a "reflection" published January 1994
Recently in Seattle, a 16-year-old lad chanced upon his three-year old sister as she was being mauled by a dog. The boy went into his house, got a gun, and shot the dog. His sister, who would have been a goner, survived.
The press and politicians, usually quick to make object lessons out of every such violent event — advocating laws against dangerous dogs
such as pitbulls, or the regulation of weapons — were oddly silent. No one, it seemed, dared draw the obvious conclusion: that having a deadly weapon in the home, and children who can use it, can be a blessing, a very great blessing.
Of course, the reason for their silence is obvious. Both media people and political people thrive on a helpless populace, a populace afraid of every momentary crisis
; this, as H.L. Mencken explained, is their particular form of charlatanism. They publicize a hazard, then provide the solution,
in their op-ed pages, magazine sections, and television specials.
I suppose it is inevitable for newspeople to express opinions on the stories they report. But we should hold them to higher standards than they themselves promote. If they report on a tragic instance of an accidental shooting by children playing
with their parents' gun, the moral should be: parents, train your children in gun safety.
The dominant ethic in many of today's gun-owning households appears to be just the opposite: keep the weapons out of reach of the children, don't let the children touch the guns; guns are for adults. But this sort of prudery is merely the liberal
version of an older belief about sex: deny the existence of a fact of life when you can, demand abstention when you can't, and whatever you do, keep discussion to a minimum. Guns, apparently, are an awful lot like sex: something dirty and regrettable that only adults can be allowed to have. This is irresponsible.
Parents: if you can't talk to your kids about sex, you have a problem — and your children may wind up in a family way
long before their time. And if you can't talk to your kids about guns, you have a problem — your kids may wind up orphans.
What is needed, of course, is a culture of responsibility, where knowledge, wisdom, and skill are expected and demanded. Gun safety classes
are not something that just prospective hunters should take. And gun cleaning should become a family event — like saying grace — in every home that harbors a gun. Though parents should still regulate their offspring's gun use (of course of course of course), the guns should not be something foreign and mysterious to the children of the household.
And, of course, families aren't the only beneficiaries of privately owned handguns. In early September, in Federal Way, Washington, a retired schoolteacher and her housemates were threatened by their knife-wielding handyman — a homeless man whom they had helped find both work and shelter — in the early hours of the morning. But one of them got a gun. He attacked her and the gun fell to the floor, where it was picked up by another of the intended victims, who shot the felon in the head. He died. Altogether a happy ending, though I can imagine a better one: the moment the assailant moved toward the first woman who held the gun, this woman fired. Perhaps if she had not been brainwashed by a liberal
culture that instructs victims to be too solicitous of its aggressors, or a sexually segregated culture that regularly leaves the boys to clean the guns (once a year) while the girls do the dishes
(every night), she might have had the wherewithal to avoid the danger of a loaded gun flying, uncontrolled, through the air.
Sure, I'm an advocate of gun control. Gun owners: control your guns!
Liberty, Vol. 7, No. 3
 |
Click here for this site's general fair-use permissions statement. |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|