Dear Mr. Spencer, I am writing this song to you...
Mr. Spencer,
Regarding your article "Innocent pay price for easy gun access:" (see below)
It's truly awful that Garry Scott McLaughlin died as a result of a criminal act with a gun. Many innocent people die each year as a result of violence.
It's really too bad that people in your position try to make an object the bad guy, instead of making the person responsible the bad guy. If someone is murdered, they are just as dead if they are killed with a car or a knife as with a gun.
It's the wholesale blame of the existence and availability of certain objects that is one of the root causes of justice being destroyed by jurors buying into ridiculous defenses: "Easy access to (fill in the blank) guns; pornography; alcohol; automobiles; gasoline; baseball bats; etc.; caused him to do it."
The idiot that ran over and killed my brother wasn't responsible because he was drunk. Idiots like you help the two-brain-celled-television-addicts understand that personal responsibility has NOTHING to do with a crime. "If we can only create a non-gun Utopia we will all be safe" seems to be your message.
Well, ask the folks in Australia and jolly ole England if they are safer as a result of disarming their law-abiding subjects.
Ask yourself this: Do you apply the same logic to guns that you apply to every other inanimate object? If the answer is no, then you are using emotion instead of logic to persuade your audience.
Do you truly feel that you would be safer if government agents went door to door disarming your neighbors? If so, then please consider moving to one of the many utopian societies that has outlawed guns.
Oh -one more thing - How can we take you seriously about your anti-gun stance until you have posted your home as being a gun-free haven where guns are not allowed?
Really - until you do so, spouting your anti-gun rhetoric is like someone wolfing down a steak at Black Angus while touting the benefits of being a vegetarian.
Until you are prepared to post your property thus, please don't be a hypocrite. After all, think of all the lives it would save if every hoplophobe would post their houses as gun-free zones? The people who burgle and rape for a living would choose people like you - who in turn, would not resist. Everyone would be safer - and all hoplophobes would be so much more righteous.
What the heck - a few anti gun men and women may have to give up the booty, but they would likely not be hurt, since the criminals would know that they won't be putting up a fight.
So do the right thing. Post your home, and perhaps your car, as a GUN-FREE zone. It worked in schools, right?
Sincerely,
Mark Terry, Payson, AZ
Innocent pay price for easy gun access
by Jim Spencer - Denver Post Columnist
June 08, 2003 - I'm still getting hate mail for a May 21 column that criticized the state for diluting local gun laws.
I haven't heard a word from the Sons of the Second Amendment about Garry Scott McLaughlin.
This doesn't surprise me. McLaughlin, an 18-year-old honor student and the stepson of a district judge, shoots holes in the idea that easy access to guns makes Colorado safer.
McLaughlin is dead. He was shot to death June 1 for the decidedly un-deadly offense of asking some young party crashers to leave his home.
McLaughlin personifies truth in a state and country that would have you believe that guns protect and might makes right.
A gun would not have saved McLaughlin, said his stepdad, Jack Berryhill, a judge in Gilpin and Jefferson counties.
"He wouldn't have been better off with a gun. He wouldn't have had a chance to counterfire.
"The thing is, you wouldn't think a bunch of kids crashing a party would have guns. I crashed parties when I was a teenager. Guns never entered the picture."
Where firearms are seen as the be-all, end-all of civilized society, guns are never out of the picture.
Police have arrested no one in Berryhill's slaying. If they do, odds are no one will be prosecuted for providing the pistol to the person who fired it.
Maybe the gun was stolen and sold by "some dude" on the street. It's all but impossible to find "some dude."
Worse, a number of ways exist for Colorado teenagers 18 and older to legally carry handguns.
State law says a private person can sell a handgun to anyone 18 or older. Drivers also have the right to carry weapons in their cars for protection. According to state officials, that right extends to drivers 18 and older.
Millions of legal, virtually unregulated private sales of handguns take place in America each year. In Colorado, only "retail" sales require record-keeping.
"Retail is not defined," said Ken Lane, a spokesman for the attorney general's office. "But generally, the accepted definition of retail means involved in a business."
Individual-to-individual sales appear to require no record-keeping of any kind.
Sell your personal piece to some punk kid and it's hard, if not impossible, to get caught. The gun lobby battles for this lack of accountability. That might seem like one more reason to arm yourself. But unless you want to brandish a firearm every time you see a stranger, McLaughlin's death shows the futility of such a strategy.
"It would be one thing if my stepson had been in a strange place, where he thought he needed to protect himself," Berryhill said. "He was at home."
He was also killed from afar, apparently as an afterthought.
Police won't say whether they think the shooting was the work of a youth gang. But the shooting happened in a comfortable suburban neighborhood in Arvada, a city that had only two homicides all of last year.
Gang-related or not, it seems pretty clear that McLaughlin died as some armed fool's way of garnering respect.
The shot that claimed McLaughlin came from 100 feet away, his stepfather said.
"This was a fairly nonchalant event" for the shooter, Berryhill said. "It was as if the person was firing a pellet gun or a pea shooter.
"At first we thought three shots were fired. Now, we think it was more. It's a wonder no one else was hurt."
The greater wonder is that tragedies such as this one don't rally the majority of Americans and Coloradans to take their country and state back from the gun lobby that controls Republican-dominated legislatures. Sane gun control shouldn't be a partisan issue. It is, however, distinctly political.
A fundamental misunderstanding of firepower took McLaughlin in his prime. That misconception grows from a culture that says the more guns, the better.
"I, for one, don't feel safer with people carrying guns," Berryhill said the day before he buried his stepson. "You always wonder if the guy who gets angry in traffic has a gun under his seat. You wonder about the presence of guns in cases of domestic violence. "When people decide to be destructive, either in a rage or as a prank, a gun becomes a way to express yourself."
Sometimes it takes a grieving parent to drive that point home. Berryhill said he once wrote off newspaper accounts of shootings as "life in the city."
No more.
"You don't think it's going to happen to you, then boom, it strikes home," the judge said. "You realize everybody's vulnerable, even if you're in the right place."
Guns can always make the right place wrong.
"If they didn't have the gun, they couldn't have hurt my son," Berryhill said of the killers. "These guys were 100 feet away on the street."
From that distance, he said, "you can't do this kind of damage with your fists. You can't do it with a rock."
By the same token, law-abiding Americans can't shoot their way out of trouble.
Not unless they want more Garry Scott McLaughlins caught in the crossfire.
Original column posted at
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~27772~1440837,00.html.
Jim Spencer's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in The Denver Post. Contact him at [email protected] or call 303-820-1771.
Mr. Spencer,
Regarding your article "Innocent pay price for easy gun access:" (see below)
It's truly awful that Garry Scott McLaughlin died as a result of a criminal act with a gun. Many innocent people die each year as a result of violence.
It's really too bad that people in your position try to make an object the bad guy, instead of making the person responsible the bad guy. If someone is murdered, they are just as dead if they are killed with a car or a knife as with a gun.
It's the wholesale blame of the existence and availability of certain objects that is one of the root causes of justice being destroyed by jurors buying into ridiculous defenses: "Easy access to (fill in the blank) guns; pornography; alcohol; automobiles; gasoline; baseball bats; etc.; caused him to do it."
The idiot that ran over and killed my brother wasn't responsible because he was drunk. Idiots like you help the two-brain-celled-television-addicts understand that personal responsibility has NOTHING to do with a crime. "If we can only create a non-gun Utopia we will all be safe" seems to be your message.
Well, ask the folks in Australia and jolly ole England if they are safer as a result of disarming their law-abiding subjects.
Ask yourself this: Do you apply the same logic to guns that you apply to every other inanimate object? If the answer is no, then you are using emotion instead of logic to persuade your audience.
Do you truly feel that you would be safer if government agents went door to door disarming your neighbors? If so, then please consider moving to one of the many utopian societies that has outlawed guns.
Oh -one more thing - How can we take you seriously about your anti-gun stance until you have posted your home as being a gun-free haven where guns are not allowed?
Really - until you do so, spouting your anti-gun rhetoric is like someone wolfing down a steak at Black Angus while touting the benefits of being a vegetarian.
Until you are prepared to post your property thus, please don't be a hypocrite. After all, think of all the lives it would save if every hoplophobe would post their houses as gun-free zones? The people who burgle and rape for a living would choose people like you - who in turn, would not resist. Everyone would be safer - and all hoplophobes would be so much more righteous.
What the heck - a few anti gun men and women may have to give up the booty, but they would likely not be hurt, since the criminals would know that they won't be putting up a fight.
So do the right thing. Post your home, and perhaps your car, as a GUN-FREE zone. It worked in schools, right?
Sincerely,
Mark Terry, Payson, AZ
Innocent pay price for easy gun access
by Jim Spencer - Denver Post Columnist
June 08, 2003 - I'm still getting hate mail for a May 21 column that criticized the state for diluting local gun laws.
I haven't heard a word from the Sons of the Second Amendment about Garry Scott McLaughlin.
This doesn't surprise me. McLaughlin, an 18-year-old honor student and the stepson of a district judge, shoots holes in the idea that easy access to guns makes Colorado safer.
McLaughlin is dead. He was shot to death June 1 for the decidedly un-deadly offense of asking some young party crashers to leave his home.
McLaughlin personifies truth in a state and country that would have you believe that guns protect and might makes right.
A gun would not have saved McLaughlin, said his stepdad, Jack Berryhill, a judge in Gilpin and Jefferson counties.
"He wouldn't have been better off with a gun. He wouldn't have had a chance to counterfire.
"The thing is, you wouldn't think a bunch of kids crashing a party would have guns. I crashed parties when I was a teenager. Guns never entered the picture."
Where firearms are seen as the be-all, end-all of civilized society, guns are never out of the picture.
Police have arrested no one in Berryhill's slaying. If they do, odds are no one will be prosecuted for providing the pistol to the person who fired it.
Maybe the gun was stolen and sold by "some dude" on the street. It's all but impossible to find "some dude."
Worse, a number of ways exist for Colorado teenagers 18 and older to legally carry handguns.
State law says a private person can sell a handgun to anyone 18 or older. Drivers also have the right to carry weapons in their cars for protection. According to state officials, that right extends to drivers 18 and older.
Millions of legal, virtually unregulated private sales of handguns take place in America each year. In Colorado, only "retail" sales require record-keeping.
"Retail is not defined," said Ken Lane, a spokesman for the attorney general's office. "But generally, the accepted definition of retail means involved in a business."
Individual-to-individual sales appear to require no record-keeping of any kind.
Sell your personal piece to some punk kid and it's hard, if not impossible, to get caught. The gun lobby battles for this lack of accountability. That might seem like one more reason to arm yourself. But unless you want to brandish a firearm every time you see a stranger, McLaughlin's death shows the futility of such a strategy.
"It would be one thing if my stepson had been in a strange place, where he thought he needed to protect himself," Berryhill said. "He was at home."
He was also killed from afar, apparently as an afterthought.
Police won't say whether they think the shooting was the work of a youth gang. But the shooting happened in a comfortable suburban neighborhood in Arvada, a city that had only two homicides all of last year.
Gang-related or not, it seems pretty clear that McLaughlin died as some armed fool's way of garnering respect.
The shot that claimed McLaughlin came from 100 feet away, his stepfather said.
"This was a fairly nonchalant event" for the shooter, Berryhill said. "It was as if the person was firing a pellet gun or a pea shooter.
"At first we thought three shots were fired. Now, we think it was more. It's a wonder no one else was hurt."
The greater wonder is that tragedies such as this one don't rally the majority of Americans and Coloradans to take their country and state back from the gun lobby that controls Republican-dominated legislatures. Sane gun control shouldn't be a partisan issue. It is, however, distinctly political.
A fundamental misunderstanding of firepower took McLaughlin in his prime. That misconception grows from a culture that says the more guns, the better.
"I, for one, don't feel safer with people carrying guns," Berryhill said the day before he buried his stepson. "You always wonder if the guy who gets angry in traffic has a gun under his seat. You wonder about the presence of guns in cases of domestic violence. "When people decide to be destructive, either in a rage or as a prank, a gun becomes a way to express yourself."
Sometimes it takes a grieving parent to drive that point home. Berryhill said he once wrote off newspaper accounts of shootings as "life in the city."
No more.
"You don't think it's going to happen to you, then boom, it strikes home," the judge said. "You realize everybody's vulnerable, even if you're in the right place."
Guns can always make the right place wrong.
"If they didn't have the gun, they couldn't have hurt my son," Berryhill said of the killers. "These guys were 100 feet away on the street."
From that distance, he said, "you can't do this kind of damage with your fists. You can't do it with a rock."
By the same token, law-abiding Americans can't shoot their way out of trouble.
Not unless they want more Garry Scott McLaughlins caught in the crossfire.
Original column posted at
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~27772~1440837,00.html.
Jim Spencer's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in The Denver Post. Contact him at [email protected] or call 303-820-1771.
