I find myself once more countering something I consider a virulent and dishonest email.  It may be argued that there is no point, but I am a patient man, and my reaction to writing that I think is malignant and untrue is to search for what is true, and, as clearly as I can, state it.

 The email is no doubt being sent around to quite a few people.  It was sent to a friend of mine, who is a kind and decent person, and who enjoys shooting guns at targets for fun.

 Subject: Fw: BUTTE, MONTANA-

I like this kind of e-mail!   American citizens defending themselves and their homes.  I will keep my freedom, my guns, my
money, you can keep the change.
 
Shotgun preteen vs. Illegal alien Home Invaders...

 Two illegal aliens, Ralphel Resindez, 23, and Enric Garza, 26,  probably
believed they would easily overpower home-alone 11-year-old Patricia Harrington after her father had left their two-story home.  It seems  the two crooks never learned two things: they were in Montana and Patricia had been a clay-shooting champion since she was nine.

Patricia was in her upstairs room when the two men broke through the front door of the house. She quickly ran to her father's room and grabbed his 12-gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun.  Resindez was the first to get up to the second floor only to be the first to catch a near point blank blast of buckshot from the 11-year-old's knee-crouch aim. He suffered fatal wounds to his abdomen and genitals.

When Garza ran to the foot of the stairs, he took a blast to the left shoulder and staggered out into the street where he bled to death before medical help could arrive.

It was found out later that Resindez was armed with a stolen 45-caliber handgun he took from another home invasion robbery. That victim, 50-year-old David 0'Burien, was not so lucky. He died from stab wounds to the chest.  

Ever wonder why good stuff never makes NBC, CBS, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, or ABC news........?  An 11 year old girl, properly trained, defended her home, and herself......against two murderous, illegal immigrants.......and she wins, She is still alive.

Now THAT is Gun Control!

Thought  for the day....Calling an illegal alien an 'undocumented immigrant' is like calling a drug dealer an 'unlicensed pharmacist'

I like this kind of e-mail! American citizens defending themselves and their homes.    

IF YOU'RE A TRUE AMERICAN PASS THIS ON, IF YOU'RE AGAINST NOT PROTECTING OUR BORDERS DELETE THIS MESSAGE

I suspect what was intended in the capitalized passage above was the opposite of what it says:  I suspect what was intended is that if you are AGAINST protecting the borders you're not a true American, not that if you are against NOT defending them, you are a true American.

I've changed a few names in my response, and edited out any personal information that might have been in my original response to my friend.  I have also corrected a couple of minor factual errors I made in that response, including the age of the girl in the story and the actual wording of the email's metaphor.

It's with a heavy heart that I respond to the email someone in Montana sent to you.  I'm afraid you will think that because I do not like the email, I judge you and all people who like guns.  That isn't true.  I'm an excellent shot, and for one of Esme's birthdays in her mid-fifties, I had a century-old wild west Colt revolver (handed down to her by her grandfather), cleaned and checked out, so that it could be shot.  One of my brothers loves hunting and finishing, as do many of my relatives, and that's the culture I grew up in.

My trouble with the email is not the guns.  I knew Ralph and I know you, and I know you are good people, and I never felt anything but happiness that target-shooting gave the two of you so much pleasure together.

My trouble is with what I consider dishonest presentation of facts, and emotional manipulation of readers.  My trouble with the email is as a writer.  As a writer, you quickly learn to recognize emotional manipulation, and people playing fast and loose with facts.  I know many feel threatened by those who advocate gun control.  But something there doesn't make sense.  THEY have the guns, not me.  Why are they feeling threatened?  What good is a gun, if you spend all your time feeling threatened?  I thought the idea was to feel safe.

Here are some questions I have:  If this story is true (I assume it is), why have I not read about it somewhere?  The writer blames all the networks and mainstream media, which the writer clearly thinks are "liberal," and whom the writer asserts have refused to cover the story.  To me, this sounds like paranoia.  As far as I can see, the mainstream media loves stories about dogs who dial 911 to save their families, or children who drive the car to a hospital when their father has a heart attack, or pets or children who do brave things in the face of danger.  This seems to me exactly the sort of story the media love, and I simply do not believe there has been an consistent attempt to keep this story from the citizenry.  So to me, the writer is manipulating the reader by sneakily suggesting a conspiracy where none exists, and then attempting to enlist the reader on his or her side by implying that the reader is also a victim of said conspiracy.

Most importantly, what about the young girl?  The original author of the piece (it probably wasn't the person who sent it to you--he or she was probably just forwarding something that had been sent to them) appears to chortle over her "toughness," the fact she was familiar with guns and had been trained to shoot.  My question is, what effect does all this have on the eleven-year-old girl?  If the event happened as described, then I applaud the courage of the young girl, and feel she was justified.  However, would you want your eleven-year-old to have killed two people, and to live with that knowledge the rest of her life?  Tv and the movies present a consequence-free world in which, if you are justified in self-defense, you never have any subsequent worries.

All the evidence and all my experience argues otherwise.  EVEN IF you are justified, such a thing haunts you, and you never ever get over it.  After all, what kind of eleven-year-old COULD kill two people and feel nothing?  Nobody I would want to know.  Even the war hawks admit that something like 85 percent of soldiers on the battlefield shoot over the heads of their enemies.  Good people have an instinctive revulsion to killing, even if it is justified, yet this article seems to rejoice in the killing, seems to vicariously take vindictive pleasure in it.  What sort of adult feels vicarious pleasure in the unavoidable killing done by a child?  That's creepy.

Next:  Even if this story is true, it is only ONE anecdote.  It is not proof that we are all in danger and must be ready to shoot burglars dead.  I have a very strong feeling that there are probably something like a hundred kids who accidentally kill themselves or others playing with guns for every incident like this one.  This is not the exact figure, I am sure, but I know it's in that range.  You can ask any officer of the law how many such fatal accidents he or she deals with for every case in which a gun came in handy and saved a life.   If I had a car that killed people a hundred times, but once out of every hundred times saved a life, I would not drive that car.  Hell, if it killed people who drove it TWO times for every one time it saved a life, I would not drive it.  The odds are terrible.

The article ignores this sanity, and pretends that the burglary incident is typical.  It isn't.  There are a lot more incidents of crazy people committing murder, like the fellow who killed the only doctor in Oklahoma who would perform medically necessary abortions, or the mass-murderer who just yesterday targeted Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, and killed six people, including a Bush-appointed judge and a child.  But the email does not provide such actual numbers, the full truth and context of the sort of things that happen.  It attempts to blow one isolated incident up into an example of the way all true Americans should behave.

Next:  The story is structured deliberately to provoke a certain response.  But even if the story is true, things could easily have gone another way.  What if, for example, an off-duty cop had seen the burglars and gone running into the house and the burglars fled and the cop went running up the stairs to see if everybody was okay and the young girl thought he was a burglar and shot him?  That could just as easily have happened.  What would the moral be then?

Next:  The story allows itself to engage in name-calling that has nothing to do with what happened.  It fairly radiates contempt for "illegal immigrants," as if they were all alike.  But I lived eleven years in a city that was majority Hispanic, and they were just like me.  Most of them just wanted to live happily and raise their kids in safety.  Most of the "illegal immigrants," by far, are harmless people who just want to make a decent living in a safe place.  Most of them are not burglars and killers.  How often have you been burglarized?  I never have.  I have a friend who was, and he's a year younger than me.  Our combined lives of over 130 years have experienced exactly one burglary, and that one was small and nonviolent.  I don't think it is smart to spend a lot of fear and energy preparing for a possibility that is very unlikely ever to happen.  I don't consider it honest to get readers all worked up about a group of people as if they were all dangerous criminals.  I say look at the probabilities, don't let yourself live in fear because of an anecdote about something that will probably never happen to you.

Next:  The email said something like "calling these people undocumented immigrants is like calling a drug dealer an unlicensed pharmacist."  No it isn't.  The first phrase is accurate, the second is a clear distortion of the facts, and fools nobody.  They just aren't the same.  Claiming that they are is dishonest rhetoric, an obvious attempt to inflame the hot passions of the reader.

I've seen a lot of emails like this, and as a writer, I can easily see what they have in common--all the things that an honest and skilled writer rejects:  False comparisons, vicarious pleasure in violence, name-calling, emotional manipulation.  We are invited to identify with the free-living people of Montana, who love their guns.

Well, again, I do not hate guns.  I do not want to take them away from anyone, although I really cannot see the point of keeping an automatic rifle in your house.   I do not have guns myself because no matter how hard I think about it, I can't see much use for them (aside from the pleasure of target-shooting) except to kill things.

Parents do not let their children play with knives.  You would not let an eleven-year-old play with a chainsaw, or drive the family car.  To my mind, guns are more dangerous.  Again, I admire the girl for her courage, and salute her.

But I do not admire the sort of person who uses her and the story of her terrible moment to try and score political points, to imply that their ideology is better.  In a law-abiding society, we have a police force to take care of criminals.  It's true that our law enforcement is not perfect, and that terrible things happen.  This is what makes the question difficult, and why we argue about the best way to proceed.  It's pretty natural to be horrified at those who would kill others, as the burglars in this story are presented, and such people horrify me too.

But as much as we might be horrified when criminals kill people, the only honest question is would it be better for our society as a whole to have everybody shooting for themselves?  My answer is no.  No doubt the burglars were terrible people, but they would have been terrible people even if they were Anglo citizens.  The fact that they were illegal immigrants has nothing to do with the story, and is, in my opinion, a cheap attempt to manipulate the reader's natural horror of such criminals into an emotional hatred of all Mexicans, and to defend vigilantism.

When I read a thing like that, I think of the kid at the gun show whose father allowed him to shoot an Uzi, even though the worker at the shooting range told him it had a bad kick, and who shot his own head off.  To me, that sort of thing is a lot more common in this increasingly hostile and frightened nation than the anecdote in this email.

Anyway, this is my analysis of the email, and why I reject it.  I may be wrong, but I suspect that Ralph would make pretty much the same arguments, although he enjoyed shooting and I do not.

 (Notes:  It occurs to me, belatedly, that if O'Burien had not kept a .45 in his home, Resindez would not have been carrying one, and that somehow the .45 did not keep O'Burien safe--but the email fails to make these fairly obvious deductions.  I wonder also how the original author of this screed, name not supplied, was able to be so certain what the dead burglars were thinking .)