Criminals use knives to
hijack planes--let's ban handguns!
by Robert A. Waters
October 3, 2001
It was as predictable as Ted
Kennedy's bouts with the bottle and Barney Frank's bouts with his latest live-in
lover.
As soon as the World Trade Center
towers went down in flames and the Pentagon went up in smoke, the anti-gunners
began looking for ways to link the crimes to guns. But since the skyjackers used
knives to subdue the crews and passengers of the doomed planes, they knew it
would be a hard sell.
Those of us who believe in gun
rights, however, figured they'd find a way. Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe
didn't disappoint.
The real problem, according to
Oliphant, is the evil gun show.
These shows are the "ideal
shopping mall for criminals in general and terrorists in particular." It
doesn't matter that none of the knives used by the skyjackers were bought at gun
shows--instead, they were almost certainly purchased at hardware stores. It
doesn't matter that none of the uniforms they used to infiltrate the cockpits
were bought at gun shows (there is evidence that they may have been stolen from
foreign and domestic airports). In fact, there seems to be nothing to link the
criminals who murdered thousands of innocent people to guns or gun shows.
But that's just an inconvenient
detail.
According to Oliphant, people who
oppose closing the so-called gun show "loopholes" are, like Attorney
General John Ashcroft, "fanatics." (Note that the terrorists are also
fanatics.)
Meanwhile, the Air Line Pilots
Association has demanded that pilots be allowed to carry
guns on airplanes. Union spokesman John Mazor explained that the strategy
before September 11 had been to "accommodate, negotiate, and do not
escalate. But that was before. The cockpit has to be defended at all
costs."
The howls of rage from shocked
gun-banners quickly muffled the call to arm pilots. According to anti-gun
activists, bullets shot from a gun inside an airplane will blast through walls
and windows, thereby decompressing the plane and causing it to crash. Captain
Duane Woerth, union president, addressed that issue. The bullets supplied to the
pilots would "basically come apart on first impact," he said.
"They're very destructive to human tissue but it's very unlikely they would
do serious damage to the fuselage."
A bevy of police officers quickly
weighed in as well. Allow us to carry our weapons aboard, they said, and we
won't hesitate to use them if confronted by skyjackers. Again, safety seemed to
be secondary to the antis, who quickly squelched that idea, too.
Carrying guns on airplanes is
nothing new. Armed sky marshals successfully ended a wave of skyjackings in the
1970s. But after the perceived threat vanished, so did the marshals. David
Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, estimated that now only a
couple dozen remain. President Bush, lukewarm on arming pilots and on letting
cops carry guns on airplanes, enthusiastically embraced the "air
marshal" approach, the one deterrent sure to cost millions of taxpayer
dollars.
So on the one hand you have
anti-gunners calling for more restrictions on guns to foil future skyjackers
(who rarely use guns). On the other hand, the pilot's union is demanding that
their members be allowed to carry firearms so they'll have a fighting chance to
save themselves and their passengers.
What's
the general public to think?
They would do well to remember
that the biggest massacre of innocent civilians was caused not by guns but by
criminals using boxcutter knives. That the largest school massacre in history
was caused by someone using dynamite (Andrew Kehoe, Bath, Michigan, on May 18,
1927), not guns. That even more recently, a Greyhound bus carrying more than
thirty passengers was wrecked by a man carrying a knife--at least six people
were killed in the ensuing crash after the man attacked the driver.
And they might do well to remember
that guns save many more lives than they take.
But those who oppose guns will
continue to ignore the facts. In their rush to incrementally restrict
law-abiding citizens' access to self-protection, they will continue to try to
close the fantasy gun show
loophole. (In fact, buyers and sellers at gun shows are bound by the same laws
as everyone else).
Shame
on those who would try to use the tragedy of September 11 to further their
anti-gun agenda.
Let me repeat, guns weren't
used by the terrorists.
It was knives.
So when are we gonna close that
hardware store loophole?
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