]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]          BAN ALL HANDGUNS!         [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ 
                                                             (6/24/88)
     When Swiss citizens finish their obligatory military service, 
they return with the rifle and ammunition they have learned to use for 
the defense of their country. So Switzerland has a million rifles in 
its attics, and never has one been shot in anger.
     Neither the Swiss nor the American governments are afraid of an 
armed population; only would-be take-over politicians need fear it. In 
the Communist countries, people cannot shoot their politicians, mainly 
because the politicians shoot the people.
     But guns are not only needed against possible take-over politi-
cians. They are also needed because of the politicians that are unable 
to protect their constituents' security in their homes and in the 
streets. So Americans have to do themselves what their government is 
incapable of doing.
     But not everybody thinks so.
     Liberal columnist and television commentator has always been 
adamantly opposed to guns in civilian hands. In a 1986 column, he 
wrote "The gun lobby continues to work the White House and Congress to 
the point of guaranteeing that almost any nut in any neighborhood can 
turn his house into an arsenal."
     In a 1981 column he proposed "Anyone found in possession of a 
handgun except a legitimate officer of the law goes to jail -- 
Period."
     And in a 1985 column he called for "a complete and universal 
federal ban on the sale, manufacture, importation and possession of 
handguns" other than those for use by authorized police and military 
personnel.
     But at about 2 a.m. of June 19, 1988, some unarmed teen-agers 
scaled the fence of his home in Washington, D.C., and swam in his 
swimming pool. Whereupon upright columnist Rowan, who ferociously 
advocates banning the guns of everybody else, took his UNREGISTERED 
.22 caliber Smith-Wesson handgun and shot one of them in the wrist; 
the others escaped.
     His explanation might come straight out of the book of the gun 
lobby:
     "I am appalled that so many people are so eager to spread their 
propaganda about gun laws that they ignored the first overriding fact 
that my home was violated, my family was threatened by strangers in 
the darkness... A lot of what is theoretical, ideological is being 
written by people who have not been threatened, ... and have not been 
confronted by a doped-up intruded just outside their door."
     Unlike Bernhard Goetz, who was convicted for shooting four black 
youths who threatened him with a sharpened screwdriver, Rowan, who is 
black, does not face any serious punishment for shooting an unarmed 
white teenager in Washington, DC. Asked by the New York Post if his 
case could be compared to Goetz's, Rowan put the finger of cold logic 
on the difference between the two: the comparison was "so stupid I 
won't even talk about it."
     Among the suppressed giggles (for you never not laugh out aloud 
when royalty embarrasses itself), there was a hearty guffaw that was 
not widely reported: Sen. Symms (R-Idaho) purchased the upright colum-
nist a membership in the NRA and sent him a telegram:
     "YOUR ACTIONS HAVE SPOKEN LOUDER THAN WORDS."
          
[Rowan quotations from Human Events, 6/25/88]
                         

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