Each year I usually spend some time teaching in Florida. One of the mixed pleasures of being there is reading The "Miami Herald", whose editorial approach to the gun control issue is to journalistic integrity what Richard Speck was to male sensitivity.
One Sunday "Herald" front page in particular struck me. The massacre at the mosque in Hebron had just taken place and was receiving heavy coverage. Inside, the paper pointed at this as an example of the horrors that could be inflicted upon any society that allowed individuals to own intrinsically evil assault rifles like the Galil fired by the murderer, an American expatriate named Baruch Goldstein.
How ironic. Goldstein was a militiaman with the kind of true assault weapon with a full-auto switch that the Israeli government issues to the government-approved elite. He was wearing a government uniform and carrying government-issue grenades when he began the slaughter.
Of course, no one shot back. The people in the mosque were forbidden by the government to have arms because of their race.
Apparently, there were no historians on staff at the "Herald". If there had been, they'd have known that the history of gun control in the United States stemmed largely from efforts to keep southern black citizens unarmed and helpless against terrorizing nightriders in the post Civil War years. The best literature on this aspect has been written by Second Amendment Foundation's Don Kates, who worked with William Kunstler during the Freedom Marches of the '60s.
In a supreme example of ironic juxtaposition, the same edition of the Sunday "Herald" gave the rest of its front page to an account of the Rosewood Incident of January 4, 1923.
It had begun as a lynching, with white vigilantes terrorizing the all-black village of Rosewood looking for a man they thought had raped a white woman, three days before. The Ku Klux Klan quickly became involved, and the terror snowballed.
On the night of the fourth, blood thirsty racists opened fire on the home of Sylvester Carrier. One of the bullets struck and killed his mother, Sarah Carrier. As the vigilantes kicked down the door, they were met with the return fire of the dead woman's son.
Sylvester Carrier shot and killed two of the mob, and wounded four more before he was cut down, but the lethal resistance had taken the fun out of the nightriding. The gunfight signaled the end of the terror.
Clearly, the "Herald" had missed the point.
Meanwhile, in North Miami, an armed robber with a pistol in his hand and a spare magazine in his pocket braced a 41-year old social worker as she was getting out of her car. Not wanting to see blood shed over money, she handed over her purse. The he ordered her to get into her car. She realized that she was about to be raped or murdered or both.
The social worker drew her snub-nosed .38 from her hip pocket and fired twice. Hit once in the chest and once in the mouth, the gunman went down dead without firing a shot.
She said later, "I would not have shot this man if it was just a robbery. I just wanted him to take what he wanted and go on his way, but it was clear to me that he was going to kill me."
Oblivious to this, the "Herald" ran a cartoon showing a paramilitary figure called "Legislature" festooned with guns and bullets and pompously saying, "We Floridians believe strongly in the Constitutional right to bear arms!"
A couple, their eyes lidded with distaste, reply, "We of the rest of the civilized world believe strongly in the Constitutional right to travel were we see fit!"
What the "Herald" editorialists had missed was that these are not mutually exclusive goals. The Florida woman had a right to travel to a community not her own, North Miami. Because she had the right to carry a gun, she was able to go home alive.
Draconian gun control has historically been forced upon people by governments who did not hold the best interests of those people at their heart. The Rosewood mob had been fired up by Klan rhetoric about how "that kind" of person needed to be stamped out.
Baruch Goldstein was commended by some of his radical compatriots for murdering unarmed men, women, and children because "their kind" could not be tolerated in the society they and Goldstein envisioned.
Pre-World War II German citizens largely accepted the excoriation of the Jews as scapegoats for their society's problems, and turned their backs as the unarmed victims of the Holocaust were herded to the ovens.
In the United States of America in 1994, we see a concerted media effort supported by the very pinnacle of our nation's government that is implying the gun owners and gun dealers need to be stamped out in the name of crime control and national well-being.
Our government is polling its soldiers on whether they would be prepared to open fire on American citizens if ordered to do so, at the same time that radical legislators propose laws that would confiscate private property (guns) without compensation from law abiding citizens and deliver harsh punishment to those citizens who did not comply.
We live in frighting times, and if you don't believe it, you haven't been reading the papers.
This material was graciously forwarded by Willard Baker