1/22/01 11:10 a.m.
The Hate-Crime Myth
People don?t save people. Guns save people.
By Deroy Murdock, columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service

If Matthew Shepard had a gun, he would be alive today.

As a new and very sad MTV teledrama reminds us, the 21-year-old University of
Wyoming student was pistol-whipped, tied to a rural fence and left to die on
October 7, 1998. Anatomy of a Hate Crime depicts Shepard as an amiable
scholar and his murderers as local delinquents who killed him in a robbery
aggravated by scorn for Shepard’s homosexuality.

A half-hour talk show that follows the TV movie presents numerous arguments
for hate-crimes legislation. But neither the film nor the discussion even
hints at the obvious: If Shepard were armed, he could have warded off his
assailants. Instead, he nearly froze in an open field and died five days
later of his injuries and exposure.

Thankfully, there is no MTV telepic mourning a gay man named Tom. As the
National Journal’s Jonathan Rauch reported, Tom (who withheld his surname)
and a male friend were walking through a dodgy part of San Jose, California
when a gang of 20 thugs began taunting them.

“Hey, you f***ing faggots!” one of them yelled. “When we’re done with you,
they’ll never find your bodies.” Tom and his pal ran for their lives, with
the hoodlums in hot pursuit. Tom dug into his backpack and yanked out a
semi-automatic handgun. He stood beneath a streetlight brandishing his
weapon. His tormentors quickly retreated.

“There’s no question in my mind,” Tom believes, “that my friend and I would
have been at least very seriously beaten, and maybe killed.”

Of course, gays are not the only Americans who would benefit from being
armed. James Byrd, the black man fatally dragged by three truck-driving white
supremacists, still might walk the streets of Jasper, Texas, had he carried a
gun in June 1998. Had Yankel Rosenbaum packed a pistol in August 1991, the
rabbinical student might have neutralized a mob of black thugs that yelled
“Kill the Jew” and “Heil Hitler” before Lemrick Nelson stepped forward and
fatally stabbed him in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights district. Personal firearms
likewise might have saved one or more of Hillside Strangler Angelo Buono’s
nine female victims or any of the 36 women who serial killer Ted Bundy is
suspected of having murdered.

“The largest and fastest-growing group of purchasers of small handguns, cheap
handguns, are single women, most of them minorities,” National Rifle
Association President Charlton Heston told me January 15, shortly after he
received a lifetime achievement award from Manhattan’s Congress of Racial
Equality. Heston spoke of women who return home to rough neighborhoods after
working late hours. “Of course they want a gun in their purse when they get
off the bus at 4:00 o’clock in the morning.”

John R. Lott Jr., Yale Law School researcher and author of More Guns, Less
Crime, argues that if every state had a right-to-carry law, armed potential
victims could have prevented 1,500 murders and 4,000 rapes between 1992 and
1998. Merely displaying guns deters some 1.96 million violent crimes
annually, Lott estimates.

Nonetheless, fashionable politicians and pundits prefer to fight lethal
bigotry with hate-crimes laws. Although attractive on their surface, such
measures create their own problems.

First, “hate crime” is a truism. What exactly is a love crime?

Second, suppose a racist spots a mixed couple and yells, “Die, ******!”
before severely assaulting a black husband and his white wife. Imagine
further that the accused is convicted and receives 20 years in jail for his
attempted murder of a man of color while only getting 15 years for nearly
slaying his bride. Now pretend you’re the trial judge. Try to tell the
woman’s enraged relatives why she nearly was killed at a discount.

Third, and most worrisome, hate-crimes laws are an unreliable deterrent
against anyone so consumed with venom as to attack another for his sexuality,
race, religion, or sex. If such statutes magically shielded at-risk
minorities from violence, they would be worthwhile. Alas, they are no defense
at all.

Far more promising is the adoption of state-level right-to-carry rules that
would permit sane, law-abiding citizens to keep and bear handguns. Such a
practical application of the Second Amendment would help racial, sexual and
religious minorities ? and even straight, white, Christian males ? to
protect themselves from those who would turn bias into bloodshed. In this
sense, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, and Yankel Rosenbaum sadly demonstrate
something too often true. People don’t save people. Guns save people.