2/29/00 Gun Control Laws Fail Again

Gun Control Laws Fail Again

For Immediate Release
February 29, 2000
For Further Information Contact John Velleco 703-321-8585
 

Today’s tragic killing of a youngster by another youngster underscores the ineffectiveness of gun control laws.

Rather than ask about the gun, we should be asking what got into a child to want to kill another child?

The President and the others in the civilian disarmament lobby have taken this opportunity to call for more gun control on top of the already failed gun control laws on the books.

The President’s call for trigger lock legislation would be more accurately called a Lock-Up-Your-Safety law. The main beneficiaries of trigger locks on guns will not be children or homeowners, but home invaders.

Guns and children actually go well together, and they have over the years of our country’s history.

Had President Clinton’s Home Invader Protection Act been on the books in the past, the following people would have been dead because a child would not have been able to get a gun:

    * Dennis Smith, 12 years old, in Compton, CA killed an armed robber in his mother’s convenience store in March, 1999.

    * Tracy Templeton’s 15-year-old son shot and killed a man in Elko, NV in 1997 who had been beating his mom and screaming that he was going to kill her.

    * Jarrod Barnes, 13, of Tulsa OK, saved his life and that of his three brothers (all home alone in 1994) when a man broke into their home and chased him into a bedroom where he got a pistol and killed the attacker.

    * In 1985 a Bethel, OK mother’s life was saved by her six-year old son who used a rifle to kill the man trying to kill his mom.

The question for President Clinton, Sarah Brady of Handgun Control, Inc. and others is — do you want to tell the parents of these children that their kids should not have had access to a gun?