🚀 go-pugleaf

     March 5 Neal Knox Update -- The horrible Santana High School
shootings this morning spell nothing but trouble for gunowners,
particularly California gunowners who are already looking into the
muzzles of two gun registration bills.

     Never mind that registration wouldn't have affected this.  The
response to the handgun killing of Sen. Robert Kennedy on the eve
of passage of a handgun-only version of the Gun Control Act was
the reintroduction and eventual passage of the rof;e amd shotgun
portion of GCA '68.

     Thankfully, the 15-year-old Santee, Calif. killer was using
the least-deadly gun available, a .22 revolver.  If he had used a
shotgun, like Columbine killers Klebold and Harris, more than two
of the 15 shot would almost certainly have died.

     The boy's father discovered his gun was missing last night and
confronted the boy about it, according to one report.  Other
reports say, the boy had told many friends over the weekend --
including some of their parents -- that he intended to shoot up the
school and kill people, but he convinced them he was "only joking."

     One kid took it seriously enough that he patted down the
killer this morning to be sure he didn't have a gun.  But the killer
either had it in his backpack or had hidden it on-campus.

     We have had a bloody series of these horrors, and we've been
on the verge of more.

     Internet Web pages celebrate the Columbine murderers as
heroes.

       School and law enforcement authorities say they have
recently prevented at least five school shootings and bombings,
some with multiple would-be shooters.  One was stopped because an
alert photo lab technician saw photos of his guns and pipe bombs.

     The school shootings in recent years are unprecedented.  What's
happened to our kids?

     As I told the Wall Street Journal less than an hour after
Columbine, "the only thing I know for certain is that this scourge
of school shootings is not due to the 'increased availability of
guns.'"

     Guns have been made less available every year for over three
decades.

     Just today I talked with a man in Baltimore who had bought a
single-shot brass frame pistol for $2.95, by mail order, when he
was 13.  He got his first pistol when he was nine, the same age my
wife and I were each given our first .22 rifles.

     A prominent St. Louis lawyer once told me that when he was 14
he rode his bicycle over the Mississippi bridge to East St. Louis,
Illinois, where he bought a .45 auto, and pedaled home.  Despite
his credentials as a member of the court and a retired army officer,
he can't go across the river to buy a gun today.

     None of us ever shot or killed anyone, or even thought about
it -- though we sometimes took our guns to school if we had been
hunting that morning, or were going hunting or shooting after
classes.

       In keeping with my high school yearbook's "Western" theme,
some of the school favorites are showing wearing guns in buscadero
holsters -- one a .45 auto.  Imagine the outcry that annual would
trigger today!

     When something like the Santana School shooting happens, and
we hear the screams for more gun laws, I'm reminded of the
foolishly naive Johnson White House-drafted statement read and
subscribed to on the Joey Bishop television show by a string of
Hollywood actors including Hugh O'Brien, Kirk Douglas, James
Stewart and Charlton Heston.

     It read, in part:  "The Congress has recently given us some
protection against pistols in the wrong hands.  But that's not
enough ... not nearly enough.  The carnage will not stop until
there is effective control over the sale of rifles and shotguns."

     Well, they passed that law.  And many more laws since, each of
which was going to "stop the carnage."  It didn't.  Neither will
yet another that focuses on inanimate objects instead of twisted
minds and impure hearts.

     NRA President Heston appears to have learned better; I wish
others would. 

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