** STATEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE **

Fellow Libertarians:

I've just received our national committee's mailing to LP members on
"Operation Safe Streets", an attempt to raise money internally by
promising to try to persuade disaffected Republican gun owners to vote
Libertarian.  The "program" outlined in this mailing (they failed
to send their proposal in its entirety for review) superficially
resembles policies I recommended in my address to the national
convention in Salt Lake City last September.

But this mailing, more than anything else, impresses me as a
putty-pale, wimpified replica of the National Rifle Association's
hypocritical "Operation Crime-Strike", and typifies the timidity and
ineptitude which have kept the LP tiny and insignificant throughout
its 23-year history.  The one fitting and effective message to the
nation's gun owners at this moment is that "crime" has nothing to
do with _rights_; that the LP opposes all proposed and pending
victim-disarmament laws -- commonly but improperly known as "gun
control" -- and, given the political power, will:

1)  repeal more than 20,000 victim-disarmament laws already on
the books (not one of which is Constitutional or consistent with
individual or human rights) and abolish all agencies, at every
level of government, responsible for enforcing them;

2)  decriminalize the act of self-defense;

3)  pardon and provide restitution to anyone ever inconvenienced in
the slightest by victim-disarmament laws;

4)  arrest, convict, fine, and imprison any public official who ever
enacted or enforced victim-disarmament laws; and

5)  where such a violation of individual or Constitutional rights has
resulted in a fatality, impose the maximum penalty on all such public
officials.

Anything less than the above, stated any less strongly than above,
will have no effect except to convince this nation's gun-owners that
Libertarians are the same sort of cowards, four-flushers, and idiots
who run the other two political parties.

Sincerely,
L. Neil Smith
Founder, Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus