Gun control laws have failed once more

Josey1

Gun control laws have failed once more Wednesday, following a news report that a Las Vegas 12-year-old left to baby-sit his 3-year-old sister had apparently managed to kill the child Tuesday with his parents' shotgun -- and despite a preliminary ruling by police that the parents had done nothing wrong because the weapon had been "in a reasonably secure location" -- an unsigned e-mail from an address at the UNLV rolled in, stating in its entirety: "Well chalk up another 3 year old as a sacrificial offering to the NRA and to Vin Suprynowicz. "I hope you are sleeping well tonight with the thoughts that unfettered gun control claimed another innocent victim. "I guess it's time to use your rag for another crummy moronic piece why guns are to be treasured." After briefly shaking my head at the ruthlessness with which this gang of totalitarian rape enablers will seize on any tragedy to advance their warped agenda -- even before the poor child was in her grave -- I replied: Hello, anonymous, tax-supported academic totalitarian. I must take exception to your association of me with the NRA, the country's largest gun-control organization. If you can find any writings in which I have ever endorsed the bulk of this organization's works, please site them. (Oh dear; I suppose you haven't actually read my writings, have you? Do give it a try -- you might surprise yourself. The alphabet is phonetic.) I also suspect you mean "unfettered gun availability" when (above) you make the interesting Freudian slip "unfettered gun control" ... though how this nation's 20,000 existing victim disarmament ("gun control") laws have left gun ownership in this country "unfettered," you would bear the burden of explaining. You also didn't bother to specify what the heck you were talking about, though I suspect I know. For your information, more than 1 million German and other European children were killed in Hitler's concentration camps because their families had given up their firearms -- and thus their ability to defend themselves against government tyranny -- by obeying victim disarmament ("gun control") laws very much like the ones you'd like to see imposed here. ... When the tiny number of children who die in gun accidents or due to the misbehavior of madmen in the free world begins to equal that number -- after subtracting the number of children saved from such madmen when law-abiding civilians show up to the rescue with their firearms, as in the famous recent case in Pearl, Miss. -- you be sure and let me know ... whereupon I'll advise you of how many children died thanks to the kind of "gun control" that fills your wet dreams, in Stalin's USSR, in Mao's Red China, and in Pol Pot's Cambodia. You're going to have a lot more counting to do. If gun control laws work, by the way, what is it you're complaining about? Surely you don't mean there's now been another wrongful or accidental gun death in spite of all these 20,000 overlapping state and federal laws which you gun-grabbers (since 1934, and especially since 1968) have been assuring us would guarantee "the safety of the children"? If so, will you now join me in declaring they've all failed, and calling for their repeal? ... In fact, about 80 to 200 American children under 15 die in gun accidents each year, which is certainly unhappy news. In most cases, those guilty of mishandling those firearms are rightfully punished. Meantime, in 1996, three times more children died in bicycle accidents, 950 children drowned in pools, and 15 times more children died in automobile accidents ... with hardly anyone being held responsible. When you've succeeded in banning bicycles and swimming pools and automobiles -- none of which the founding fathers promised to protect, in order to win ratification of their Constitution, acknowledging that they were "necessary to the security of a free state" -- be sure and get back to me. ... In "Armed" (2001, Prometheus Books), Kleck & Kates estimate there are 700,000 defensive firearms uses annually, which doubtless save thousands of innocent lives. In "More Guns, Less Crime" (1998, University of Chicago Press), esteemed researcher John Lott found passage of right-to-carry concealed handgun laws brought an 84 percent drop in multiple-victim public shootings (deaths from such shootings plummeting by 90 percent), and that women who behave passively when confronted by a criminal are 2.5 times more likely to be seriously injured than women who defend themselves with a gun. Do you have any idea how violent crime rates have soared in England since the ban on defensive firearms there? Are you willing to be held personally responsible for the thousands more innocent victims who will be killed by criminal assailants if your "gun-control" dreams ever come completely true? Have you forgotten that it was Richard Henry Lee who stood in the Virginia ratification debates and declared, in 1788, "To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them"? That it was Patrick Henry who responded, "The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able must have a gun"? ... A traitor and a coward, sir, a whimpering sycophant to tyrants, it was to your kind I believe Samuel Adams rightly referred when he famously advised: "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom ... go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels nor arms. May your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." Vin Suprynowicz, the Review-Journal's assistant editorial page editor, is author of "Send in the Waco Killers." His column appears Sunday. http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2002/Mar-24-Sun-2002/opinion/18355076.html