A gun story


Tragedy ensured by law
Vin Suprynowicz is so much of a libertarian that he makes me look like a New Deal Democrat. But he wrote a pretty good column on gun control recently. I added the emphasis.

Jessica Lynne Carpenter was 14 years old on Aug. 23, 2000, the morning 27-year-old Jonathan David Bruce came calling at the Carpenter house in Merced, Calif.

Jessica Lynne knew how to shoot -- her father had taught her. And there were adequate firearms in the house to deal with what happened next.

That Wednesday morning, Jessica was home with four of her siblings -- Anna, 13; Vanessa, 11; Ashley, 9; and John William, 7 -- in the San Joaquin Valley farming community, 130 miles southeast of San Francisco.

Bruce, an out-of-work telemarketer apparently high on drugs, was stark naked and armed with a spade fork. He cut the phone lines to the house shortly after 9 a.m., broke in, and immediately began chasing down and stabbing the children in their bedrooms.

Jessica Lynne tried to dial 911. The phone was dead. So she ran to the gun closet.

Then she remembered the new "safe storage law" that had just been enacted in California, and which her parents had told her about. When John and Tephanie Carpenter had left the house that morning, they had locked the gun closet so no one under 18 could get access to the family firearms ... as required by law.

Jessica's only option was to climb out a window and run to a neighbor's house.

By the time Merced County sheriff's deputies arrived at the home, John William and Ashley were dead. Anna was wounded but survived.

As deputies arrived, Bruce rushed them with his bloody spade fork. So they shot him dead. They shot him more than a dozen times.

The following Friday, the children's great uncle, the Rev. John Hilton, told reporters: "If only (Jessica) had a gun available to her, she could have stopped the whole thing." Maybe John William and Ashley would still be alive, Jessica's uncle said.

"Unfortunately, 17 states now have these so-called safe storage laws," then-Yale Law School senior research scholar John Lott, author of the book "More Guns, Less Crime," told me at the time. "The problem is, you see no decline in either juvenile accidental gun deaths or suicides when such laws are enacted, but you do see an increase in crime rates" perpetrated against the newly disarmed victims.

That last bit is pretty important.

Now I am going to say up front that this is one issue for which it is almost impossible to find "neutral" statistics. You can do it, but they are not usually online. Handgun Control Inc., for example, is very well known for skewing statistics or cherry picking the period they wish to discuss.

Even without the statistics, it's hard to make the argument that guns can not and will not prevent crime. Looking at it logically, it is a matter of risk assessment. A criminal is looking for an easy mark that can't fight back. They go to where they know that the victims will be unarmed. Although police response time in most areas of the U.S. is between two and five minutes, in some metro areas it is between eight and ten. In some rural areas, it can be more than an hour.

I have described myself as a reluctant gun advocate, and I am. One of the things that convinced me that guns are necessary was history.

Generally, when gun control laws are proposed, it is to keep a group of people in their place. Some of the first gun control laws in the United States were enacted in the rural South before the Civil War to keep blacks unarmed. The push against "Saturday night specials" and mail order guns were the same.

Remember, bad laws tend to be enforced against those people least able to resist.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - January 11, 2006 at 04:31 AM  Tag


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