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How to deal with an 'obsolete' Amendment
Satire: Citizens for Printing Control demand 'reasonable' controls on the First Amendment

Imagine, if you will, this headline from a future issue of the Washington Post: "Citizen Activists Decry 18th-Century Amendment, Cite Threat to Public Safety."
     And the story reads:

     Washington, DC --- Citizen activists continue to press for sweeping Federal legislation in the wake of the Littleton tragedy, claiming that modern technology has made the Constitutional provisions of the 18th-Century Bill of Rights obsolete in our society.
     Citizens for Printing Control (CPC) activist Rosie O'Donnell said, "The First Amendment was written in the days of the quill pen and hand printing press. It's obvious that it wasn't intended to apply to typewriters, rotary presses, or computer printers."
     Other activists hammered home similar points: "Today, modern printing and communications technology is capable of spewing out thousands of dangerous ideas per minute. Perhaps the First Amendment could be tolerated in a society where hand presses might publish a controversial pamphlet once or twice a month, but today, allowing private citizens to own means of mass communications is just plain idiocy."
     Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) poured contempt during today's hearings, which examined whether the First Amendment was intended to apply to individual possession of means of communication.

Official capacity
     "The First Amendment was intended to protect the right of state legislators to voice their opinions to Congress and the President, while speaking in their official capacities," he argued.
     Other activists derided the theory that the right of individuals to freely print and distribute opinions is necessary to defend liberty.
     "Perhaps in colonial times a pamphleteer could influence the course of public opinion," they noted. "But today, individuals with typewriters would be helpless in the face of the government's massive army of speech-writers, spin-doctors, and other trained professionals."
     The history of press control in the U.S. has been fraught with controversy from the start.
     At the founding of the Republic, the image of pamphleteers like Tom :Paine and printers like Benjamin Franklin were central to the iconography of the Revolution. The First Amendment was widely interpreted as giving each citizen the right to print whatever they wanted.
     But as printing technology advanced, most responsible citizens began to feel that some controls were necessary to prevent the irresponsible use of these devices. New York City's Sullivan Law (1900), banning typewriters except in the offices of licensed newspapers, began the trend.
     Federal controls began in the Prohibition era, when public opinion became alarmed at the use of high-speed presses by gangsters to publish clandestine advertisements for speakeasies. The Rotary Press Tax Act (1934) created a very high tax on privately owned high-speed presses, and created the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Printing (BATP) to enforce it.
     However, attempts at printing control have been frustrated by the persistence of a First Amendment culture of individual typewriter, mimeograph, and printing press owners.
     Claiming that the intent of the Founding Fathers was to permit every citizen to express their opinions without limit or compromise, this subculture claims to promote responsible use of printing technology.
     Organized into the National Readers Association (NRA), these people, backed by the powerful lobby of typewriter and press manufacturers, have effectively blocked all but the most token printing controls.
     Sparked by a series of incidents in which students--stimulated by literature printed on unregistered presses--have killed fellow students and faculty, a growing groundswell of anti-printing sentiment has begun to chip away at the power of the typewriter lobby.

Cheap typewriters
     First the import of cheap foreign typewriters was outlawed; then the sale of electric typewriters (feared for their fast, 60-word-per-minute typing rate) was severely restricted.
     Subsequently, the sale of extra-long typewriter ribbons was banned, although such items are still reportedly available at book fairs were printing fanatics gather--as well as, reportedly, computer printers and other military-grade technology.
     The Littleton massacre, in which two students, inflamed by reading Gothic literature, much of which was printed on unregistered presses, killed fellow students, became a catalyst for printing-control advocates.
     The New York Times editorialized: "People have talked about alienation and other possible contributors. But this ignores the obvious. The problem is clearly the proliferation of millions of printing presses in the hands of Americans. How much longer can we afford this tragedy?"

This satire, by James C. Bennett, appeared in the August 1999 Libertarian Party News.

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