Easy Access

FOREWORD: This little essay, which I wrote in 2001, has disappeared from other sites where it originally appeared, so I'm going to give it a home here at WarOnGuns:

Half a lifetime ago, my friend Howard's dad bought him a Stevens bolt-action, single-shot .22 with a Weaver 4X scope. By the time he was 13, his dad trusted him enough to take the gun by himself to the range in Santa Monica. The rest of the world didn't have a problem with it either.

Stevens rifle in hand, he and a friend walked down the street and boarded a bus, opening the action to show the driver that the gun wasn't loaded. After getting off at their stop, they walked another half-mile to the range. And they returned home the same way.

Fast-forward to the present. The place is Hawthorne, California, the scene, the 99 Cents Plus Mini Market. Two predatory teenagers have decided the store is a low-risk target, with vulnerable prey. This is the third robbery at the place in two months. It's not as if the cops are around. And when you're an easy mark, word spreads on the street.

Still, there is nothing like an overwhelming show of force, just to make sure your victims know who's in charge, and violent criminals always seem to understand this. To that end, one approaches a 62-year-old female clerk and sticks a gun to her head, a machine pistol according to the news accounts.

Another gun crime committed by troubled adolescents. Isn't this further proof that youth today have all too easy access to guns, and that if we don't do something about it, the senseless killings will continue?

Let's stop for a moment and examine the facts. In California, a juvenile cannot legally own a gun. He cannot legally handle one outside the supervision of an adult. He cannot legally carry a concealed weapon, nor can that weapon be loaded, even if carried openly, which he's not allowed to do. So at this point, we have several violations of state gun control laws, each enacted under the promise that it will help end this sort of thing. And, as automatic weapons have been regulated, licensed and taxed by the federal government since 1934, illegal possession of a machine pistol makes this a federal rap as well.

Like any of this matters to any but opportunistic politicians and those incapable of separating reason from emotion who elect them. Street hoodlums are smarter than that. They know they can get a gun any time they want. They laugh at anyone who thinks that another law is going to slow them down one bit, as if someone who would commit armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon by sticking a machine pistol to a 62-year-old woman's head would worry about the penalties for violating one of the 20,000-plus gun control laws already in place. No?

But let's return to the 99 Cents Plus store and see what harvest easy youth access to guns has reaped. There is a struggle. The woman's 12-year-old grandson grabs a hidden handgun and fires at one of the attackers, killing him and causing his accomplice to flee.

He has repelled two monsters, this brave youth, most certainly saving his grandmother, and probably himself, as murderers tend not to look upon witnesses with favor. He has stopped a violent crime from happening and assured that at least one sociopathic reptile will never again find human victims.

So where are the headlines: RESPONSIBLE ARMED YOUTH SAVES LIVES...? I mean, the press is supposed to be objective and unbiased, right?

Do you think the scenario may have played out differently had the wonks at Handgun Control, Inc., been heeded? What do you think the outcome would have been had the grandmother kept her gun unloaded, locked up and separated from its ammunition, or if she had installed a trigger lock? What about if her firearm was a personalized "smart gun" that no one but herself could fire? And had these "safety methods" resulted in the death of this valiant boy and his grandmother, would HCI have exploited this to call for yet more gun control?

Half a lifetime ago, a boy carrying a scoped rifle boarded the Santa Monica bus and no one gave it a second thought. There can be no doubt what the result would be if he tried the same thing today, in our climate of "easy youth access to guns."