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Guns: Left's Hysteria Running Rampant Over Common Sense
Neal Boortz
Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2000
Did you know that prior to 1969 virtually every New York City high school had a shooting program for students?
These students would bring their guns to school and leave them with a homeroom teacher or shooting instructor until time for the shooting class. Then they would carry those guns home at the end of the day.
Back then these students, and children elsewhere in the country, could buy guns through mail order or at their local hardware stores or gas stations. Talk about an easy availability of guns!
Now it is illegal for a teenager to even purchase a gun, much less take one to school. Shooting courses or competitions in schools are virtually unheard of. The availability of guns is far more restricted now than it was in the 1960s.
Now we have school shootings! And what do the politicians and anti-gun crowd blame those school shootings on? The "easy availability of guns"! Does something just not sound right here?
When we had scores of kids legally carrying guns to school every week, there were no shootings. Now guns are absolutely forbidden in schools – even administrators and teachers can’t have them – and we do have shootings. And the left is blaming this on "easy availability of guns."
Sorry, doesn’t compute.
Since we’re talking about guns in schools, let me relate three different incidents to you.
Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi – 1998
After killing his mother, Luke Woodham took a gun to Pearl High School, where he shot and killed the girl who had broken up with him a year earlier. He killed two at that high school and injured seven.
Assistant Principal Joel Myrick heard the first shot and saw Woodham with a gun. Myrick had a .45 in his pickup truck parked a quarter-mile away, off school property. You see, federal law said he couldn’t bring that gun onto school property.
Myrick sprinted to his truck and got his gun. He got back to the school in time to confront Woodham as he was trying to leave in his mother’s car. He later said he was headed to the middle school to shoot more people. Myrick put the .45 in Woodham’s face and ordered him out of the car and on the ground. He held him there for the cops, saving lives.
A Lexis-Nexus search for the 30 days following the shooting showed a total of 687 articles. Only 19 of those articles mentioned Myrick. Only 10 of those said that Myrick used a gun to stop the attack. So, less than 1 1/2 percent of the articles on the Pearl High School shootings mentioned that the attack was stopped by an assistant principal with a gun.
Edinboro, Pennsylvania – 1998
Fourteen-year-old Andrew Wurst opened fire on an eighth-grade graduation dance. The dance was being held at a privately owned ballroom. The owner of the ballroom, James Strand, grabbed a shotgun out of his office and confronted Wurst. Wurst dropped his gun. One teacher killed, two wounded. Who knows how much worse it would have been if Strand had not been there with his shotgun.
I couldn’t find one media story which revealed that Wurst was stopped by a man with a gun. The articles all said he was "subdued" or "persuaded to surrender."
The problem here is clear. The leftist media in this country absolutely refuse to tell the whole story when a civilian uses a privately owned gun to stop a shooting.
Why? Because this does not support or promote the anti-gun agenda of the left. There is no objectivity here. The media has a clear agenda, and liberal media reporting will promote that agenda if at all possible.
Israel – 1997
In times past there were many terrorist attacks on Jewish children in Israeli schools. Finally some of the teachers and administrators started carrying guns. The shooting stopped. Flat-out stopped.
Stopped, that is, until 1997 when a group of Israeli schoolchildren was scheduled to visit the "Island of Peace" along the Jordanian border. Teachers were told that they had to leave all firearms behind because this was a place of peace. They did. The terrorists didn’t. Arab gunmen killed seven children and wounded six more.
Clearly guns can be a deterrent to school shootings. Right now depraved teenagers know that if they carry a gun into a school they will be the only person in that school with a gun!
What happens when someone in a position of authority actually suggests that we might want to discuss arming teachers or administrators?
Ask John Varis. For 13 years he was the district school superintendent in Reading, Ohio. He did a good enough job to win several awards and commendations.
Varis was engaged in a meeting inquiring into ways that schools might be made safer. He suggested that a study should be made of the possibility of allowing guards or teachers to be armed.
Columnists went into hysterics. The anti-gun crowd was just beside itself. Finally Varis was hounded into retirement! He lost his job because he suggested that schools might be safer if some teachers or administrators were armed!
That’s not all. The hysteria continued in Reading, Ohio. Some parents actually started a movement to have Varis’ pension revoked!
Can you believe this? This is the type of mindless hysteria the left has created over the issue of guns! A man can dedicate his life to education; win awards for his work, and then lose his job and possibly the pension he worked for decades to establish – all because he suggests that armed guards or teachers might prevent school shootings.
Do you remember those three kids in San Diego walking to school when they spotted a handgun lying in the grass? One of the students picked it up to see if it was real. It was. He immediately put the gun right back where they found it and went on to school. When they got to school they told a teacher about the gun. The police went to the location and retrieved it.
So, what happened to the students? Suspended. The student who picked up the gun and put it back into the grass was kicked out of school under the school’s zero-tolerance policy because he was in possession of a firearm on the way to school.
A San Diego politician was so outraged over this nonsense that he collected $500 in reward money to give to the kid for "doing the right thing."
With this type of left-wing hysteria clouding the debate, rational and logical discussion is impossible.
Neal Boortz is the hugely popular nationally syndicated radio host.
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God, Guns and Guts made this country a great country!
oberkommando sez:
"We lost the first and third and now they are after the Second!(no pun intended)"
