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."
It is time to move forward to a time when there will be REAL easy access to firearms for everyone. Criminals wouldn't stand a chance.
ReplyDeleteMy Dad also grew up in an earlier and more sensible time Ruran Nevada during the Great Depression. Early on, they rode to school on their horses. Most often, the boys and even some of the girls brought their rifles, mostly .22 bolt actions, though one of them had to have taken Grandma's lever action repeater. They'd turn their horses loose in a paddock at school, walk into the one classroom, prop their rifles up against the back wall of the room. During recess and lunch, most would retrieve their guns and take them outside to do a littie friendly tin can murdering competition. They hated it when a few of the girls joined in as they were often better shots.
ReplyDeleteWhen Dad was 12 HIS Dad took him down to the county clerk's office on his birthday and said "we'd like to get his driver's license". She handed them a pad of small forms, they tore off the top blank one, filled out his name, date of birth, and address. They haded it back across the desk, she said "that'll be twenty five cents, please", which they dropped on top of the paper. She signed it and handed it back. Dad was now licensed to drive, at twelve. Two years later the school district bought a bus. Dad's family lived furthest from school so HE, at 14, became the bus driver. After all, he'd been running the wagon and team out at the farm for several years now, single handed. They didn't bring their rifles on their horses anymore, they just brought them along on the bus. Each kid kept theirs with them in their seats. Especially in the afternoons, on the way back from school, they'd keep a sharp eye out for critters the bus might spook up. Dad would stop the bus, and some boy or other would stand in the door steps, door open, and fire at some cottontail or maybe a big fat rattler digesting the last rabbit kit he'd swallowed. More protein for the family dinner table.
One of Dad's brothers became a sniper in the US Marine Corps in the Pacific Theater. He'd never talk about his "work", but I know firsthand what an incredible shot HE was. Using a 1903 Springfield military issue rifle he'd restocked, one time we were out shooting in the Nevada desert (I was about 15) and I had my first opportunity to fire a shotgun at some clays. I picked up on it pretty quickly, but my next younger sister did not. Tired of watching those clays break up as they hit the rocks on the desert floor, Uncle picked up his /06 and, after she had taken a shot and missed, he would take the clay out mid flight, going away as they flew. I had no idea what an impossible task that was at the time. I guess their schoolyard plinking and tin can murdering contests built a solid base of marksmanship in those boys. Oh, and at least one of Dad's many younger sisters. Even as adults, that girl could outshoot most of her brothers.
And everyone considered all of that "normal life".
ReplyDeleteCan anyone here imagine the kerfuffle, including red lights, sirens, handcuffs, SWAT teams to lock down the whole county, were a ten or twelve year old boy or girl would board a school bus today, .22 bolt action (or, the HORROR of it all, a LEVER ACTION REPEATER , surely that day's equivalent of today's Modern Sporting Rifle) in hand, action open "just because", and a pocket holding two or three boxes of .22WRF "shells" (that cost a whoe dime at the time....)
To my kowledge, and I'm sure if anyone had they'd have become a family pariah, not one of those school kids has ever fired a weapon of any kind in anger or unlawfully at any person. Nor even used one to threaten.
Have the guns commonly available today somehow morphed into strange devilish beasts with their own ability to transform their holders into raging murderous monsters? Nah. Somehoe I don't think its the hardware. More likely the defective software now deeply engrained into the sick hearts of the perpetrators of violence with firearms. Had any of Dad's peers ever tried any of this nonsense, their own peers would have jumped on him and pounded him senseless. then taken away his gun until he "wised up".
The issue is never the hardware, its always the software.
The M.S. Media and the Democ-Rats don't want you to know how many times armed citizen has stopped a crime
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