From the April 2000 Idaho Observer:

Aspiring senator exposed proposed gun ban -- in 1974

By Don Harkins

On October 18, 1974, Gun Week newspaper published a story headlined “Indiana senatorial candidate Lugar exposes proposed ban” in reference to the findings of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards which, in 1973, called for the ending of private firearms ownership in the U.S.

Four-term Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) has since become silent with regard to his stand on 2nd Amendment rights even though the Rhodes scholar has known since 1974 that the disarmament agenda was rife with deception. “The first and only discussion concerning whether or not to include the gun chapter was carried out during an informal session earlier in the commission's activities,” said then Indianapolis Mayor Lugar.

Lugar recalled that, “there was much discussion about it with most of the members being opposed to including the chapter.”

According to Lugar, a vote was taken and a proposal to include an anti-gun chapter in the commission's report was defeated. “I assumed that the defeat of the 'gun control' advocates had closed the matter. It never came up again. However, like a number of others, I failed to attend the last meeting of the commission which was generally considered a formality, in order to remain home and work at my duties here,” Lugar stated in 1974.

“It was in this session, with its light attendance, that the gun chapter was inserted, very much against the wishes of what I believe to be the majority of the commission. I was not aware of the chapter's existence until I examined the finished document,” he said.

At the time Lugar recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is a right secured to the people by the Constitution. “The right to possess and carry a firearm is very clearly a recognized constitutional right which is the individual citizen's. The basic position of the 'gun control' advocates is the same one long stated by my opponent: The citizen has no such right,” Lugar stated in reference to then incumbent Indiana Senator Birch Bayh who publicly stated that the 2nd Amendment applied solely to the National Guard.

While campaigning for the Senate, Lugar compared Bayh's logic to reserving the 1st Amendment, freedom of the press, to the U.S. Government Printing Office.

“The contrast could not be clearer: We have the Constitution which clearly sets forth gun possession as an individual right and we have those actively working to infringe that right, who use the 'Big Lie' technique to say that no such individual right exists,” Lugar so eloquently explained before beltway politics conditioned him to keep his mouth shut with regard to the right to keep and bear arms.

Lugar, who at the time considered himself to be a scholar, found that the research which supposedly supported the content of the commission's gun ban chapter was “very poor.”

Lugar, who could not have been peering 25 years ahead at the time because he was simply campaigning for office, made a few comments that are increasing in relevance in direct proportion to the increasing militancy of the nation's gun grabbers. “Aside from the critically important constitutional question, which is causing greater and greater bitterness among the people, there is the matter of the research offered to support the ban proposal: Examination will indicate to anyone that who cares to look that there is no academically acceptable material offered in support of the ban. Moreover, there is no effort made to provide even token examination of the other side of the question.”

Since the commission's scientifically invalid report in 1973, several scientifically valid reports have been published which support claims that “an armed society is a polite society,” and not one scientifically valid report capable of withstanding peer review has been published in support of the disarmament of the American people. However, several high-profile tragedies, most of them involving the deaths of children in America's public schools, have been used illogically and unscientifically as a means to justify the passage of legislation intended to leave the American people defenseless against the armed agents of tyranny.

With thanks to Richard Korus for supplying the Gun Week newspaper article which provided the basis for this article.