From: EvMick@aol.com
Date: Sun May 30 1999 - 09:37:48 MDT
attached mail follows:
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED MAY 31, 1999
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
To prevent a life of crime, buy your kid a gun
It's called propaganda: Simplify your lie down to an easily-recalled
slogan, repeat it often enough, and people will eventually get it down by
heart and accept it as fact.
Take: "The cause of all these school shootings is the too-easy
availability of guns."
Prior to the National Firearms Act of 1933, there was no law to
discourage a veteran of the Great War from keeping a fully-operational
souvenir machine gun in the bedroom closet. There were few towns in America
where the local lads didn't know the location of at least one such weapon.
Yet none was ever used in a "school shooting."
As late as the 1960s, it was not unusual in rural America for young boys
to carry their .22 rifles to school with them, parking them in the
principal's office until needed for the target matches after school. At
age 49 I am no doddering old-timer, but I can remember young lads walking
the country roads of Ohio and Connecticut after school with their rifles
(or bicycling home with the weapons across their handlebars), hoping to
pick off some predatory bird with the full encouragement of area farmers. A
neighbor might chide you about watching where your bullets went if you
missed, but no one ever called the police to report "The Jones boy is
heading down the road with his gun; come arrest him!"
When I went away to Eaglebrook School in Massachusetts (yes, "Own a gun,
go to jail" Massachusetts) in 1962 at the age of 12, I took my rifle. We
fired for accuracy at the range on Saturdays. I daresay we could have snuck
them out of the lockers down at the gym for some mayhem if it ever crossed
our minds ... but it never did.
The violent media? Today's TV offers nothing like "The Rifleman" or
"Wanted Dead or Alive," programs of the early 1960s in which Chuck Connors
and Steve McQueen ended every episode by mowing down some reprobate who had
kicked the town dog or insulted Millie down at the general store, in
McQueen's case using a sawed-off Winchester which it's now a federal felony
even to recreate for a museum.
This focus on "the availability of guns" -- ignoring the fact they were
far more accessible only 40 years ago, when you could order a 20-mm Lahti
anti-tank gun through the mail from an ad in the back of a comic book -- is
intended not only to advance the prior agenda of those who want a disarmed
and enslaved citizenry, but also to distract us from asking what it is
about the mandatory behavior modification labs (public schools) which
creates such rage and frustration in our incarcerated adolescent males. We
don't see these shoot-em-ups in the private schools, or among
home-schoolers.
It also diverts attention from the perfectly relevant question of how
many of these shooters had been on drugs known to affect the judgment, like
Ritalin and Luvox, (start ital)prescribed and administered by their
government wardens(end ital).
In the face of all this misdirection, isn't it too bad the government has
never conducted an actual scientific study on how it affects a child's
likelihood of committing crimes if his parents buy him a gun?
Um, actually ... they have.
The study was conducted from 1993-1995 by the U.S. Department of
Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Child
psychologists tracked 4,000 boys and girls aged 6 to 15 in Denver,
Pittsburgh, and Rochester, N.Y. Their findings?
-- Children who get guns from their parents don't commit gun crimes (0
percent) while children who get guns illegally are quite likely to do so
(21 percent).
-- Children who get guns from parents are less likely to commit any kind
of street crime (14 percent) than children who have no gun in the house (24
percent) -- and are dramatically less likely to do so than children who
acquire an illegal gun (74 percent.)
-- Children who get guns from parents are less likely to use banned drugs
(13 percent) than children who get illegal guns (41 percent.)
-- Most strikingly, the study found: "Boys who own legal firearms have
much lower rates of delinquency and drug use (than boys who own illegal
guns) and are even slightly less delinquent than non-owners of guns."
This wouldn't have surprised anyone before the rise of the modern welfare
state. It used to be common knowledge that the best way to get kids to act
"responsibly" was precisely to give them some "responsibility." Why would
we assume a child taught by his parents to use a gun responsibly wouldn't
also be more responsible in his other behaviors?
"Want to dramatically reduce the chance that your child will commit a
gun-related crime or -- heaven forbid -- go on a shooting spree?" asked the
national Libertarian Party in a May 21 news release detailing these study
results. "Buy your youngster a gun."
"Politicians are apparently more interested in demonizing guns than they
are in facts," commented LP national director Steve Dasbach, himself an
Indiana government schoolteacher. But "The evidence is in: The simplest
way to reduce firearm-related violence among children is to buy them a gun
and teach them how to use it responsibly."
Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal, is author of the book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on
the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998."
***
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. -- John
Hay, 1872
The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not
get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases
to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and
soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don't adjust! Revolt
against the reality! -- Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw, 1943
* * *
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