http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20020401/index.php

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Guns Save Lives By Charley Reese

For Monday, April 1, 2002

In June, a new book will be published that I urge every American to
read. It’s called “Guns Save Lives: True Stories of Americans Defending
Their Lives With Firearms.” The author is Robert Waters. The publisher
is Loompanics Unlimited.

If your politically correct bookstore doesn’t have it by June, tell it
to order the book for you.

This is not a dull, scholarly study, nor is it a book of arguments.
Robert Waters has just done a fine job of reporting. He tracked down 14
people who had been forced to defend their lives, their families or
their employees and businesses with a firearm. He interviewed them and
others involved in the cases, including police. Then, like a good
storyteller, he tells you what happened, blow by blow.

These are exciting stories, some of them terrifying. To summarize just
one, imagine that you are a woman with two small children in the house.
You’re home recuperating from recent surgery. You go to the front door,
and a man shoves his way in and begins to stab you with a knife – in the
chest, in the arm, in the eye.

Your screams bring your 11-year-old son down from upstairs, and he hurls
his frail, little body on the back of the thug who is trying to kill
you. The thug shakes the boy off and begins to beat him. This gives
you the chance to stumble downstairs and retrieve your pistol. It is a
mother’s love that gives you strength through all your pain and fear to
climb back up those stairs, gushing blood every step. You know only you
and that pistol stand between death and your children. You shoot the
bastard four times. He drops, paralyzed from the chest down.

This time the guy was sentenced to life without parole. I said “this
time” because he had a record of felony convictions that should have
kept him in prison. That is a common theme. In almost all of these
cases, the bad guys were convicted felons who never should have been let
out of prison, but were by a badly run criminal justice system.

I say it plainly: If you rely on the criminal justice system to protect
you and your family, you’re relying on a flawed system that has resulted
in the deaths and serious injuries of literally thousands of innocent
people who were murdered or assaulted by people with many convictions on
their records. The revolving door of our prison system still has not
been completely shut, though some progress in some states has been
made. Even so, there are still many idiots in black robes who seem to
have far more sympathy for the criminals than for the victims.

Incidentally, if you want a reason to never vote for a liberal governor,
that’s it. A liberal governor is going to appoint liberal judges, and
unless you are a career criminal, that’s the last kind of judge you want
sitting on the bench. It breaks your heart to read these stories of
good, decent people who were terrified and often badly injured before
they could save their lives with a firearm.

I don’t make any bones about it: I hate the gun-control crowd. They are
liars and deceivers at worst and fools at best. The men who took up
private arms to win their liberty from British tyranny wrote the Second
Amendment in the Bill of Rights to make sure every American would also
have a firearm for self-defense and for the defense of liberty.

Scholarly works that have been done – more than 20 of them – show that
anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 2 million Americans defend
themselves or their property with firearms every year. Yet deaths from
firearm accidents have steadily decreased until they are next to dead
last on the list of accidental fatalities.

Of course, if you buy a gun, learn what the laws are, learn to use the
weapon, and learn to use it and store it responsibly. That goes without
saying. This nation was created by intelligent and responsible people
for intelligent and responsible people. Don’t vote for one single
politician who even hints he or she might want to limit your right to
own and use a firearm in self-defense. This is a no-compromise issue.

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Charley Reese can be contacted at [email protected]
? 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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