Gun Control

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dvocacy of controversial political or social views frequently provokes violent antagonisms. Although they are usually unwilling or politically unable to overtly suppress these views, officials can covertly withdraw police protection, leaving the job to such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Council, the Storm Troopers, the Cherry Society, and the Black Hand.

What might have happened to civil rights workers if there had been strict gun control in the South is exemplified in the 1969 machine-gunning of several hundred marchers by right-wing extremists in Mexico City. Both the possession of automatic weapons and the act of murder are as strictly forbidden by law in Mexico as they are in the U.S. Nevertheless, the police made no arrests-either on the scene or when the attackers later invaded hospitals to finish off the wounded.

Even assuming that gun prohibition would be enforced against right-wing extremists also, the effect is to render dissenters defenseless without meaningfully preventing lethal attacks upon them. A group of Klansmen or other neo-fascists will hesitate to attack someone they know to be armed or to fire-bomb his house, because they don't want their members to risk injury or death. Even though they may be unarmed, they will not hesitate to attack if they know that their intended victim is also unarmed and that the police will not defend him. No one had guns in the hostile mob which burned the headquarters of the Marxist W.E.B. DuBois Club in 1966 while New York City police looked on. But the DuBois Club member who had to pull a pistol on the mob in order to get out of the burning clubhouse was immediately arrested for gun posses

In response to requests from women who want to learn how to use handguns, some police departments have developed training programs.

Chowchilla (Calif.) Police Dept.

sion. Needless to say, no members of the mob were arrested.

During the civil rights turmoil in the South, Klan violence was bad enough; it might have been worse with gun control. It was only because black neighborhoods were full of people who had guns and could fight back that the Klan didn't shoot up civil rights meetings or terrorize blacks by shooting at random from cars.

Moreover, civil rights workers' access to firearms for self-defense often caused southern police to preserve the peace as they would not have done if only the Ku Kluxers had been armed. I remember how Klansmen broke up a series of marches in a Louisiana town with hideous violence and head-bashing while the police looked on in benevolent neutrality. The unarmed marchers' appeals to the

governor for state police protection were in vain. After many weeks of heavy injuries to the marchers, a black man shot one of several Klansmen who attacked him with clubs. The state police arrived the next day, and there was no further violence.

Contrast an incident that occurred in Madrid on November 6, 1975. A meeting of opposition reform parties was broken up and its participants severely beaten by right-wing gunmen. The victims could offer no resistance, since Spanish law strictly forbids civilian possession of handguns (except by right-wing thugs with permits). Falangist policy follows the gun laws of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, under which Jews and political opponents were disarmed and left helpless against mob violence in the early 1930s. As Hermann Göring said in 1933, "Certainly I shall use the police—and most ruthlessly whenever the German people are hurt; but I refuse the notion that the police are protective troops for Jewish stores. The police protect whoever comes into Germany legitimately, but not Jewish usurers."

becomes more important. Obviously, in most situations it is futile and perhaps dangerous for a woman to resist a male attacker. Armed defense is even more dangerous, since a rapist will invariably get a gun away from a woman and use it on her-or so most movie and television scripts tell us. It seems that a woman who doesn't have a male to protect her had better just "lie back and enjoy it" and hope her attacker doesn't intend to murder or mutilate her afterward.

Men-even police chiefs-who voice such opinions, however, are usually surprisingly short on specific examples. I have researched the subject in detail and have found no case in which a rapist was able to disarm his victim. Those who are familiar with the martial arts know how extraordinarily dangerous it is to attempt to disarm anyone-even an untrained person. Police training emphasizes that this maneuver should be avoided, unless the alternative is immediate death.

If women defend themselves with firearms less frequently than they could, it is only because they have been brainwashed by the steady stream of propaganda generated by males. The Eisenhower Commission Firearms Task Force Report, for example, contemptuously dismisses women in a single sentence: They are "less knowledgeable than men about guns and generally are less capable of self-defense." (To make certain they stay that way, the commission recommends banning handguns.) Having trained women to handle guns and having studied police training for women, I know that they are at least as capable of combat

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shooting as are men. In a mechanical age which has largely rendered irrelevant male-female differences in strength, the concept that women are incapable of using firearms is an anachronism. I have investigated over 150 cases in which women rejected this notion. It is noteworthy that in 80% of the cases studied, women chose to defend themselves with handguns. Such weapons are infinitely preferable to long guns because they are more portable and maneuverable and far less lethal. Here are some abbreviated examples:

• California, 1969: A Los Angeles woman shot and seriously wounded an attempted rapist who broke into her house. Police later charged him with two other rapes.

• California, 1970: An armed Modesto woman storekeeper who had wounded armed robbers on two other occasions captured a third.

• Maryland, 1970: Knocked to the street by punches in the face and stomach by a mugger who told her, "You know what I want," a Baltimore woman drew her pistol and gave him a bullet in the neck instead..

• Maryland, 1971: A Baltimore woman shot to death a man who had raped her and threatened to kill her children if she called the police.

• Tennessee, 1972: When a Chattanooga woman drew a pistol, the man who was preparing to rape her left in too great a hurry to collect the clothes he had just taken off. He was later traced and apprehended through identification found in his abandoned clothing.

Gun Control

• Florida, 1973: Although she was seriously wounded by a burglar who stabbed her several times, a Barstow woman shot him to death.

• Kansas, 1974: Commenting, "I don't think you want to do that," a Wichita storeowner's wife drew a pistol on two armed robbers. They departed in haste. • West Virginia, 1975: A retired schoolteacher awakened to find an armed burglar in her bedroom. Knocking his gun away, she seized her own pistol and shot him to death.

un prohibitionists deny the value of civilian possession of firearms in combatting crime. They cite the Eisenhower Commission's conclusion that "the gun is rarely an effective means of protecting the home against either the burglar or the robber: the former avoids confrontation, the latter confronts too swiftly." But the report, unlike many people who cite it, makes clear that this conclusion applies only to householders, and specifically to those householders who do not have firearms immediately at hand because a criminal attack is completely unexpected. Robbers do not "confront too swiftly" for armed storekeepers, who, the report admits, foil appreciable numbers of them each year. And, although it offers no figures on the success rate of citizens who carry arms for self-defense, the report admits that this practice (which it deplores) does allow for some resistance to street crime.

Like much gun control propaganda, the report does not discuss the utility of