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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (142451)	2/6/2002 12:10:05 AM
From: d[-_-]b	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577225

Principal's Gun Saves Lives By NEAL KNOX WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 29) -- The nation was horrified when 16-year-old Luke Woodham walked into his Pearl, Mississippi, High School with a .30-30 hunting rifle, shot to death his ex- girlfriend and her close friend, then shot and wounded seven other students. Then the nation learned Woodham had stabbed his mother to death earlier that morning. Then the nation learned that the local prosecutor had charged six more students with having conspired in the killings as part of a Satanic plot. What most of the nation never learned was that Assistant Principal Joel Myrick, using his own gun, stopped the killer as he tried to flee the school. The news media virtually ignored the fact that an armed citizen had possibly prevented more bloodshed -- using a gun possessed in violation of the Federal Gun-Free School Act, which prohibits firearms within 1,000 feet of a school. To find out what happened I talked to the school's principal, Roy Balantine. Mr. Balantine said when he heard the shots he ran into the hall and "saw a kid with a gun," then immediately called 911. Mr. Myrick, he said, was in his office on the opposite side of a "commons" that the school surrounds. Myrick also had run into the hall and seen a student with a rifle; he shoved several students into his office and locked the door, then ran toward the shooting. He saw Woodham shoot and wound one of the students -- and Woodham saw him, so Myrick jumped back out of the line of sight. That's when, Mr. [Balantine] told me, "Mr. Myrick remembered that he had been out to visit his parents over the weekend, and that he remembered that he had forgotten to take his gun out of his pickup. "So Mr. Myrick ran across the commons and out the back door and got the gun, and loaded it, then came around the side of the building." At that point, Mr. Balantine said, he saw the student pull out of the school parking lot and pull up behind a car that was stopped at a stop sign. As Myrick ran toward the car, Woodham pulled around the stopped car, but spun out and off the road. Before he could get the car going again, Myrick was there with the .45 pointed in Woodham's face, demanding "Why did you do that?" That's when Woodham "instantly became a coward," Myrick had told one local reporter. Woodham must have feared that Myrick would shoot him for he stammered, so Mr. Balantine told me, "Oh, Mr. Myrick; I'm the one who gave you the discount on the pizza last week." Myrick got Woodham out of the car, made him lie on the ground, pulled his coat over his head and kept one foot on his back until police arrived. Woodham's rifle was in the car, and he still had 30 rounds. "With all that ammunition, we don't know what he might have done," Mr. Balantine told me. "We don't know if he would've gone to the junior high or the pizza parlor where he worked, or what. There's reason to believe he might not've been through killing." "I'm just thankful that Mr. Myrick had the presence of mind to remember his gun and bring it all to a stop." Amen, Mr. Balantine. Police and local reporters are convinced that Woodham was a member of a satanic cult that had been ritually sacrificing animals and planning killings before fleeing to Mexico. But predictably, there's a bit of a flap in Mississippi about the "terrible fact" that this vice principal had a gun at school, and that he was violating the gun-free school law (which the Supreme Court struck down but Congress reinstated last year). Under Mississippi law he could legally have a gun in his car. I'm thankful he had it, and asked Mr. Balantine to thank him for me and those of us who admire his courage -- and for setting a clear example of a gun being used to save lives. Further, I told him, if the U.S. Attorney or anyone else wants to give Mr. Myrick any legal troubles, to give me a call and I'd be delighted to start a defense fund.

To: tejek who wrote (142451)	2/6/2002 10:32:16 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577225

The percentage of gun owners who shoot someone by accident or in a fit of passionate anger is very tiny. "In 1996, 65% of intimate parter homicides involved guns."** I wont challenge that stat, but its not relevant to what I said. I did not say the percentage of homicides or the percentage of intimate partner homicides involving guns was small. I said the percentage of gun owners who shoot someone by acident or in a fit of passionate anger is very tiny. I'll go beyond that and add that the percentage of gun owners who shoot someone for any reason is very small. I would say that's a pretty high percentage. A high percentage of a different thing. Maybe an example will make it clear to you. If you have a 2 million people, 1 million of whoom are gun owners and 10 of the two million commit murder, and 6 of those involve guns, then the percentage of murders useing guns is 60% but the percentage of gun owners commiting murder with guns is 0.000006%. There is no one including Dr. Kleck that will convince me that there were 3.0 million Defensive Gun Uses [DGU] in CA in 1976 by non institutional adults Kleck said there where two million DGUs by everyone all across America in one year not by registered voters in CA. If you don't like his numbers how about the department of Justice's 1994 survey that estimated 1.5 million. Before Klecks survey 13 smaller survey's estimated between 800,000 and 2.5 million. Even if the lowest estimate from 15 different surveys is the real number you still have 800k times when guns where used for defense in one year. If that year was exceptionally high and the average during my lifetime has only been 400,000 that would be over 13 million since I was born. Sorry I ain't buying these statistics....sounds like a lot of gun owners have a hero complex combined with an overactive imagination. The 1.5 million figure was from a federal government study. Gary Kleck is a liberal who is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Independent Action, Democrats 2000, and Common Cause. When he started his inital study he expected it to support the case for gun control, but he was open minded enough to look at the facts and allowed the facts to change his mind. More info about him and quotes from him relating to his political ideas and inital views can be found at guncite.com If for some reason you don't like Kleck you can look at a table showing the results of other studies at guncite.com A correction - I have more then once said that there are more guns then people in the US. It now appears that my statements may have been correct and that a more accurate way to discribe the number of guns is "almost as many guns as people". There are apparently over 200mil guns in the US. Another way to describe the number of guns is "a lot more guns then cars". Tim