David Horowitz: Disarming Honest Citizens: Forward to Richard Poe's The Seven Myths of Gun Control © June 22, 2001, FrontPage Magazine Send to a Friend Printer Friendly Post to Del.icio.us Digg This Page Spread the Word Tell Your Friends: Our growth -- and our successes -- depend entirely on word of mouth. We MUST spread the word. To send a brief email to your circle of friends, click here. Join the Fight! Current Campaigns: Petition Congress and other leaders and make a difference today. Click here. Volunteer: We're building an army that's sweeping America. If you have time or skills to volunteer, click here. Donate: All this costs money. George Soros, Teddy Kennedy and Michael Moore have it: will we? Please make a financial contribution today. Tools For Victory Activist Center: Learn how to really make a difference, for your candidates and for your beliefs. Click here. Issues Center: Learn more about the ideas and policies shaping America, and how we'll build a better tomorrow. Click here. IN 1999 a six-year-old walked into a Michigan classroom with a loaded handgun and shot and killed 5-year-old Kayla Robbins. There was an immediate public outcry from predictable quarters about “gun violence.” President Clinton held a press conference deploring the tragedy and calling for legislation that would require mandatory trigger locks on all handguns. The key to unlocking most political puzzles is making a distinction between fantasy and reality. In the fantasy world of liberal gun-control advocates, Kayla Robbins might be alive today if a trigger-lock requirement had been added to the 20,000-plus gun laws already on the books. In the real world, the little boy who shot Kayla Robbins lived in a crack house run by his uncle who was a career criminal with three outstanding warrants for his arrest. He was living with his criminal uncle because his father was in jail, and his drug-addicted mother was out of the picture. Is there any law that government can design that this “family” would feel compelled to obey? The six-year-old killer did not buy the murder weapon at a gun-show to avoid “loopholes” in the existing laws. He did not buy the gun at all. He picked it up, already loaded, from its resting place on a bed in the crack house where he lived. Focusing on this reality -- or rather this set of realities -- would dispose of the idea that a trigger lock law would have saved Kayla Robbins’ life. Extend the proposition. Criminals kill people. But, being criminals, they don’t obey the law. Or, put the proposition another way: More than 50,000 people a year are killed by automobiles. Should we outlaw these vehicles to save those lives? In the fantasy world, guns cause violence and laws are obeyed. In the real world, individuals pull the triggers and it is they who cause the violence. If they are individuals who are likely to use guns on innocent victims, they are individuals who by definition do not obey laws. Including gun laws. Hence, gun control is really about controlling law-abiding citizens. It is about disarming law-abiding citizens in the face of those who would do them harm. As Richard Poe’s indispensable book shows, citizen-endangering crimes such as “hot” burglaries – burglaries that occur while the victims are home – are much higher in countries like England, which outlaw guns, than they are in the United States, which so far does not. In the real world, gun-control liberals usually live in safe neighborhoods and low-crime areas. If they live in big cities, they have access to private security systems because they know that law enforcement agencies are over-worked and under-staffed. In contrast, the only security available to the welfare mother who lives in a high-crime area is what she can store in her night-table drawer. Richard Poe’s richly informative and superbly argued book pierces the veil between fantasy and reality, and sets the record straight. It is the needed guide to political good sense in an area that affects the security of ordinary Americans in more ways than they know. David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.