is implicit in the blanket abolition of interstate shipments to individuals. Thank you for hearing our views. Mr. KING. Thank you, Mr. Wheat. Are there questions? Thank you again. Mr. KING. Mr. Scott. Mr. WATTS. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, it gives me a great deal of pleasure and a real pleasant surprise to be able to introduce and present to this committee a boyhood friend of mine who grew up in the same county that I did. We both attended the University of Kentucky Law School and graduated in the same class. Of course he went on to New York to make quite a success of himself and I poked around with politics, but it is a real pleasure, Woodson, to have you here. We would be delighted to hear from you. STATEMENT OF WOODSON D. SCOTT, REPRESENTING THE ROSLYN CLUB, TEANECK CLUB, AND BIG T CLUB, NEW YORK CITY, N.Y. Mr. Scorr. Thank you, John. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Woodson D. Scott. I am a resident of New York City, a lawyer in active practice, a member of the Roslyn Club in New York, and the Teaneck Club and Big T Club in New Jersey, a competitive shooter in pistol, smallbore, and high-power rifle, an official referee in rifle, pistol, and shotgun tournaments, and a certified instructor for rifle and pistol. I am specially interested in sports afield and shooting sports for recreation and competition on the many available target, skeet, and trap ranges throughout the country. I am grateful for this opportunity to come here and speak to you for the purpose of furnishing whatever help I can in relation to the proposed antigun legislation now before the Congress of the United States. I am opposed to all proposals for the registration of firearms. Any laws necessary under the police power for the public safety should be aimed at the criminal and the misuse of firearms. The right of reputable citizens to own and use firearms should not be restricted by oppressive laws. A firearms registration law does not disarm the criminal or assist in the prevention or detection of crime. Such a law discourages reputable citizens in the ownership of firearms, by high license fees, inconvenience, police interference, and time-consuming administrative procedures, which the average person finds an intolerable burden. Registration of firearms is a misguided step toward a police state which never should be taken in a free country such as the United States of America. Freedom from arbitrary police interference is implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. There is no reason or justification for interference with the ownership and lawful use of firearms by citizens of good repute. I ask your support in preserving our traditional right to own and use firearms without unnecessary restrictions. I am aware of the problems presented by the mail order sale of cheap guns, making them readily available for use by irresponsible persons. All of us are concerned about that problem. The claims you have heard from the antigun forces about the position of the people who own and use firearms are incorrect. The members of the clubs for whom I speak and the millions of other law-abiding citizens similarly situated throughout the country do not oppose all proposed firearms legislation. They have recognized the problems of some local communities arising from the ready availability of concealable guns through mail order purchases. They are aware of the occasional misuse of such guns by juvenile delinquents, criminals, and other irresponsible persons. They have supported legislation prepared and proposed by the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate Subcommittee To Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, S. 1975, introduced August 2, 1963, applicable to concealable firearms, as amended to eliminate any requirements for police approval, to establish a measure of Federal controls over the sale of concealable firearms in interstate commerce. They support properly drawn legislation to outlaw dangerous devices such as bazookas, bombs, and antitank guns. They support properly drawn legislation to control the importation of cheap foreign concealable firearms into the United States. They support properly drawn legislation to impose heavy penalties for crimes involving the misuse of firearms. They support the strict enforcement of existing laws at all levels of government. They support properly drawn legislation that is proposed to accomplish these proper purposes but are unalterably opposed to oppressive antigun bills such as the administration's proposals now before the Congress which are so drastic that they would unreasonably restrict and virtually prohibit the private ownership and use of firearms in the United States. We are dealing here basically with a matter of civil liberties and traditional personal rights. These civil liberties and personal rights evolved out of more than 500 years of struggle for freedom in England before the United States of America became an independent Nation. These civil liberties and personal rights were inherited when our Nation was formed and have been preserved through the changing vicissitudes of the years and two world wars and the aftermaths of those wars. There is no cause or justification for surrendering them now. The right to own and use firearms for lawful purposes is one of the civil liberties and personal rights which existed at the time this Nation was formed and it should be preserved as a heritage of our people and as a vital necessity to free people in modern as well as in earlier times. The administration's proposals would place unnecessary and burdensome restrictions on the purchase, transportation, or shipment of target and sporting firearms in interstate and foreign commerce; they would impose prohibitive license fees which would put many people out of business; they would leave too many things concerning basic rights to the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury or his delegate; they would delegate to the Treasury Department the administration of laws passed under the commerce power, which is an unsound if not unconstitutional delegation of powers. The Treasury Department is the tax collector for the Government. The next step could be the imposition of a prohibitive tax on the ownership of target and sporting firearms as the final step in the eventual disarmament of the reputable citizens of the United States. The proposed legislation as a whole is bad, so bad that it is doubtful whether any part of it could be salvaged by amendment. I ask you to ponder well the fatal consequences of such legislation on the civil liberties of your constituents. I ask you to oppose this proposed legislation and assure its defeat. If I may take a moment more of your time, I would like to give you some additional information which may be helpful to you about the dreadful Sullivan law in New York and the practical application of that law, if we have time for that. I would not impose on your time. This subject was covered in my testimony before the Commerce Committee on January 23, 1964, and appears at page 144 and following of the hearings before the Committee on Commerce, U.S. Senate, 88th Congress, 1st and 2d sessions, on S. 1975, which is the Dodd bill of August 1963, which I mentioned in my statement this morning. I want to say in commenting on the Sullivan law that nothing I say here is to be interpreted as reflecting adversely upon the Police Department of New York City. Over the years the New York City Police Department has extended to me every possible consideration and courtesy. I have found that the police officers in charge of gun licenses and renewals are honest, conscientious, and dedicated people. What I have to say here today about the Sullivan law which they enforce does not reflect in any degree upon their competence, integrity, or purpose. I have the highest praise for them. We all understand it is their responsibility to enforce the law which the legislature has placed on the books and likewise it is our responsibility to comply with that law so long as it is in effect. The difficulty with the Sullivan law is not in the police department, but in the statutes, which was made by the Legislature of the State of New York and it has been on the books since 1911, a period of over 50 years. I might say that that law was amended 67 times between the date of its original enactment and the recodification which occurred in 1963 in chapter 136 of the laws of 1963. Those 67 amendments created a complex of antigun legislation, the most stringent in the United States, and they became virtually unworkable because it could only be enforced by administrative interpretation, and that differed with the many counties in the States. Basically it was a law to prohibit the possession of a concealable firearm without a license and in that form it was enforced over the years. The application for a license itself is a very complex thing and only the people who can persuade the desk sergeant that they are specially qualified and specially in need of a license can even get past the desk sergeant to get a form, one of the complicated forms, with 38 questions that have to be answered. After you get past the desk sergeant and get a form and answer all those questions you have to go out and get three vouchers who are local residents who must not only vouch for all the things that you say, which cover your whole lifetime, but they have to vouch for many other things about which few people have personal knowledge. It is a matter of great difficulty in finding vouchers, particularly for people who have not lived long in the city. Then you have to go get photographs and pay for those photographs. You have to pay a $20 license fee. If the license is denied, as it so often is, you do not get back the fee nor does it go into the general tax fund, but goes into the police pension fund and they retain it. Then if and when you get the license you hold it at the discretion of the license commissioner, and when that license is terminated by revocation or by death the items desribed on that license thereby become a public nuisance and are confiscated as such under the laws of New York. When a licensee dies the gun sergeant often gets there before the undertaker. He takes those into protective custody, dumps them into a box or some other receptacle, and it is very, very seldom that people interested in that estate ever see those again. If they are fine target firearms they never see them again in the proper shape to serve the purpose they once served. They are destroyed under the law of New York. They are required to be destroyed at least once a year and more often, and I have many times seen a little piece in the paper, a few lines long, saying that such and such a barge had taken so many thousands of confiscated firearms out and dumped them in the ocean. I understand that some of them are also destroyed at the plants of some of the concerns which have ways of making metal unusable for future use. All this occurs at a time in our national maturity when more than 50 cents out of every tax dollar is spent on the national defense. This alone should give you pause in considering of any significance in your deliberations any statement made which would extoll the very doubtful virtues of the Sullivan law in the State of New York. In 1964 we came to a turning point where the Sullivan law could no longer be accepted as a guide as to what the people want or what they think they should have. For the first time since 1911 we got some amendments to the Sullivan law in 1964, and I am going to take just a moment to tell you about those amendments because they tell you a great deal about the law. The first one I want to call your attention to is chapter 788 of the laws of 1964 passed by the New York Legislature which made toy pistols exempt from the Sullivan law. Up to that time if my son Jimmy Scott had a toy pistol in a public place he was adjudged a juvenile delinquent. By legal definition he became a juvenile delinquent. It was not in anybody's discretion, but by legal definition he became a juvenile delinquent, and, needless to say, he was not allowed toy pistols until the law was amended. It was amended to make some provision for a lost license. Up to that time if you lost your license or went in swimming and destroyed it or something like that, you had to start all over again. You couldn't go down and get a new license. You had to start all over again and go through the whole voucher procedure again. Then we had a provision which made it impossible for a person living in other parts of the State to take a registered gun through New York City without a New York City license, and that was changed. These changes point out some of the worst hardships of the law. It also covers antique firearms. We got through a bill last year, but it was vetoed by Governor Rockefeller, which would have prevented the confiscation of guns owned by a deceased person. This bill was passed by the legislature, but it was vetoed by the Governor. There are many other hardships that I could go into, but I will not take your time. I will just give you one other bit of informa tion which is pertinent here on the problem of administrative discretion which you hear so much about. I have a letter here dated July 3 from Mr. Manuel Lena, of Brooklyn, N.Y., in which he tells me that he is a taxi driver and he has what they call a hack license. The license division administers the pistol licenses, the hack licenses, the sound trucks, and the tow trucks in New York, all under one commissioner, and he is a hack driver. He is also a target shooter and he wants to go to the range one night a week and do some shooting, so he applied for a target permit and he was granted the permit and by notice dated June 16, 1965, he was notified that he could come in and pick up his pistol permit if he would surrender his current hack driver's license. I made discreet inquiry as to what that meant and was told that, while there was no provision in the law, it was a matter of departmental policy that anyone who had the one license could not have the other. We all think that administrative discretion will not be exercised in that way, and we all might assume that if these bills, including this broad administrative discretion, should be enacted nothing like that would be done but there are many of us who hold other licenses, and if one of us wants to buy a shotgun in Belgium and have it shipped to the United States under regulations provided by the Secretary or his delegate I don't think that we would want to be told that we couldn't do that unless we gave up all of our other licenses. I mention this as an instance of administrative discretion which has gone to a point beyond which you would not assume in the enactment of a law it would go, and I suggest a great deal of caution in any law which contains broad administrative discretion. I am familiar with the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 and of the cases that have been cited under it, and certainly you have a right to go to the courts, but it costs several thousand dollars to mount an effective litigation, to have the questions passed upon by the courts, and then the court tells us that they can only change the decision of the administrative officer in case they find it is unreasonable and arbitrary and capricious. The broad administrative discretion is one of the very dangerous things in the laws now before the Congress, and, as I read it, it goes beyond anything which heretofore has been proposed in any department of Government. I urge you to assure the defeat of all the antigun bills now pending before the Congress. May I include these letters to which I have referred in the record-letter from Manuel Lena, dated July 5, 1965, to me and the letter dated June 16, 1965, from the Division of Licenses, Police Department, City of New York, to Mr. Lena. Mr. KING. Without objection. (Letters referred to follow :) Mr. WOODSON D. SCOTT, Lord, Day and Lord, New York, N.Y. JULY 5, 1965. DEAR MR. SCOTT: This letter will introduce me: My name is Manuel Lena. I live at 233 Suydam Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., 11237. I am a National Rifle Association member. I have been a member for the past 3 years. I have recently signed up for life membership. I also belong to the Brookwood Gun |