From: "Clayton E. Cramer" <clayton_cramer@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Re: CCW Permit A Lot Like Gun Registration
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 16:21:17 -0700

tudor wrote:

> TaurusM605 wrote in message
> I don't advocate your wife havintg been raped as a child, nor do I minimize
> the horror of it. Did she report it to the police, or was it a family member
> incest kind of thing? Do you think that, at the age of 14 a gun would have
> been practical for her? Thinking of the specific situation, would it have
> changed anything?

Even incest situations sometimes get resolved with gunfire.  Remember the
two teenagers in the Dakotas a few years ago?  Daddy was an IRS agent.
He also raped both his son and daughter repeatedly.  Attempts to get the
authorities to do anything about it were unsucessful.  (No surprise there --
a friend who works for IRS says that his IRS ID next to his driver's license
has caused a number of traffic tickets to become warnings instead, out of
fear.)  Finally, one day, the IRS agent came home and the kids decided
they had had enough.  Boom!  Dead creep.

An acquaintance grew up in a small town in upstate New York.  There was
only one murder the whole time he was growing up.  The daughter of
another family got tired of the father's continual molestation.  At
Thanksgiving dinner, she used a shotgun to impress upon the rest of the
family that molestation was NOT okay.

Neither are these are the right way to resolve such problems.  But there
are times when the system doesn't work, and there's no other choice.

> You do seem to have been involved with an extraordinary level of violence in
> your life. Your wife's experiences aside, have you ever asked yourself why
> your path has seem to cross that of violent criminals as often as it has?
> You know, I've been in economic situations where I just squeaked by and in
> situations where I was doing very well, and through it all I've managed to
> not be involved in a fraction of the level of mayhem that you have. I'm sure
> that, in both our cases, it colors our view of the gun issue.

Exactly.  If violent crime is as rare as you think, what's your objection to
gun ownership?

The experiences of my wife and I have been similar to Taurus605's.  Over
the years we have known far, far too many people whose lives have been
touched by violent crime, in nice neighborhoods, involving nice people.

1. One couple we know were the victims of home intruders who forced
entry, tied him up, beat him badly, gangraped her in front of the husband,
and stole everything they had down to their wedding pictures -- an item
of no monetary value at all.  Six months later, he found out that LAPD
hadn't bothered to run the fingerprints found in the house because it wasn't
an important enough crime.  (No surprise.  Hollywood Division LAPD
officers at the time were doing burglaries to order for fences while on duty,
though this wasn't widely known for some time thereafter.)

2. Another couple we know experienced a similar crime (perhaps even
the same criminals -- the same MO, the same descriptions, the same
neighborhood two years later).  Except that the husband fought back,
and was stabbed seven times in the chest.  Only the sight of a gun in
the hands of one of the scum stopped him from fighting.

3. A girl I went to high school with named Lisa.  I used to run into
her around Santa Monica after we both graduated.  One time she
could barely speak -- her jaw was wired shut.  Two guys with a
baseball bat decided that they wanted her purse, and apparently
decided not to risk a fight with her -- they broke her jaw, knocking
her to the ground.

4. A girl that my wife and I got know from church.  She was terribly
confused.  She wore a wig because she had ripped out all her hair.
She burned herself with cigarettes.  Starting at age 8, her stepfather
had raped and sodomized her continuously.  (This is only the most
extreme example -- I've lost count of the number of women my wife
and I know that were raped as children or early teenagers.)

5. We moved up to Northern California.  Our landlady's daughter
was shot to death in Golden Gate Park in the middle of a Sunday
afternoon.  The killer had a story.  He had been in and out of
mental hospitals for 20 years.  He had prior convictions for
brandishing a firearm and making bomb threats against airliners.
The system refused to keep him locked up.  The last I heard it
was five years after the murder, and he STILL hadn't gone to
trial, because his sanity kept changing back and forth.  But the
victim's father, driven insane with grief, sneaked a gun into the
courtroom at one of the hearings, and opened fire.  Fortunately
the insane murderer, the father was using a .32, and the injuries
were slight.  The father, of course, experienced the full weight
of the criminal justice system, far more so than the guy who
murdered his daughter.

6. We went through Lamaze class in preparation for our second
child.  There was a girl in the class who was 14, and pregnant.
An older couple had arranged to adopt the child.  They were
perfectly respectable upper middle class couple living in Marin
County, owners of a video rental store.  A few months after the
Lamaze class, their cleaning lady told her illegal alien* boyfriend
that the husband had raped her.  The cleaning lady gave her key to the
boyfriend so that he could come in and murder both husband
and wife one night.  At trial, the cleaning lady admitted that
she had made up the story about the rape because her boyfriend
was showing too much interest in another girl.  The boyfriend
hung himself in jail before trial; the cleaning lady tried to use
"battered woman" defense to get her off the hook for conspiracy
to murder.

*I mention "illegal alien" because the laws of California prohibit
him from buying a gun.  See how well those laws work?

I could go on and on with the lesser crimes.  It is precisely
because there is so much savagery out there that we see
no reason to disarm law-abiding adults.