Real Life Lessons About The Value of Gun Laws
May 20, 2003
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world that sometimes seems to be getting madder.
While the anti-gunners like to claim that children are being victimized by violent gun crime which they blame on the presence of guns in our society, on gun manufacturers and supporters of the Second Amendment, two facts that contradict them are constantly cropping up in news stories about life in America.
The first example, from Maryland, illustrates that children are entering into the criminal world at ever earlier ages, and that they don’t need real guns to pursue their felonious careers.
Vicky McLaughlin, manager of the Hollywood Video store in Annapolis, MD, wasn’t sure what to make of the bandit pointing a silver handgun at her on Apr. 21 and declaring, “I’m going to stand this place up.”
His gun looked real and he was dressed in all black, with a sweatshirt hood pulled tightly around his head in approved criminal fashion. But this robber was 4 feet tall and weighed 70 pounds. He was 7 years old. And the gun turned out to be a fake, according to The Baltimore Sun.
Boy Charged
In the eyes of the law, however, that’s just old enough to be taken seriously. The boy, whom police did not identify, was charged with attempted armed robbery and released to his mother.
Police said the incident easily could have taken a tragic turn.
“It’s definitely not taken as a joke when someone points a gun and announces a robbery,” said Officer Hal Dalton, a police spokesman. “It could have gotten him killed.”
Fortunately, the store’s employees and the police officers who were called to the scene remained calm, Dalton said. An officer eventually wrested the gun from the diminutive 7-year-old’s hands.
McLaughlin said that even though the gun looked like a real .32-caliber handgun, she turned her back on the boy, when he first entered the store with two companions, she said.
However, authorities could not confirm that the child had companions. He apparently was alone when police officers arrived, minutes after employees called 911.
McLaughlin said the boy berated the officers. “We couldn’t believe the language he was using,” she said.
Police said the orange tip on the gun that would have denoted it as a fake had been removed. When questioned by an officer, the boy continued to maintain that he had intended to rob the store. “He had every opportunity to tell the officer, ‘I was kidding,’ ” Dalton said.
Perhaps the kicker to this story follows: The next day, the boy’s mother came by the video store twice to threaten employees, according to police and store personnel.
From Louisiana and Pennsylvania come two tragic school shooting stories in which all of the shooters and at least two of the victims were under the age of 21, the legal age for acquiring a handgun.
Just a week before the Maryland 7-year-old’s caper, a 15-year-old New Orleans, LA, high school student was gunned down in a crowded gymnasium by four young men not much older than the victim. Three girls were also wounded by stray bullets.
The next day, investigators discovered that the murdered student, Jonathan Williams, had been carrying a loaded 9mm pistol when he was shot.
According to wire service reports, police spokesman Marlon Defillo said investigators believe the Apr. 14 shooting was retaliation for the April 7 killing of Hillard Smith, an 18-year-old student at a different high school. Investigators have not named Williams as a suspect in that killing, but said the gun found on his body will be tested to see if it is the same one that killed Smith.
Defillo said officers acting on a tip went to the home of suspect Steven Williams’ (no relation to the victim) grandmother, and found the youth, 18, and a 17-year-old male inside. The two “children” were charged with first-degree murder. A third accused shooter, 19-year-old Raymond Brown, turned himself in at the jail.
Witnesses told police that four men, two carrying pistols and one with an “AK-47,” confronted Williams in the gym and shot him repeatedly.
The attackers appeared to have used a rear alley to sneak past armed security guards and metal detectors at the school.
Gun Ban Renewal
The shooting at the New Orleans school prompted a number of anti-gun organizations to call for a “strengthening” of the federal ban on so-called assault weapons which is scheduled to sunset in September 2004. In a press release from Philadelphia, PA, a collection of gun control groups in a five-state region—Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York—deplored the availability of “assault weapons” and called on legislators to strengthen and renew the existing federal law.
Although laced with typical anti-gun rhetoric and technical mumbo-jumbo, the anti-gun press release failed to mention that the ban and other federal and state laws had failed to prevent the New Orleans school shooting and that of a New Jersey police officer that was also cited.
However, the anti-gun coalition urged Congress to renew and strengthen the ban by adding several new provisions.
But while that law failed in the New Orleans school and elsewhere, another shooting in a Red Lion, PA, junior high school on Apr. 24 further emphasized that laws, locks, and security systems can be circumvented even by 14-year-olds without a problem.
Three days after the shooting of the New Orleans student by other teens, James Sheets, a 14-year-old football player, fatally shot his junior high school principal and then killed himself.
Sheets had three loaded revolvers tucked away in his backpack when he road the school bus that morning, according to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. After the bus pulled up to Red Lion Area Junior High School, Sheets made his way into the cafeteria and headed to a rectangular table where he often sat in the morning, joining scores of other students waiting for the school day to begin.
And then, without warning or provocation, the boy stood up and pulled out a .44 Magnum caliber revolver, firing twice and striking Principal Eugene Segro, 51, once in the chest as he stood just 15 feet away. In the two or three seconds of stunned silence that followed the first two shots, Sheets moaned loudly and looked around the room. Then he took a second gun, a .22-caliber revolver, put it to his right temple and pulled the trigger.
Red Lion Police Chief Walter Hughes said that Sheets apparently obtained a key to the family’s locked gun safe and took the handguns. Sheets also had a .357 Magnum that police found in the book bag.
Guns Locked Up
All three guns were registered to Sheets’ stepfather. Hughes said the cabinet was locked when police went to the home and it does not appear Baker was negligent in any way. No charges are expected to be filed against him or his wife, Angelia, the boy’s mother.
“They’re distraught,” Hughes said.
Unlike the New Orleans school, the Red Lion school reportedly does not have a metal detector and the security system is only used after classes begin to keep strangers out. But a police officer from the York Regional Police Department who is stationed at the campus was in the high school at 7:30 a.m. when the shooting occurred.
All of these April news reports involve what the anti-gunners loosely call children. All of them involve criminal intent.
Two of the incidents involve violations of laws against murder and laws prohibiting firearms on school property. Zero tolerance didn’t work worth spit. They also involve violations of prohibitions on firearms possession by minors, and an apparent violation of the so-called assault weapons ban.
In the New Orleans shooting, the victim and his assailants all managed to circumvent metal detectors and on-sight security.
So what is the answer? Or is there one? If anything, it appears that focusing on the instrumentality of crime is largely useless.
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