-winning photo showed a
federal agent dressed like a
soldier and pointing a machine
gun at the man who was holding
the terrified child, Holder
claimed that Gonzalez "was
not taken at the point of a gun"
and that the federal agents whom
Holder had sent to capture
Gonzalez had acted "very
sensitively." If Mr. Holder
believes that breaking down a
door with a battering ram,
pointing guns at children (not
just Elian), and yelling "Get
down, get down, we'll shoot" is
example of acting "very
sensitively," his judgment about
the responsible use of firearms
is not as acute as would be
desirable for a cabinet officer
who would be in charge of
thousands and thousands of armed
federal agents, many of them
paramilitary agents with machine
guns.