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Joyce Foundation
Just saw a note that the Fordham Univ. Law Review is coming out with a symposium issue on the Second Amendment -- strangely, without a single recognizable pro-individual rights author (and almost without recognizable authors at all).
Aha, thought I -- is the Joyce Foundation at it again? Sure enough, a Google quickly turned this up: "The papers and commentaries presented at the conference will be published in the Fordham Law Review in Fall 2004. The conference was funded by a generous grant from The Joyce Foundation."
Why would I say Joyce is at it again? Well, in 2000 Chicago-Kent Law Review issued a similar symposium issue. A bit of inquiry found ... well, let me give you background first. Law reviews are run on a shoestring. They're edited by students themselves, and very proud of that tradition. Editors get paid a pittance (I got $600 a year back in 1975), and authors of articles never, never, get paid.
A bit of inquiry showed that Joyce had done some serious bankrolling. The law review consented to having an outside editor for that issue, who surprisingly was anti-Second Amendment. (And when pro-Second Amendment law professors volunteered to write, he refused to allow it). He got paid $30,000. Authors of the articles in it got $5,000 each for their time. The rest of the grant went for buying a load of reprints to be sent to judges. So Joyce had essentially bought a issue of the review, stacked the deck of authors, and then mailed a load of copies to judges.
Recently there was an interesting article in the NY Post on how an official of the Pew Charitable Trusts was caught on video explaining how the Trusts had invested millions in campaign finance reform. He explained:
Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.
"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."
Sounds like Joyce has the act down pat. Use millions to bankroll supposed experts, create fake groups (more on this in extended remarks), and pursue a broad agenda through supposedly modest and incremental measures. And when I say millions ....
Download Joyce's 2003 financial statement from this page and you'll find Joyce invested no less than $1.25 million on its antigun efforts in that one year. (The Foundation's net worth is over $600 million). The funding was for a wide range of efforts, including one to set up campaigns to write newspapers and ask that they refuse firearm want ads.
$400,000 of that apparently went to create a "Second Amendment Research Center" at Ohio State, headed by Saul Cornell, who has written in support of the collectives rights view. article here. Other sums went for a study arguing that shooting ranges are environmentally hazardous due to lead.
Other projects being funded currently, from Joyce's webpage include a Harvard study "funded in part by the Joyce Foundation" that attributes teen suicides to firearms laws, a book by David Hemingway, who "has been a Joyce grantee for his pioneering work," that calls for a public health approach to gun law issues, and " a new book based on a symposium supported by the Joyce Foundation and edited by legal scholar Carl T. Bogus" that "cast[s] doubt on the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment."
So Joyce's millions are being invested on a broad front. Create studies that argue guns are health menace, that even regulated shooting ranges are environmental risks, bankroll supposedly local groups that will try to cut off newspaper ads (and presumably won't dissolve once that is done), create law reviews that will oppose the individual rights view and ship them to judges.
13 Comments
At some point it's going to come down to the ultimate truth. "Why should an unarmed man obey one who is armed?" I am pledged to introduce these freedom thieving bastards to the ultimate hypocrisy, for to disarm me they will have no choice but to use deadly force.
I think I'll write the Joyce Foundation a thank you note for encouraging me to increase the size of my personal arsenal in anticipation of their efforts. I'm a bit thin on .50 caliber equipment.
Hey, Dave, I think you meant David Hemenway, not Hemingway. Thanks for the heads-up.
That $1.25 million is piffle for Joyce. It's not overwhelming by anybody's standards. It seems to me that Joyce makes a lot more noise than $1.25 million worth.
Sure there isn't a misplaced decimal in there? (I don't want to dig through the financial statement, the link doesn't work, it's been a bad day, my site is down because the new admins messed up my file permissions - and I wouldn't believe the statement anyway. Joyce has professionals hiding the damning evidence from amateurs - like me, and reporters, and Congressmen).
Joyce sounds like our Wendy C. heads the Coalition for Gun Control of Canada. Knows nothing of crime fighting , anti-gun nut citizen! Has no credentials other than someone in family killed by some person with a gun! I feel sorry that happened but obvious a criminal doing a crime!,does not warrant a ban on Firearms! But her org.has backing of U.N.Firearms Laws for the NWO. Canada is one of four countries being used as example to rest of world - how to register owners,& firearms,progressively ban certain guns,and confiscate ALL firearms in Canada-except Natives/Aboriginals. Then only cops & criminals would have the firearms, & crime soars,like England,since all firearms in storage at Armouries,&2wks.written notice by law to get your own''gun''! Rowanda need not happen if citizens have guns-machetes can't kill at long range! UN dithering caused murders/slaughter of 250,000! The UN.can go stuff themselves! Arm all homes except for known criminals! Watch crime rate drop drastically, as the bad ones realize they could be dead! Won't happen in Canada-only reasonable force to overcome force is allowed-wide open area for courts/judges/juries to decide! Don't wound/injure B&E armed person here - you get sued, better to kill them!-that way he can't sue for sure eh?? Except next of kin! Maybe? Later 308cal.
Okay, let's pretend it's a perfect world. Guns are gone. Nobody has them, least of all criminals. But crime continues unabated. What's next? Outlaw knives? Broken glass? Pointed sticks? Long fingernails?
It just goes to show that happiness isn't the only thing that money can't buy. Apparently, intelligence is pretty high up on that list, too.
Gun Control: "Using both hands in order to achieve a clean head-shot."
One only has to look at the swiss to see how we need to handle the crime problem
the government gives out guns to people when they reach a certin age, every home has atleast one gun, and they have one of the LOWEST crime rates in the world..
hmmmmmmmm
The Joyce Foundation also has steered money to the Chicago PR firm Mark Karlin & Associates. Karlin is a gun control activist. Karlin owns and operates the progressive news site buzzflash.com.
If I recall correctly, Karlin has received about a quarter of a million dollars alone over the last 5 years for gun control advocacy.
Anon,
Please be a little more careful when you bandy about that word "progressive." The "progressives" have not been progressive for 50 years or more.
There was a leter to the editor published in the Casper Star Tribuine (Wyoming) in the last few days where the author told of all the dangers of not having more gun control. Her last paragraph was most telling about her reasoning and the reasoning of others of a like mind. It seems her nephew was killed by an "illegal" gun in Denver sometime in the past. Since her nephew was killed with an illegal gun how much more illegal can you make it?
Dick: Point noted. I use the term progressive because that is the term used by buzzflash. You can make up your own mind if Karlin and buzzflash is "progressive" or not, but I'll add that Karlin has written that guns are fuel for the white male psychological disorder of power.
Anon,
Have you ever researched the stats on white vs. black in the number of cases of "gun violence" ie: homicide,robberies,carjackings, gang related crime, etc.???
Let me save you the trouble of doing the research...Blacks lead that category 10 to 1 over whites. So much for Karlin's " white male psychological disorder of power" theory.
Calvin Massey, one of the participants in the symposium, is the author of a leading constitutional law book, and his article in the symposium argues for stronger protection for gun rights (Excerpt: Massey criticizes "ignorant and stereotypical thinking on the part of the legal and cultural elites that, in general, oppose the recognition of individual gun rights" and opines that "the Second Amendment is ... 'a constitutional ghost town,' a textual structure from which all contextual life has fled.... The Second Amendment should be given contemporary meaning.").
While the professors in this symposium may not be "recognozable" to you, maybe that doesn't prove a liberal conspiracy. You could say "so what, Massey is just one token gun rights advocate" -- but the point is that you clearly have no idea who these folks are and therefore are just making it up when you trot out your "woe is me, the oppressed conservative" claptrap.
I see these gun grabbers are up to their same old tricks;
Ellen S. Alberding, President of the The Joyce Foundation wrote an article a few years ago (2003), containing the following nonsense:
[quote]
Several recent studies by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health make clear that in states where there are more guns, more people, including children, are dying from gun violence.[/quote]
...of course, what she doesn't tell you is that the Joyce Foundation funded the Harvard study.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/press/releases/press02192002.html
Not surprising, considering she is a Hillary Clinton Campaign contributor.