FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED AUG. 15, 1999
EDITORS: THIS IS A SHORTER VERSION OF COLUMN WHICH ALREADY MOVED
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Fact or phobia on guns: the choice is ours
One of the news digests I receive over the Internet reported last week: "FEWER GUNS FOUND IN SCHOOLS: Despite an outburst of horrendous and well-publicized shootings in schools, the U.S. Education Department said today the number of students expelled for bringing guns and explosives onto campuses took a sharp dip last year."
Can anyone spot the blatant bias in this "news summary"? Focus on that word "despite." Now try reading the same item, substituting for the word "despite" the phrase "Helping to explain ..."
One more time: Nut cases only succeed in multiple killings when they can be confident their prospective victims are (start ital)disarmed(end ital).
As Marilyn Henry reported for the Jerusalem Post on Aug. 12, under the headline "U.S. Jewish gun advocates call for self-defense":
"Aaron Zelman isn't calling for gun control after the Tuesday shooting at a Los Angeles Jewish center that wounded five people, including four children. Quite the reverse: He is aggressively pushing Jewish self-defense."
" 'The Jewish community is blind,' said Zelman, the hairman of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. 'We must be able to defend ourselves against evil-doers.' ...
A Marine Corps veteran who believes "gun control" will eventually lead to an American police state, Zelman told the Post that Israelis -- who have experienced no such terror attacks since they started arming teachers, day care workers, and even parent volunteers -- could teach America's liberal politicians a thing or two about self-defense.
" 'I chose to move out of the city of Milwaukee and take my children out of a Jewish day school because the people who run these schools don't give a damn about security. What they call security doesn't amount to a $25 system from K-Mart,' said Zelman, the father of two.
" 'I am not going to subject my children to being sitting ducks because of what I call Jewish stupidity. They are not going to be victims like these kids today,' he said."
Mr. Zelman was even more strident in a subsequent interview with the Internet publication World Net Daily, declaring: "It's time for the American gun owners -- Jewish and non-Jewish alike -- to take a stand together, shoulder to shoulder, and tell the 'victim disarmament' crowd that the blood is on their hands for what happened (in Los Angeles)."
" 'The JPFO is not a bunch of redneck, paranoid Jewish gun nuts,' Rabbi Reuven Mermelstein, director of the group's editorial board, told Ms. Henry of the Post.
" 'It says in our Torah, "And you must surely guard your life." I understand this injunction to mean stay out of inclement weather, eat wisely, and be armed.' "
"We were, are, and will continue to be victims. If anyone attempts to arm him or herself, he or she will be in violation of the law and tried as a criminal," Rabbi Mermelstein wrote in an Aug. 11 Internet "alert" to JPFO members.
The world is, sadly, overpopulated with psychotics like the Los Angeles shooter, says Rabbi Mermelstein. "But Americans have always had the cure. (Only) the whims of capricious legislators living inside their gated communities ... prevent its use. It is a national disgrace that ... potential victims are denied the only known disease prevention that is easily carried in a waistband or handbag."
Of course, those with an irrational phobia for firearms -- the tools with which Americans won their independence and brought down Adolf Hitler -- will whine, "Turning our child care centers into armed camps will never do; fighting violence with violence is never the answer."
Really? So when the folks at the North Valley Jewish Community Center dialed 911 last week, they specified "Now, please don't send us the kind of officers who carry guns, since we believe guns never solve anything"?
Of course not. They hoped the LAPD would send the best shooters in town. We already (start ital)do(end ital) fight guns with guns. The only mistake we make is in believing the police will ever arrive in time to stop the nut from working his will on his victims -- the cretinous assumption necessary to embrace "gun control," which really only means "victim disarmament."
What are culture and technology good for, if we don't use them to protect the progeny to whom we hope to hand down these achievements?
John Lott, a law professor at the University of Chicago, told WorldNetDaily last week: "The safest course of action by far for someone to take when confronted by a criminal -- whether the criminal's armed or not armed -- is to have a gun yourself."
Lott's studies -- the most detailed ever undertaken -- show women who behave passively when confronted by a criminal are 2.5 times more likely to be injured than women who actively attempt to defend themselves -- especially by pulling their own gun.
"If you look across the United States, those states with the highest gun ownership rates tend to have the lowest murder rates and lowest violent crime rates across the board," says Professor Lott. "And probably more importantly, those states that have had the biggest increases in gun ownership have had the biggest relative drops in violent crime."
Which state has the most onerous victim disarmament regulations, by the way -- now including the first statewide attempt to actually confiscate semi-automatic rifles once ruled legal?
That would be California.
Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is author of the new book, "Send in the Waco Killers."
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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