In the Supreme Court handgun ban case, the brief for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership presents an argument on a highly emotional topic in a very sober and solid manner. Gun bans do not always lead to genocide: Luxembourg bans all guns--and provided the sculpture of the destroyed revolver with a twisted barrel that now adorns the plaza outside the United Nations. The gun-hating government of the Duchy has not attempted genocide against is disarmed subjects. However, as the JPFO brief shows, governments which do perpetrate genocide do work hard to disarm the victims beforehand.

Addressing this argument is something which the anti-gun lobbies have rather conspicuously avoided over the years. In 1995, I participated in a international gun control symposium New York Law School; for my contribution, I wrote a favorable review of JPFO's book Lethal Laws. The staff of New York Law School Journal of International and Comparative Law contacted gun control groups, and solicited an article to counter mine. There were no takers.

While the pro-ban amicus briefs in DC v. Heller do anticipate some of the arguments (e.g., gun control's racist roots, Gary Kleck's figure of 2.5 million annual defensive gun uses) which were expected to be raised by Heller or his amici, none of the pro-ban briefs address the genocide issue. The closest thing to a counter-brief is that of by the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, filed on behalf of a large number of organizations, including several Jewish ones. The brief argues that the Second Amendment could not possibly have been written to protect the means of resistance to tyranny. The EFSGV brief and the JPFO brief both provide evidence from Founding Era writings to support their respective arguments.