COLUMN: Gun Protesters on College Green

From Marc Teillon's "The Public Pillory," Fall '95 From Marc Teillon's "The Public Pillory," Fall '95Every national debate seems to find its way to West Philadelphia. Sometimes it takes an issue a year before it makes its way onto Locust Walk. Other times it seems like the campus is in sync with Washington. But whether its support of gays in the military, a.k.a. the let's kick ROTC off-campus because homosexuals lost in Congressional campaigns, or a placard on Good Morning America protesting Proposition 187, a.k.a. let's continue to give illegal immigrants the benefits of law abiding citizens, the message is all the same. Every time a major issue comes to town, the more vociferous campus activists are always ready to protest and they always enlist in the wrong side of the debate. "On the 27th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., community leaders held a dramatic vigil in front of the peace symbol on College Green Tuesday to call attention to gun-related crime and to suggest ways to end violence," according to The Daily Pennsylvanian's story. Now, if the campus community wants to have a ceremony or rally in memory of Dr. King, then "The Public Pillory" is all for it. But what hides under the guise of a vigil was actually a cheap attempt to play off peoples' emotions to win them over to a cause that punishes law-abiding citizens under the pretense of safety and non-violence. The Nazis had it. Communist China has it. The elitist establishment wants it. Sarah Brady, the husband of former Press Secretary James Brady, gets all teary-eyed over it. And what is this great social policy that is supposed to resurrect the Garden of Eden and make city streets safe again? You guessed it. Gun control. Now, a vigil usually involves devotional prayer, a few candles, and possibly a sermon. But last Tuesday's event had nothing to do with "Martin Luther King's vision," as Joel Chinitz of Physicians for Social Responsibility announced to the audience. It also had nothing to do with honoring King's memory. Instead, the participants turned the day into a mass political tearjerk. According to the DP, "Event leaders began the 'heal-in' by telling local horror stories of gun-related violence while a woman stood next to the podium, marking each tale with a loud drumbeat. As each speaker read a statistic about gun-related violence, participants fell to the ground, as if shot by an imaginary assailant." The hysteria heightened reached its peak when the "featured speakers tried to identify the causes of violence." "When you don't protect the education of children, you let loose animals. You create pimps, prostitutes and thieves," shouted the keynote speaker, Reverend James Bevel. Another participant added his own enlightened theory, "We need to lock up our guns, not our people." It should come as no surprise that nobody offered up statistics that show that guns are actually used to protect persons and property. Nobody bothered to quote Jeffrey R. Snyder's article appearing in the January 1994 issue of Public Interest or criminologist Gary Kleck. In his study, Snyder showed that, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, there are some 200 million firearms in the United States. Only one third of them are handguns, hovering around 60 to 70 million. But despite many weapons of destruction in the hands of so many people, there are but 30,000 deaths from guns per year (suicides, murders, and accidents). That figure includes all firearms, not just handguns. Thus, most of the guns out there have never been used to kill a person. But the real kicker is Kleck's finding. Using various public surveys, Kleck found that in the years 1979-81 alone, "there were 644,976 defensive uses of handguns against persons per year, excluding police or military use." Compare that to the average 30,000 deaths caused by firearms in Snyder's study and you get the point. While some people do use guns to kill, more than twenty times as many individuals use them to protect their families and private property. It comes as no surprise that such information was not made available because the whole event was based on emotion, not fact. You see, there is no individual responsibility in gun-related murders. The gun-control of today is like the anti-drug era of the eighties and the temperance movement at the turn of the century. The evil is in the object, not the human heart. Get rid of the nefarious good, whether its a bottle of whiskey or a .38 Special, and everyone will work hard and play fair. And where will children learn to behave this way? Why, in the public school system, of course. We are all born with a blank slate. Our environment is what makes us the way we are. As long as the teachers get their hands on students early on, they will be able to make them into good little citizens, free from any violent thoughts. But there are two fundamental flaws with these statements. Are guns the only cause of violence in America? What about knives? What about baseball bats? What about hands and feet? All have been used to commit violent crimes. Where do you stop in the banning process? Since the object is actually the guilty party, every possible murder weapon will find its way on to the "public enemy" list, whether it's a golf club or a broomstick. And what about the educational system? While education is important to a civilized society, what about children who don't commit crimes? For every thug with a "one eight seven on an undercover cop," there are hundreds of teenagers avoiding gun use every day. For every lunatic who runs into a McDonald's and kills more than twenty people, there are thousands of gun users who have never killed a person. If the federal government created a Gun Gestapo today, crime would not disappear. The problems plaguing our society go far deeper that the mere existence of automatic pistols. Disarming the innocent citizenry will only further its vulnerability in the eyes of the criminals. The protesters last week, like the rest of the anti-gun establishment in this country, are not serious about stopping crime. They simply want to take away your guns so they can go home at night and feel good about their "good" deed to humanity. And when crime doesn't stop and the police are overwhelmed, you're forced to put bars on the windows, bolt locks on the doors and ADT security systems in the houses. And while the murderers and rapists rule the streets when the sun goes down, it's the innocent citizens who are locked in their homes, unable to enjoy their neighborhoods after dark. In late twentieth century America, it's kind of hard to tell who are the law-abiding citizens and who are the criminals.