The Washington Times
www.washtimes.com

Guns, hypocrisy and common sense

By Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder

Published 3/31/00

To be absolutely honest, like most Jews, we don’t like to be around anything that could be used to harm anybody. The only reason Jews even have a
butter knives around the house is so they can use them as screwdrivers, which
is why the points on all our butter knives are bent. In fact, things are so
bad for our butter knives, that in our house the only way you can spread some
butter on a

piece of bread is if you hold it on a slant. But if other people feel they

need to have guns around the house, they should be allowed to have them. Just
because you have a gun at home doesn’t mean you are going to go around
shooting people, just as the fact that you have a window in your house
doesn’t mean your wife and brother-in-law are going to take turns jumping out
of it.

The Army has guns all over the place and the soldiers don’t spend

their time shooting each other. Liberace had the same equipment as Bill
Clinton, but girls were perfectly safe around him. Edward G. Robinson always
had a cigar with him, but he didn’t use 19-year old girls as ashtrays. Total
gun-control might be great if you could also get the crooks and murderers to
agree to it. The perjurer-in-chief used the shooting-death of Kayla Rolland
as an excuse to plead for gun control.

Being a draft-dodger it is understandable that he doesn’t know much about
guns, but the fact is that the little monster who killed Kayla obtained it
from his criminal uncle, who presumably would not rush to the station house
to register his gun, no matter what the law was.

In virtually every instance of lunatic gun violence we read about, the

shooters were in violation of many laws before they showed up to do their
dirty work. It makes more sense to enforce the laws that we already have,
than to pass more laws that will probably be equally unenforced. If the
hundreds of laws around the country involving gun purchases, shipment, sales
and licensing are still not strongly enforced, why in the world would we
believe additional laws would be?

A gun in the hands of a law-abiding citizen represents a substantial

deterrent to a would-be attacker. Orlando, Florida had a long-standing rape
problem. Then the police offered a highly publicized gun training program for
women. The result was a 76 percent decrease in rapes. In 1982, Kennesaw,
Georgia passed an ordinance requiring every homeowner to keep a gun. The
number of residential burglaries in the town immediately took a plunge.
Kansas City’s grocers were

the victims of an epidemic of robberies. The grocers were reluctant to beat
back the robbers with boxes of corn flakes because if any of them died, the
grocers would be called “cereal killers.” So the police began a gun training
program for grocers which caused an immediate drop in this kind of crime.
Interestingly, there was during this period an increase in similar kinds of
crimes in the areas around Kansas City. It is a well-established fact that
car hijackers in the Miami area target vehicles

with license plates indicating out-of-town drivers, since these people

would not be allowed gun ownership as it is limited to people with Florida
drivers’ licenses.

Just because a person is a criminal, doesn’t mean he is stupid. You don’t
have to look past Pennsylvania Avenue to verify this. Why would a crook want
to take a chance to start-up with somebody who had a gun? He became a crook
in the first place because he wanted to go into a business where, if he had a
gun, the odds were in his favor.

Having said our piece, we really don’t have much dispute with some of

the gun-control being sought. Mr. Clinton wants a three-day waiting period
for background checks on guns purchased at gun shows. The NRA wants a one-day
check period. We suspect, that with all of the modern super-technology at
their disposal, if the administration was serious, it could figure out a way
to do the gun checks in one day. We, however, have some misgivings about
trigger locks. We can visualize an intruder pointing a gun at a victim who
asks for a time-out while he looks around the house for the key to the
trigger.

The statistical truth is that in America, deaths by shootings are

falling at a rapid rate. In 1993 there were in excess of 17,000 gunshot
deaths. In 1998, there were 11,000 deaths, and it isexpected that the 1999
rate will be even lower. But nobody wants to be confused by the facts,
especially the politicians.