The Collateral Benefits of Guns

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The Collateral Benefits of Guns By: Robert A. Waters Published 03. 22. 2002 at 22:43 PST Gun rights advocates believe that defensive uses of firearms save thousands of Americans from becoming crime victims each year. Here is a case where a serial rapist was captured by armed citizens. Unfortunately, he was turned loose by the criminal justice system and we can count the number of preteen victims he later assaulted. In the early 1980s, a rapist was terrorizing women and children in San Antonio, Texas. He had stalked hundreds of victims, peeping into their windows. Once they went to sleep, he would break into their homes--if the victim continued to sleep, he would molest her, but if she awoke, he forcibly raped her. In many cases, his victims were as young as eight. Police had no clue as to the assailant's identity but the local newspapers had a name for him: the Ski Mask Rapist. In 1983, he broke into a house at 931 Sumner Lane. He assaulted the woman who lived there, then fled undetected. One month later, he returned. He again raped the hapless victim and again escaped leaving no clues. This was enough for the woman. She moved out. But this time, a concerned neighbor decided to set a trap for the rapist. Gene Allred, in an interview with ABC's 20/20, said, "I figured [if] this guy was crazy enough to come back the second time, he'd come back again." With permission from his former neighbor, Allred and his son-in-law installed microphones in the house next door, and placed a mannequin wearing a wig on the bed. They made sure to leave a night-light on so that the rapist could see the outline of his intended victim underneath the covers. They also kept their handguns at the ready. Sure enough, almost exactly one month later, the rapist returned. Allred was asleep when the microphones indicated that someone was breaking into his former neighbor's house. He later said, "We grabbed our pants and pistols and my son-in-law went out the front door...and I went out the back." Other family members surrounded the house to keep the intruder from escaping. Allred and his son-in-law encountered the man attempting to leave through a window. He ran into an alley, but was tackled by Allred's son-in-law. A brief struggle ensued until Allred pulled his gun, subdued the man, and handcuffed him. Police were called, and they arrested Joseph Frank Smith whom they suspected of being the Ski Mask Rapist. Although he later admitted his guilt in more than 200 cases, he was tried and convicted only of raping the woman who had lived in the now-empty house. Had the story ended there, an armed citizen would have saved 83 more children the trauma of sexual assault. Unfortunately, the story doesn't end with Smith's capture. His attorney convinced the court that he was a candidate for a new procedure called "chemical castration." Instead of imprisonment, the convicted rapist was released on probation with the stipulation that he take Depo-Provera and maintain weekly counseling sessions. The drug is a birth control pill that reduces testosterone levels. This, his lawyer claimed, would reduce his sex drive so that he no longer had a desire to rape women and children. Smith moved to Virginia to attend counseling sessions at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He seemed to have changed and was featured on "60 Minutes" as a poster boy for chemical castration. Texas authorities eventually lost track of him, and Virginia police never knew about him. Smith married one of his counselors, stopped taking Depo-Provera, and eventually had children of his own. But in the early 1990s, in Virginia, a series of rapes of preteen girls began. Police were stymied. An intruder would break into homes where children were sleeping. If they didn't wake up, he would molest them--if they did....well, you guessed it. Then, in 1993, Smith's wife caught him molesting their eight-year-old daughter and two other children who were sleeping over. Police were called. When they ran his DNA through the state-wide database, it came back positive for the rape of a five-year-old girl. Smith later confessed to assaulting 83 other young girls and was sentenced to forty years in prison. While there are numerous issues we could discuss about this case, I'll concentrate only on the collateral benefits of guns. Each time a citizen uses a gun to kill, incapacitate, or capture a criminal, many other victims are spared. While it is usually difficult to put a numerical figure on the number of crimes stopped, in this case we can see that 83 young girls would not have been subjected to the trauma of assault had Texas authorities kept Joseph Frank Smith incarcerated. After having been captured by an ingenious family of gun-owners, Smith should never have been allowed to walk the streets again. After he was turned loose, Gene Allred was among those who were enraged. He later recalled, "I was numb....We could have shot him out there in that alley. That would have been the best for Mr. Smith and for his victims." Had Smith been shot and killed, 83 innocents would have been spared. Unfortunately, the criminal justice system failed miserably, and the collateral damage to those children is immeasurable. http://www.sierratimes.com/02/03/23/waters.htm