Well, now. This is news! And good news, too. I mean, how often do you
see anybody on national TV actually making sense when they talk about
guns?
Right. Hardly ever. But, on ABC's Nov. 3 "Politically Incorrect"
program, comedienne Vicki Lawrence and television's Judge Joe Brown had
many common sense things to say about owning firearms. Judge Brown was
raised in one of the toughest neighborhoods in South Central Los
Angeles. He graduated with top honors from UCLA's Law School.
On this program, discussing the most recent workplace shootings in
Hawaii by a man who legally owned the guns he used, Lawrence adamantly
opposed taking guns away from responsible citizens saying, "You're not
gonna ever get them off the streets. You're not gonna get them away from
the gangs. You're not gonna do that. So, why are you gonna take them
away from me?"
When the host of the show, Bill Maher, disputed the notion that
victims of gun crime would have been safer if they had been armed,
Brown, said, "Well, let's put it this way. I tell you what. I would have
felt a lot better if when (in Hawaii), somebody walked in and said, 'All
right, this is going down. I'm going to blow you away,' that somebody
else (armed) would have been able to say, 'Well, you know, make my day.
I got my stuff. Let's see if it works.' See, that way you're not holding
your butt in your hand. You got something else showing."
When another guest on the program suggested that the shooter in
Hawaii should have been legally limited to only two guns (instead of the
17 he reportedly owned), Brown said, to applause from the audience, "I
mean, what difference does it make? If he had one or two, he could have
done the same damage, but if you had your own, you could have stopped
it. You want to give Big Brother more authority than he's already got?
Goodness!"
When guest Peter Frampton, the rock-and-roll guitarist from England,
said it was "ridiculous" to advocate that teachers in our public schools
be armed, Brown said, "Tell you what, down in Arkansas a few years ago,
some kid went amok with a pistol, and he started shooting the school up.
The principal went out, got his .45 out of the trunk, drew down on the
kid, he threw the gun down, (and this) stopped the tragedy."
"Now see, I've noticed this," said Brown, "I'll tell you as a
criminal court judge, when you've got armed citizens, the crime drops."
What Brown is alluding to -- though his geography is a little off --
is a 1997 shooting in Pearl, Miss., where Luke Woodham shot two students
to death and wounded seven others at Pearl High School. During this
carnage, Assistant Principal Joel Myrick got a handgun from his truck,
blocked the road as Woodham was on his way to kill some other students,
and ordered him to the ground at gunpoint until police arrived. Myrick
has said he has no doubt Woodham would killed more people if he had not
been stopped since he had 36 rounds of ammo in his pocket when he was
finally subdued.
Referring to the slaughter at Columbine High in Colorado, Lawrence
said, "OK, let's talk about teachers. What if somebody had had a gun at
Columbine? Could they not have shot those guys instead of getting on a
cell phone? ... I ain't going into a public school unless I'm armed and
dangerous."
So, let's hear it for Vicki Lawrence and Judge Joe Brown! -- two of
our citizens who are not afraid to defend our Second Amendment rights.
And on national TV, too. What a breath of fresh air.
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Larry Pratt is executive director of
Gun Owners of
America, a national grass-roots lobbying
organization located in Springfield, Va.