Hercule Clinton et al. tell us why 6-year-olds are killing classmates
http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary.asp?s2=columnists&s3=steyn&f=000306/224542.html
Mark Steyn
National Post
Something funny happened in Michigan last week. A six-year-old boy shot dead a six-year-old girl. That's not the funny thing.
That's a tragedy, and one so freakish that no parent would ever expect to have to confront it. But what was funny was what
happened afterward. Hercule Clinton, Sherlock Gore and Perry Bradley began sifting through the evidence and quickly decided
whodunnit: it was the National Rifle Association with their opposition to trigger locks.
You really need the obtuse sidekick to do justice to the brilliance of their deduction. "Good grief, Holmes, that's amazing," says
Dr. Watson. "We're standing in the middle of a crack house, whose proprietor, a drug dealer with an outstanding warrant for
burglary, had been entrusted with the care of his nephews by a drug-addicted single mother, whose wretched progeny had been
exposed to marijuana since the day they were born, following the arrest of their father, who has sired six children by three
different women, and in which said crack house this unfortunate young chap didn't even have a bed to call his own but slept
where he could and thus happened to find under some blankets, secreted there by a ne'er-do-well teenager, a loaded stolen
pistol with which he dispatched his fellow first-grader. And yet you say: all we need are trigger locks."
"Elementary, my dear Watson. Trigger locks, plus background checks on gun-show sales, plus more guidance counsellors and
anger-management classes. Skip the magnifying glass and deerstalker. I can phone this one in."
The death of six-year-old Kayla Rolland isn't a gun story. It's a family disintegration story. But that's too judgmental for
contemporary tastes, especially when, as in this case, the family is black. So on ABC Cokie Roberts quoted a poll showing more
than 70% of women in favour of stricter gun control and advised conservative dissenters to get with the program. "This is a
mommy issue," she said. "And moms want to keep their children safe."
It is a mommy issue. And the issue is that six-year-old boy's mommy. Why didn't he have one? Why did he only have a drug
addict who, when they became an inconvenience, could think of no other place to palm off her unduly burdensome kids than a
crack-infested flophouse? And why does the state, which in Michigan as in Canada and elsewhere has appropriated unto itself
vast regulatory powers over the family, so fetishize the paramountcy of "biological parenting" that nothing "Mommy" did to her
kid would have driven them to remove him from (if you'll pardon the expression) her care? "It's my position that we have, at this
point, enough evidence to establish child neglect," said the cautious Genesee County prosecutor. Whoa, don't go rushing ahead
of yourself. Just 'cause she dumps the kid in a crack house doesn't necessarily make her a bad mother.
Irving Kristol once said that a neo-conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. But the great thing about being a
liberal is that your chances of being mugged by reality are very small. It's easy for Bill Bradley to call for trigger locks. He's an
NBA superstar, he lives in an upscale neighbourhood, he's got state-of-the-art security. If you live a couple of doors down from
the crack house at 1103 Juliah St. and one night the punk with a stolen semi-automatic can't think of anywhere else to burgle
for drug money except your place, maybe having a trigger lock on your gun isn't such a good idea. If you're Al Gore growing up
in luxury at the swanky Fairfax Hotel on Washington's Embassy Row, you really don't have a lot in common with children
elsewhere in the city, which has a TB rate 50% higher than the highest state and an infant mortality rate greater than Sri
Lanka's.
But let's assume he's done his research. Let's ban all handguns. Let's cut back math and geography and have compulsory
anger-management classes. What precisely will any of that do to ensure that six-year-old boys won't be going home to a
flophouse full of strangers where there's a good chance one of them will have left some stolen firearm lying around? America,
Canada and most other Western countries already have more laws than they need and more laws than they can enforce. This
kid's uncle was wanted for theft: No cops bothered to go looking for him. Uncle's crack house rang with the sound of gunfire
every night: No one bothered to investigate. The same crack house, five years on: Uncle will be in non-compliance with
trigger-lock regulations -- no one will do anything. The kid will be skipping anger-management classes -- no one will notice.
We can, of course, ban anything and everything that might even potentially harm our children. We can wall up our kids behind
schoolhouse metal detectors and security guards. We can never let them out of our sight, or at any rate the sight of their
licensed daycare providers. The childhoods of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer or even Anne of Green Gables are already lost to them.
Thanks to Al Gore and Bill Bradley, future generations are unlikely to enjoy the pleasures of learning hunting with dad, which is a
pity because, according to a recent survey, adolescents who legally own firearms are less likely to be involved in drugs or petty
crime. But hey, if our kid's involved with drugs and petty crime, don't worry, we'll have him pumped full of Prozac and/or Ritalin
just in case the anger-management guy isn't on top of the situation. And if that doesn't work, well, maybe that new gun
legislation will be so tough the little feller can't get any heat and will only be able to club his classmate into a brain-damaged,
hideously disfigured lump of tissue with his baseball bat.
The other day The New Statesman, Britain's venerable left-wing weekly, ran a remarkable essay by Melanie Phillips, published on
Valentine's Day but really more of a "Dear John ..." letter to the left. I was once on a TV show with Ms. Phillips and, to be honest,
she seemed a stereotypically earnest, blinkered, socialist drone. That may sound a bit ungallant, but it's nothing compared to
the way Ms. Phillips' leftie chums abused her once she started noticing the flaws in long-held progressive theories on education,
crime, the family, etc.
They dismissed her as "reactionary," "authoritarian," "criminally insane," "evil," "a Nazi." Ms. Phillips insists she is still a
progressive, but makes what one would have hoped was an unnecessary point: "The idea that all pre-existing traditions or
values are, by definition, unprogressive baggage is as philistine as it is risible. Values dismissed as conservative are actually
universal: attachment, commitment to individuals and institutions, ties of duty, trust and fidelity, the distinction between
constructive and destructive behaviour. Without these things, freedom cannot flourish nor society exist."
At 1103 Juliah St., all those universal values have shrivelled away: Who are we to tell that kid's dad he should try fathering fewer
kids with fewer women? Who are we to suggest to mom that children need stable, two-parent households? Who are we to judge
whether someone's behaviour is "destructive"? Ms. Phillips says there is a "huge amount of evidence" that "marriage, by and
large, was a protection for both children and adults" and that "the state should promote it as a social good." Attacked by her
socialist friends, she wondered: "How could it be progressive to encourage deceit, betrayal of trust, breaking of promises and
harm to children?"
Well, apparently it is. It's easier to fixate on the constants of American life -- the guns -- than to look at what's changed -- the
vast amount of human debris piled up by 30 years of social experimentation. So thank you, Messrs. Gore, Bradley and Clinton.
Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" has found its next rallying cry: Every kid deserves the right to grow up in a gun-free crack
house!
