Never reluctant to wade into the blood of the innocent if it offers an opportunity to advance the police-state agenda, Attorney General Janet Reno, Butcher of Waco, seized her latest opportunity after Honolulu Xerox repairman Bryan Uyesugi walked into work Tuesday morning and killed seven male co-workers with a handgun.
Such crimes demonstrate why Congress needs to pass stiffer gun-control laws, the attorney general said.
Only problem is, Hawaii is one of the most gun-restrictive states in the nation. Honolulu already has in force most of very "gun-control" laws which the attorney general now proposes as a national "solution."
Milwaukee-based Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (web site http://www.jpfo.org) dealt with the irony explicitly in a Nov. 4 news release headlined: "Hawaii's 'Gun Control': Formula for Mass Murder."
Though the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports the shooter Uyesugi was turned down for a firearms permit in 1994 after being arrested for criminal property damage at work, he had no problem acquiring his 9mm handgun, the JPFO notes.
Meantime, the Jewish civil rights group points out, "Hawaiian 'gun control' laws so strongly discourage personal possession of firearms that peaceful law-abiding people working in a Xerox office building would almost certainly not carry a firearm with them to work. Ordinary Hawaiians face huge legal risks of fines and imprisonment if they are caught carrying a firearm without a permit, and the permits are hard to get. ...
"Don't forget the lesson that Israel learned, as described ... on the JPFO website," the civil rights group concludes. "Once Israel started arming school officials and guards, the terrorist attacks on Israeli schools ended abruptly. Once ordinary Israelis were permitted to carry concealed weapons in public places, the terrorist shooting attacks in public stopped almost entirely. A child could figure out this logic."
JPFO's new booklet, "Dial 911 and Die," is $11.95 postage paid.
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Gun control advocates keep telling us they're only concerned with "safety"; they would never pass laws allowing the actual seizure of firearms from a law-abiding gun owner.
Try telling that to Thompson Bosee, 45, lifelong resident of Greenwich, Conn. and a member of the American Gunsmithing Association.
A new Connecticut law which went into effect Oct. 1 allows police to search a person's home and "temporarily" seize weapons if the individual is believed to be "an immediate danger to himself or others."
Officers went to Bosee's house on the evening of Oct. 28 to serve him with a warrant for an 8-year-old charge of failing to appear in court on a drunken driving charge -- which Mr. Bosee described as nothing but an excuse to search his house.
Greenwich Deputy Police Chief James Walters admitted the next day his four officers also carried a warrant to search for guns, since police had been "made aware" that Bosee might have a large number of weapons in the home he shares with his mother.
They found and seized 11 weapons, though Bosee "has not been charged with any weapons-related offenses."
Bosee told FreeRepublic.com most of the weapons have been in his family for generations. He plans to challenge the seizure on grounds that the law is unconstitutional.
Across the state line in New York, meanwhile, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was pushing a City Charter revision on the Nov. 2 ballot which would have created "gun free" zones within 1,000 feet of schools, barring even licensed gun owners from carrying a firearm near a school.
Voters -- in (start ital)New York City(end ital), mind you -- defeated the proposal 76 percent to 24 percent. Don't expect to hear about it on the network news.
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How insane are those who cringe in fear of "firearms violence" -- even as they happily endorse American military bombardment of women, children, and infant formula factories in Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, and the Sudan?
From Nevis, Minnesota, The Associated Press reports Nevis High School is refusing to allow a photograph of senior Samantha Jones, who will join the Army in June, from appearing in the school yearbook.
Because the photo depicts Miss Jones perched atop the deactivated 155 mm howitzer outside the local VFW post, the photo violates the school's "zero-tolerance" policy toward weapons, the Jones family was told.
"Whether it's in military, recreational or sporting form, anything shaped like a gun or knife is banned," said Superintendent Dick Magaard, who is clearly nuts.
And I'm sure by now we've all heard of Christopher Beamon, 13, of Ponder, Texas, whose school assignment was to write a "horror story" for Halloween.
Upon reading Christopher's essay, his teacher found its fictional descriptions of a bloody shooting at school "troubling," reports the Morrock News Service, "and summoned the assistant principal, who called police. The district attorney defended the decision to lock the boy up" for five days, saying he is "a persistent discipline problem for this school and the administrators there were legitimately concerned."
Did I once hear a gun nut say that if we ever allowed the Second Amendment to be shredded and used for toilet paper, the First and Sixth Amendments would be next?
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For the record, let's surmise what may (start ital)really(end ital) be causing this overreported violence. Try this:
Raise taxes till both parents have to work outside the home, leaving kids adrift. Substitute for real parents an ever-expanding welfare state (including that factory of illiteracy, the reproductive organ of the welfare state, your friendly local mandatory government youth propaganda camp -- more generally known as the "public school.")
Restrict so many formerly legal behaviors that police can harass or shoot you with impunity any time they please, merely for being out and about, rendering ever fearful and suspicious a once free and peaceful nation. (And for (start ital)heaven's(end ital) sake don't try to travel about armed only with a basketball, like the late John Perrin of Las Vegas.)
Finally, when the kids start to grow restless, dope them up on Luvox -- like one of the two shooters in Littleton, Colorado -- or on Prozac, like young Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Oregon.
(According to a report last week in England's Manchester Guardian, Prozac's manufacturer, Eli Lilly, has successfully kept from the public "disturbing accounts of violence and suicide" committed by users of Prozac, a drug which "can push some patients into so agitated a state of mind that they are a danger not only to themselves, but to others." Lilly responds that 15 percent of depression patients commit suicide, anyway.)
How widespread is such drugging, today?
When Time magazine visited Webster Groves High School, outside St. Louis, to prepare their recent profile of a typical suburban high school of the 90s, they found 20 percent of the kids stewed on Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil.
Between 29,000 and 48,000 children in Massachusetts' public schools -- most of them boys -- are now doped up on Ritalin, according to Dr. Peter Breggin, director of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in Bethesda, Maryland, who wrote a piece for The Boston Globe last month headlined: "Kids Are Suffering Legal Drug Abuse."
"In a society that's supposed to accept and even value differences, drugging shy children reflects an extreme of enforced conformity," Dr. Breggin warned.
"We are the first adults to handle the generation gap through the wholesale drugging of our children. We may be guaranteeing that future generations will be relatively devoid of people who think critically. ..."
Though it doesn't seem to interfere much with their marksmanship.
Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is the author of "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $21.95 by dialing 1-800-244-2224, or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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