Anti-gun liberals now carry guns

This is a great article, a little long in giving the background leading up
to it.  Written several years ago.  Liberal yuppies living in
crime-ridden neighborhoods decide that they must carry firearms for their
protection and the one time he had to use his pistol is a very interesting
story.  Full article attached; excerpts below.  He read an anti-gun
article by Adam Smith in Esquire Magazine and replied to it.
Jonesy

A Letter to the Editor
of Esquire Magazine
from Chip Elliott

The streets of America…are
as dangerous as the roads and alleys of an earlier century. But before we
resign ourselves to helplessness, this reader urges us to listen to the story
of how he took up arms in defense of his life and property.

I went from being where both of you seem to be at this point [anti-gun] to
carrying a 9mm Smith & Wesson automatic in ten weeks. My wife is a
psychiatrist. Very attractive, very easy to intimidate, very abstracted, a
likely target for muggers both outside, because she’s lost in her thoughts, and
at home, because punks think doctors keep drugs in their houses (they don’t).
She has a gun, too, a .38, and she knows how to use it. We are not hillbillies:
we are people who went to Radcliffe and Stanford, respectively. Appalling, huh?
It used to appall us too, until we were forced to realize that our lives, both
as a married couple with a deep commitment and as individuals doing important
and meaningful work, were worth protecting.

One morning, as I was sitting on the glassed-in porch, I watched a gang of
black teenagers pour gasoline all over a parked car and set it on fire. This
was at ten o’clock in the morning. Broad daylight.

A few days later, I heard of a robbery two blocks from where we lived: A
woman came to the door of a house and asked to use the telephone, said it was
an emergency. When the man opened the door, her henchmen came in right behind
her. The three of them stabbed the man to death and left his wife barely alive.
In the next block a woman was raped twice after her nose and jaw were broken.

Just to be on the safe side, after a kitchen table powwow, we went to a gun
shop on Pico Boulevard one Saturday morning and bought a 38 snub-nosed
revolver.  I picked the revolver up after the normal fifteen-day waiting
period and wrote the guy a check from the Santa Monica Bank. It cost $160.
[this was about 1980] It seemed like a lot for a silly object. I would rather
have bought a painting. We put the revolver under the corner of our mattress
and there it stayed. For ten days. 

One night we went to [a movie]. When we returned, the door had been broken
in. The stereo was gone, the television was gone, the paintings and cameras and
typewriters were gone. The dressers had been turned over and ransacked, the bed
had been torn up and the revolver taken; the birdcage had been torn off the
wall and the parakeet set free for a while until the cat got it and ate it, leaving
the remains on the floor where a rug had been. All the jewelry was gone, such
as it was.  Three thousand in after-tax dollars. It took the police two
hours and forty-five minutes to show up.

We reported the gun stolen, of course. Serial number and all that. Big deal.
Five months later it was used in an assault against a Los Angeles
woman.   [the author lived in Venice, California]

We bought a new revolver, a. 38 Special Smith & Wesson, and had the
handgrips filed down so my wife could hold it easily.  I bought a second
handgun, a 9mm automatic that would fire as fast as lightning. I phoned around,
discovered where to go to practice with it. And I practiced.  I also went
to the police and got a carry permit.

One night I was awakened by a noise outside on the street. I got up, peeped
through the dining room curtains and saw a gang of teenagers taking the fog
lights off my car. I raised the curtains and knocked on the window. The sight
of a thirty-three year-old naked guy with an automatic did the trick. They
fled.

[he recounts several other instances of crime in his area,
including..]  On the seventeenth of December in 1978, I saw a woman mugged
for her purse­and I watched her run screaming after her assailant until she
collapsed, crying in the street.

On the eighteenth or nineteenth of December, my wife was at a meeting,
everybody else was busy doing something, and I walked alone to the Venice
Sidewalk Cafe for some dinner.  It occurred to me that it was silly to put
on a shoulder holster just to go out for a beer and a sandwich, but I did it
anyway, although I had never been threatened physically, ever, except in
foreign countries.

Walking home about six-thirty at night, just off the corner of West
Washington Boulevard and Westminster Avenue, I was confronted by five young,
well-dressed uptown brothers. Black. Okay. Let’s get that right out front. They
could just as easily have been white. We were directly under a streetlight and
less than fifty feet from an intersection thick with traffic.

I was not dressed as a high roller. I am not a high roller. I don’t look
like a robber baron or a rich dentist. I look like exactly what I am, a
middle-aged guy who’s seen a little more than he needs to see. I thought, what
are these guys doing?

Their leader pulled a kitchen knife out of his two-hundred-dollar leather
jacket. His mistake was that he wasn’t close enough to me to use it, only to
threaten me. He smiled at me and said, “Just the wallet, man. Won’t be no
trouble.”

That was a very long moment for me. I remember it just as it happened. I
remember thinking at the time that it was one of those moments that are
supposed to be charged with electricity. It wasn’t. It was hollow, silent, and
chilly.

I looked at this guy and at his companions and at his knife, and I thought:
Don’t you see how you’re misreading me? I am not a victim. I used to be a
victim, but now I’m not. Can’t you see the difference?

I pulled the automatic, leveled it at them and said very clearly, “You
must be dreaming.”

The guy smiled at me and said, “Sheeeit,” and his buddies laughed,
and he began to move toward me with the knife. I thought, this guy is willing
to kill me for thirty-five dollars. I aimed the automatic at the outer edge of
his left thigh and shot him.

He dropped like a high jumper hitting the bar and yelled
“Goddamn!” three times, the first one from amazement, I guess, and
the second two higher pitched and from pain.

He yelled at his buddies, “Ain’t you gonna do nothing?” They did
do nothing.

I backed off and walked away, right across busy West Washington Boulevard,
with the gun still in my hand. I remember thinking, shouldn’t I call a doctor?
And then I thought, would he have called a doctor for me? And I kept right on
walking.

I was not coming on like James Bond, and I was not being territorial or
aggressive. I was simply protecting my right to walk around town with a lousy
thirty-five dollars in my pocket and not be afraid for my life.

I am not proud of this. I did not swallow it easily, either. More than a
year passed before I talked about it with anybody, not even my wife. But I did
it. And I could do it again if I had to.  Sometimes I think, this is a
stupid, abhorrent, exasperating situation. And it is.  But the way we see
it, if they have the right to mug us, we have the right to shoot them.

I used to believe that these people had some justifications on their side. I
used to feel that I ought to have some compassion for them, and I did. I used
to believe that a job and some credit would put them on the right path. It
isn’t true. I also used to believe that much of the human wreckage­the millions
upon millions of people with emotional damage­could be repaired. That isn’t
true either. They can’t be, for the most part, because the effort necessary to
straighten out a single one of them is enormous: four or five years perhaps of
therapy, in an age when there is no time for anything but emergency medicine.

They do it [mug people] because it’s easy. They do it because they believe no
one will stop them. And they’re right.

Now listen to me a minute. The guns themselves don’t cause all this. What
causes it is that people think they can have the American dream by sticking
someone up for it. They think that there ought to be a huge equal society out
there. Equal shares for everybody. Forced equal shares if necessary.

So you can fuss and bitch, Adam Smith, all you like, and you can rail at the
hillbillies in the NRA, but the next time someone breaks into your house or
your apartment, the next time someone busts the window of your car and rips off
your FM radio and your thirty-five millimeter camera, the next time some woman
you know gets raped and busted up and you have to visit her in the hospital and
try to cheer her up, the next time you are totally freaked out after coming up
against a gang halfway between the restaurant and the car, sit yourself down
and do some serious considering about who has the right to do what to whom.
Often this stuff has to touch people personally before they think about
self-protection, and often by then a tragedy of far more epic proportions than
getting knocked off for a Sony stereo receiver has occurred. I hope that
doesn’t happen to you. You have a right to carry on merrily with what you’re
doing.

Anti-GunLibConverts.doc
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