Glad He Had A Gun
By William Raspberry

Monday , March 13, 2000 ; A17
An elderly widower shot a burglar to death recently and
changed–at least temporarily–the terms of the debate over
gun control.
The 83-year-old A. D. Parker, who lives alone in a modest
San Francisco house, said he heard someone busting through
his back door late one night, then heard the intruder
nearing his bedroom.
He reached under the bed where he kept an old .38 he hadn’t
fired in decades, and when the crowbar-wielding burglar was
just outside his bedroom door, he fired once. The man fell,
and Parker called 911.
Police soon arrived to haul away the body of 49-year-old
Michael Moore.
I think it’s fair to say that most gun-control advocates
would favor legislation that would have made it difficult if
not impossible for Parker to have had that gun under his bed
that fateful night. After all, he had no license for the
weapon and, by his own reckoning, he hadn’t had anything
remotely like target practice since he was about 17.
Gun-control advocates–and I am one–argue that protection
against criminals is best left to the authorities, that
amateurs with loaded guns around are more likely to harm
themselves or family members than to stop an intruder.
We just don’t like the idea of leaving armed defense up to
individuals–and not just 83-year-olds with guns.
A Norwalk, Conn., mother was arrested last week after she
gave her two sons, aged 5 and 7, a hammer and a screwdriver
to protect themselves from bullies at school. According to
the police, the woman gave her boys the weapons because she
believed “the children were being harassed on and off the
school bus by another person.”
The police declined to give further details, but I can
imagine what one detail might have been: The boys and their
mother thought the people responsible for protecting the
children weren’t doing a good enough job of it.
Both incidents took me back to my Mississippi childhood. My
folks never shot any intruders that I’m aware of, but maybe
part of the reason was that there weren’t many intruders in
those days, given the overwhelming likelihood that someone
in the house had a loaded gun and was prepared to use it.
The Connecticut affair reminded me of some children at my
elementary school who were known to keep sharp pencils and
compasses for protection against bullies. These children, I
seem to recall, were nearly always unpopular kids who were
picked on for one thing or another. These
youngsters–usually poorly dressed or from the wrong side of
the tracks–could not always count on teachers to intervene
on their behalf. The harassment usually stopped only after
the victims made it clear they were prepared to take care of
themselves.
The two recent incidents serve to make the point that
gun-control opponents often make: that there are times when
our protection is left up to us. I don’t know many people
who, facing what Parker faced the other night, would choose
to be unarmed.
Of course other stories in the news make the case for gun
control. The death of 6-year-old Kayla Rolland at the hands
of her gun-wielding 6-year-old classmate in Mount Morris
Township, Mich., argues persuasively that something should
be done to keep guns out of the hands of the young and
irresponsible.
But what? President Clinton used the Michigan tragedy to
press for legislation to require safety locks on new guns,
ban the importation of high-capacity ammunition clips and
require a three-day waiting period for background checks for
those who buy weapons at gun shows.
These all strike me as sensible provisions, but only one of
them–a subsection of the safety-lock proposal that would
require retrofitting of older weapons–could conceivably
have saved Kayla’s life. And even with such a provision, who
can suppose that the owner of the gun–some guy living in
the home of the boy’s uncle, where the youngster was
staying–would have traipsed down to the local gun shop to
buy a new safety lock?
Ultimately, though, safety locks, background checks,
registration and the rest of it don’t really get where a lot
of us gun-control advocates want to go. We (or at any rate,
I ) want to reduce the number of guns in circulation–first
by making it more difficult for non-law enforcement people
to get them and then by collecting as many already-owned
guns as we can. In general, I think we’d all be a lot safer
with a lot fewer guns.
On the other hand, I’m very glad A. D. Parker was armed.

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