-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a prelude to war! Should All "Equalizers", Such as Guns, Be Outlawed? Should All "Equalizers", Such as Guns, Be Outlawed? Are Gun-Free Zones an Invitation to Violence? By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources, (www.originalsources.com) March 16, 2000 The debate between Bill Clinton and the National Rifle Association escalated today when. Clinton angrily rejected a suggestion that he "tolerated a certain amount of violence and killing to strengthen the case for gun control and to score political points for the Democratic Party." The NRA had the nerve to point out that Clinton could halt most gun violence tomorrow simply by ordering his Justice Department to stop letting drug dealers and criminals off when they violate existing gun laws. The argument brought to my mind an interview I did last year with Kyle Bateman, president of Action Target, which manufactures targets primarily for law enforcement shooting ranges. Gun control laws, he tells me, are good for his business, because they increase the need for his product. He made a relatively simple point: the more you disarm the law-abiding, the easier it is for the lawless to take control. We are making schools safe for the lawless by making sure that no principal or teacher is allowed to have a gun at school. That helps explain the recent rash of school shootings in an era of decreasing crime. Guns are equalizers. That is merely a fact of life that is irrefutable. Among nations, nuclear weapons serve the same purpose. They make nations hesitate to attack. Since America dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, no nation has overtly attacked our military directly. I might also add the United States does not bomb other nations who belong to the nuclear club. We bombed Yugoslavia for 79 days in 1999, destroying the country over what now appears to have been lies about "100,000 Albanians'" being "killed in a genocide." Today, the disarmed Serbs and other non-Albanians have either fled for their lives from Kosovo or are being murdered by Albanian criminals. On the other hand, we have not dropped a single bomb on Russia, over its effort to bring the Chechyna's to heel. We continue to sanction Yugoslavia. We don't sanction Russia. The Russians are not disarmed. Kyle Bateman wrote the following allegory for the October 1999 Reagan Monitor: Once upon a time, there was a group of people who lived and worked together in an organized society. Like any group, they occasionally had their differences. But they had developed an effective way to settle these differences. The parties to the disagreement would simply engage in a fist fight. The winner would get what he wanted and the loser would be left to make do some other way. This was terribly difficult for the small and weak. Technically, they were free like any other person, but the reality, they lived in constant fear that someone larger or stronger would simply take from them all they had worked for and leave them with nothing. So a ruling class of "the strong" existed which dominated the society for many years. Over the course of time, an instrument was eventually developed that allowed the weak to compete with the strong. This "great equalizer" was very powerful. It was capable of causing severe pain and even destroying life and property. It could be wielded by the weak and yet, when triggered, could bring even the strongest man into submission. So the people began to use the equalizer to do wonderful things. It was used by te police to bring criminals to justice. It was also used by the weak to protect their lives and property from the strong. But unfortunately, the equalizer was like any source of power - it could also be used to do bad things. Just as many strong people had abused their strength to take unfair advantage of the weak, those who wielded the equalizer had the ability to abuse others. It required money and some degree of skill to operate, so it was more accessible to those who were rich or who took the extra time required to become proficient in its use. But the equalizer was much more available to the common person than brute strength had been under the old system, so most people considered themselves happier and more free than they had been before (especially the smaller people). The Equalizer So what is this device? What is this instrument of force which we wield against our neighbor to bring him into submission? Is it the sword, the gun, the bomb? No, it is simply an attorney operating in the context of the law. Like the sword and the gun, a lawyer is a weapon, or an instrument of force, which can be used to empower the weak against the strong. And the law is the critical framework that allows this force to be applied in an organized and orderly manner. Just like a sword, an attorney may be used for good or for evil. The morality of his work should not be defined by its legality. Rather, it should be judged by its net effect on humanity. As a society, we have forgotten that what is legal is not necessarily right. There is no fundamental difference between using a lawyer to forcefully take money from a person or a company, and taking money from a person at gun-point. Both are acts of force and must be regarded with solemn and careful thought before they are carried out. Are we truly justified in a particular legal action against a person or company? Or are we simply motivated by pride, vengeance, or the prospect of a profitable return? If it is any of the latter, our actions gradually break down the bonds of our social fabric, creating the kind of moral decay we presently see around us. Today we see young children enter a school armed with deadly weapons simply to satisfy petty, angry feelings against their school mates. They take no thought for the consequences of their actions. They only wish to appease their own carnal cowardly desires. But is it any wonder that these children behave so badly when they see their adult peers legitimized as they commit analogous acts of destruction against their neighbors, relentlessly suing one another over every trivial issue under the sun? Conclusion We need to understand that this is not a problem of too many guns or too many lawyers. It is a problem of people who use force as the first method of choice to get what they want and forget about what others may want. Without somone pulling the trigger, a gun would never kill a person. Without someone hiring an attorney, a lawsuit would never ruin a life or a company. "Lawyers don't sue people. People sue people." It is time we recognize the consequences of our actions. When we use force to take wealth or property from another person, this is an act of violence. Our particular choice of weapon will never change that fact. Violence does not exist in a gun any more than it exists in an attorney. It exists in the heart of a person. When a person seeks to take the life, the rights or the property of another person, he has violence in his heart. It is time we ended the violence. But we can not accomplish this by legislating guns away. We can not make knives illegal. We can not make a law against being strong or powerful. None of these will do any more good than making attorneys illegal. Who would ultimately enforce such a law? These instruments of force are necessary to maintain our society. They must exist and be accessible to all in order to keep us all honest, equal and free. It is up to individual people to see that they are used as little as possible. In the course of the interview, Bateman made the following observations: 1. The legitimate use of firearms is as an equalizer - to protect the weak from the strong. 2. Making gun-free zones in just an invitation to kooks. Nobody needs to know how many guns are in a school. Let the criminal element wonder. Let them scratch their head and wonder if a teacher does, or doesn't, or if a principal does or doesn't have a gun. 3. You cannot use a law to regulate the people who don't obey laws. No! The only thing you can use to regulate the people who don't obey the law is force. 4. We need to use law enforcement, not laws, to regulate people who won't obey the law. The laws are there. Just enforce them. That's the only thing that will stop people who break the laws. 5. If you want to live under a litany of laws which try to take away the means by which you can commit a crime, try communism. In America we don't believe in preventing law-breakers. We believe in punishing law-breakers. This is the price we pay for living in a free society. 6. The price we pay for freedom is that there has to be a crime BEFORE we punish people. That is the price we pay for living in a free society. There already are bills in Congress, such as the recently introduced and passed Schumer Amendement to the Bankruptcy bill, which create laws that punish people for THINKING about such things as opposing abortion clinics. This is a departure from the U.S. Constitution. Unilateral disarmament was urged during the 1960s for America for nuclear weapons. It was wisely rejected. Although I worked for a nuclear test ban treaty in the 1960s, I worked just as energetically against the notion of unilaterally disarming America by destroying our nuclear weapons. I did not want to live in a world where the ONLY nation that owned nuclear weapons was Communist USSR. Today in Congress there is a very strong move, pushed by the President of the United States, to unilaterally disarm the American people who would then be at the mercy of the lawless element in our society - which seems to become more aggressive with each unilateral disarmament which we now call "gun free zones" and "gun control laws." If people are actually serious about stopping the recent wave of school shootings, the fastest way to do it is to stop the unilateral disarming of principals and teachers. **COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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