I like that "target-rich enclave" phrase.
Licensing our dignity will force us to live on our knees
By Timothy Wheeler
On a crisp October night in 1995, a Southern California man was raped. Walking home with bags of groceries in his arms he was abducted by a violent career criminal. The criminal, whom prosecutors charged recently as the Los Angeles Southside Rapist, took him to an automatic teller machine and robbed him. Then at gunpoint he forced the grocery shopper to perform sex acts.
No police were there to save the victim. Criminology research and common sense tell us that had he carried a gun and known how to use it, he would have been much more likely to escape injury. But he lives in Santa Monica, a city that would deny him his right to carry a self-protection gun even if he asserted it. And if he sues the police or the city for allowing this terrible crime to happen, he will discover what all other such victims have learned, to their sad amazement - the police had no duty to protect him.
TARGET-RICH ENCLAVES
An enclave of gun-abhorring (and therefore unarmed) liberal-thinking citizens, Santa Monica provides a target-rich environment for career criminals. Similar stories abound in other cities where gun ownership is limited to criminals and the police. In Washington D.C., New York, and Chicago unarmed potential victims must rely on luck and the mercy of violent predators.
But contrast Santa Monica with Orlando, Fla., in the late 1960s. During a rash of rapes similar to the Southside Rapist's spree, the Orlando Police Department trained more than 2,500 women in the use of guns for self-defense. In the year after the Orlando police launched the highly publicized program, the number of rapes there plunged 88 percent. The rate remained constant for the rest of Florida and the United States.
Truly, our government denied the hapless Santa Monica victim the means of self-defense and simultaneously denied a duty to protect him from harm. How absurdly cruel. And how Clintonesque.
President Clinton now wants to deny people like the Santa Monica victim the right to defend themselves against rape and similar outrages. In his final State of the Union address, Clinton pushed for laws requiring law-abiding citizens to obtain licenses with photo ID cards before purchasing a handgun. Presidential hopeful Al Gore gleefully endorsed a similar plan last year.
In a grim irony, the suspected Southside Rapist would be exempt from Clinton's handgun license requirement. The Supreme Court ruled in its 1968 Haynes decision that a convicted criminal cannot be required to answer the probing questions the rest of us have to answer before buying a gun. He would thereby incriminate himself, the court reasoned, since convicted felons are prohibited from buying guns.
DIGNITY DEPRIVED
One might reasonably ask President Clinton how his plan to license law-abiding handgun owners instead of criminal handgun owners will prevent crime. The answer is increasingly clear. The whole purpose of licensing you and me is not to prevent us from committing crimes. It is to prevent us, gradually and by a thousand cuts of the law, from owning handguns. It is to deprive you and me of our only effective defense when an aggressor offers deadly violence. It is to deprive us of our dignity.
>Until recently, gun owners were derided as paranoids for believing the ``slippery slope'' argument that any so-called sensible gun laws lead us toward confiscation. But since California Attorney General Bill Lockyer started using gun registration lists to confiscate previously legal guns, nobody is laughing. The gun grab has started in California.
There are signs that America's 80 million gun owners are beginning to connect the dots. This month a San Francisco legislator saw his gun registration bill die in committee, not even allowed to come up for a vote in the Democrat-controlled state legislature, much less get signed by the Democrat governor. California's gun owners rallied to the phones and let their legislators know they are not ready to be classified as criminals yet.
Rape victims suffer exposure to AIDS, hepatitis, and other sexually transmitted diseases. They often endure a life sentence of nightmares, depression, and intrusive flashbacks. The Southside Rapist took his victim's money and sense of security. But as with all violent crimes, he robbed the man of something far more precious - his dignity. And as the essayist Jeffrey Snyder wrote, if our dignity is not worth defending, it can hardly be said to exist at all.
The November elections draw near. Designing politicians used to cloak their secret desire to disarm Americans in the rhetoric of gun safety. No longer do they bother with this pretense. Their intentions are all too clear. Americans must decide whether to trust themselves with the natural right of armed self-defense, or to live on their knees.
The writer, a physician, is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Claremont (Calif.) Institute. To learn more about this project and others, visit the institute's Web site: www.claremont.org
Images and text copyright © 2000 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co.
-- 30 --
Letters to the editor at: feedback@pittsburghlive.com
------------------
The New World Order has a Third Reich odor.
Licensing our dignity will force us to live on our knees
By Timothy Wheeler
On a crisp October night in 1995, a Southern California man was raped. Walking home with bags of groceries in his arms he was abducted by a violent career criminal. The criminal, whom prosecutors charged recently as the Los Angeles Southside Rapist, took him to an automatic teller machine and robbed him. Then at gunpoint he forced the grocery shopper to perform sex acts.
No police were there to save the victim. Criminology research and common sense tell us that had he carried a gun and known how to use it, he would have been much more likely to escape injury. But he lives in Santa Monica, a city that would deny him his right to carry a self-protection gun even if he asserted it. And if he sues the police or the city for allowing this terrible crime to happen, he will discover what all other such victims have learned, to their sad amazement - the police had no duty to protect him.
TARGET-RICH ENCLAVES
An enclave of gun-abhorring (and therefore unarmed) liberal-thinking citizens, Santa Monica provides a target-rich environment for career criminals. Similar stories abound in other cities where gun ownership is limited to criminals and the police. In Washington D.C., New York, and Chicago unarmed potential victims must rely on luck and the mercy of violent predators.
But contrast Santa Monica with Orlando, Fla., in the late 1960s. During a rash of rapes similar to the Southside Rapist's spree, the Orlando Police Department trained more than 2,500 women in the use of guns for self-defense. In the year after the Orlando police launched the highly publicized program, the number of rapes there plunged 88 percent. The rate remained constant for the rest of Florida and the United States.
Truly, our government denied the hapless Santa Monica victim the means of self-defense and simultaneously denied a duty to protect him from harm. How absurdly cruel. And how Clintonesque.
President Clinton now wants to deny people like the Santa Monica victim the right to defend themselves against rape and similar outrages. In his final State of the Union address, Clinton pushed for laws requiring law-abiding citizens to obtain licenses with photo ID cards before purchasing a handgun. Presidential hopeful Al Gore gleefully endorsed a similar plan last year.
In a grim irony, the suspected Southside Rapist would be exempt from Clinton's handgun license requirement. The Supreme Court ruled in its 1968 Haynes decision that a convicted criminal cannot be required to answer the probing questions the rest of us have to answer before buying a gun. He would thereby incriminate himself, the court reasoned, since convicted felons are prohibited from buying guns.
DIGNITY DEPRIVED
One might reasonably ask President Clinton how his plan to license law-abiding handgun owners instead of criminal handgun owners will prevent crime. The answer is increasingly clear. The whole purpose of licensing you and me is not to prevent us from committing crimes. It is to prevent us, gradually and by a thousand cuts of the law, from owning handguns. It is to deprive you and me of our only effective defense when an aggressor offers deadly violence. It is to deprive us of our dignity.
>Until recently, gun owners were derided as paranoids for believing the ``slippery slope'' argument that any so-called sensible gun laws lead us toward confiscation. But since California Attorney General Bill Lockyer started using gun registration lists to confiscate previously legal guns, nobody is laughing. The gun grab has started in California.
There are signs that America's 80 million gun owners are beginning to connect the dots. This month a San Francisco legislator saw his gun registration bill die in committee, not even allowed to come up for a vote in the Democrat-controlled state legislature, much less get signed by the Democrat governor. California's gun owners rallied to the phones and let their legislators know they are not ready to be classified as criminals yet.
Rape victims suffer exposure to AIDS, hepatitis, and other sexually transmitted diseases. They often endure a life sentence of nightmares, depression, and intrusive flashbacks. The Southside Rapist took his victim's money and sense of security. But as with all violent crimes, he robbed the man of something far more precious - his dignity. And as the essayist Jeffrey Snyder wrote, if our dignity is not worth defending, it can hardly be said to exist at all.
The November elections draw near. Designing politicians used to cloak their secret desire to disarm Americans in the rhetoric of gun safety. No longer do they bother with this pretense. Their intentions are all too clear. Americans must decide whether to trust themselves with the natural right of armed self-defense, or to live on their knees.
The writer, a physician, is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Claremont (Calif.) Institute. To learn more about this project and others, visit the institute's Web site: www.claremont.org
Images and text copyright © 2000 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co.
-- 30 --
Letters to the editor at: feedback@pittsburghlive.com
------------------
The New World Order has a Third Reich odor.