By Selwyn Duke

We
all know what can happen when kids and guns mix. And today I will tell
you some stories about that very thing. The kids' names were Kendra and
Alyssa, and then there was the 11-year-old boy whose name we just don't
know. What we do know is that they lived in places called Bryan County,
Albuquerque, and Palmview. We know that guns were in their homes — and
that something horrible befell them.

Last
year, 12-year-old Oklahoman Kendra St. Clair was home alone,
unsupervised. At some point she accessed her mother's handgun – a
.40-caliber Glock. Then Kendra pulled the trigger.

And that bullet tore into flesh.

You probably know the rest of the story.

Or maybe not.

The
bullet tore into the flesh of a 32-year-old home invader, causing him
to flee. Kendra was left scared and crying, but unscathed.

The story of Albuquerque 11-year-old Alyssa Gutierrez turned out differently. Three teenage burglars broke into her home, but they fled after she merely grabbed her mother's rifle. No one was hurt, but the criminals were caught.

But
sometimes innocents do get shot. Such was the case with an 11-year-old
Palmview boy in 2010. At home with his mother, he got his hands on a
.22-caliber rifle. And after the two armed and masked illegal aliens who
had broken into their home shot through their bedroom door after the
mother refused to open it, hitting the son in the hip, the boy returned
fire. He struck one of the criminals in the neck, causing them both to
flee. They were apprehended when the wounded miscreant showed up at a
local hospital.

These
were children who lived in places called Bryan County, Albuquerque, and
Palmview. Thank God, they still live in those places. And that's what
can happen when kids and guns mix.

If
you're unacquainted with my work, you perhaps didn't expect this piece
to take the turn it did. You perhaps didn't hear these stories; the
mainstream media doesn't report such things much. But now that you have,
ponder this question: do you wish these children hadn't had access to
firearms? Because they won't if the gun grabbers of the world have their
way.

Of
course, the above real-life stories are just that: anecdotes. Some will
say they're rare and not statistically significant. And I suppose they
are rare; most people will never face such evil and have the ability to
thwart it. Yet they're not nearly as rare as a Sandy Hook or Virginia
Tech: your chance of dying in a school shooting approximates that of
being struck by lightning. In contrast, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck estimates
that 2.5 million Americans each year use guns for self-defense and that
400,000 of them say they would have been killed if they hadn't been
armed. That's 400,000 a year.

Do I believe they all would have been murdered? No. People have a penchant for the dramatic, and fear and stress
can corrupt judgment. But even if only one half of one percent of them
are correct, that's 2000 innocent lives saved with guns every year. This
is approximately 76 times as many as were killed at Sandy Hook and
considerably more than were lost in all American gun massacres during
the last 40 years. And if five percent of them are right, it amounts to
20,000 innocent lives saved – far more than the number murdered with
guns in America every year.

Ah,
"that big 'if,'" some will say. Woulda', coulda', maybe, perhaps, I
suppose. Of course, we should also consider that those 2.5 million
annual defensive gun uses represent rapes, robberies, and assaults
thwarted — usually without firing a shot. And that's part of the
problem. It's a headline when a gun goes off; it can be head to the next
story when a criminal is merely scared off. As for hypotheticals, they
aren't as emotionally compelling as a school shooting, where you see
victims' pictures, grieving relatives, and emergency vehicles dominating
your TV.

Perhaps
it would be different if we, as in a science-fiction movie, could
somehow get a glimpse into alternate gun-free futures, where the world's
Kendras and Alyssas and millions of other good citizens couldn't defend
themselves. Maybe if the citizenry saw in living color how many of
these people, while now safe, would have been left brutalized, killed,
and lying in a pool of their own blood, we could compete for emotional
impact. Thus we should remember, to use a play on a Frederic Bastiat
saying, that a bad policy-maker observes only what can be seen; a good
policy-maker observes what can be seen — and what must be foreseen.
Dead innocents killed with guns can be seen; the innocents who would be
killed were it not for guns must be foreseen.

Yet
even what can be seen, such as the stories I opened with, won't usually
be because they don't fit the anti-gun mainstream-media narrative.
Instead we hear about how 13 children a day are killed with firearms,
with no mention that this "'statistic' includes 'children' up to age 19
or 24, depending on the source [most of these incidents involve teenage
gang members shooting each other]," writes Guy Smith at
Gun Facts. Or we're asked questions such as "Why does anyone need an
AR-15?" Perhaps we should ask the then 15-year-old Houston boy who used that very weapon to defend himself and his younger sister against two burglars in 2010.

Here's
what you might learn: being a light gun (seven pounds) with little
recoil, it's an ideal firearm for youngsters and women. A lady I knew
once fired a shouldered shotgun when she was a girl, and the kick
knocked her on her backside; an AR won't do this. This is partially
because its high-tech mechanism absorbs much of the recoil energy, but
also because it is not nearly as powerful as even many hunting rifles.

How can this be? Isn't this "scary black gun" a "killing machine," as Piers Morgan put it? As explained and illustrated in this video, this class
of weapons is designed to wound a 170-lb. man, while a high-powered
hunting rifle's purpose is to kill a 300 to 800-lb. deer or moose. In
fact, in some states and countries it is illegal to hunt large game with
an AR-caliber round (.223) for fear that its relative ineffectiveness
will leave a wounded and suffering animal wandering the forest. As to
this, note that the AR-wielding 15-year-old Houston boy shot one of the
intruders at least 3 times – and the man lived. It might have been a
different story had the teen used a 30.06 deer rifle, and a very
different one with a buckshot-loaded shotgun.

So
do kids and guns mix? Well, kids and their guns have sometimes been
mixing it up with criminals – and coming out on top. But neither kids
nor anyone else mixes well with guns when ending up on the wrong end of
one. This happened at Sandy Hook. It happened in Aurora, CO. It happens
during many other garden-variety crimes. And it could conceivably happen
scores of thousands of times more every year. The only way to find out
precisely how many more times is to disarm the American people.

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