UPLOADED BY: "GUNNER" @ 14,400bps v.42bis
=========================================

The following article was taken from the September 1993 issue of "The Firing
Line" newsletter, printed by The Firing Line indoor pistol range in
Northridge, CA.
==============================================================================

          ***** ON THE DEATH OF MY STUDENT, WILLIAM SHADDEN *****

by Charles H. Webb, Ph.D.


    William Shadden is dead, and I'm afraid.  I'm angry, shocked, frustrated,
saddened, but most of all, afraid.  Bright, hard-working, handsome, at the
height of his physical powers and the threshhold of his artistic ones -- Bill
Shadden was killed by two men who wanted his bicycle.  Let congress make
bike-jacking a federal crime.  Let them do the same with book-jacking and
Big-Mac-jacking -- for all the good it will do.

    I should be rubbing ashes on my skin, tearing my hair and wailing for the
promising young writer who will never keep his promise.  Instead, I'll remem-
ber to rush to unlock the two security devices on my steering wheel when I
leave a friend's house; how I peer into the shadows around my own driveway;
how I imagine a knock on my windshield and wonder if my "Club" would serve as
one; how I drive with my windows up; how I've gone hungry rather than face
hostile panhandlers outside my favorite fast-chicken place.

    I am not a coward or a man who attracts bullies kicking sand.  I earned
a brown belt in karate years ago.  I belong to a health club and work out the
requisite three times a week.  Still, I know Bill Shadden could have beaten
me in a fight.  The thugs who killed him could more easily have killed me.

    "I feel safe when I'm with you," the woman I'm dating told me a few weeks
back.  There was a time when I would have agreed a woman was safe with me.
There was a time, not long ago, when I would not have disillusioned her in the
least.  This time, in 1993 Los Angeles, I said, "If some guy with a gun wants
to rape you and kill us both, there's almost nothing I can do."  So much for
romance in the 90's and for bare hands against a gun.

    "There's the problem," many readers will say.  "We've got to control
guns."  But guns didn't kill Bill Shadden -- dirtbags did.  He couldn't
defend himself and the dirtbags knew it.  Unarmed he was easy, a sitting
duck.

    I don't like admitting that this is how I feel, and what I think.  In a
city where an honest citizen can more easily become a movie star than get a
permit to carry a gun, even suggesting that firepower should be fought with
firepower invites classification as a nut, irresponsible, and probably a
red-necked fascist, too.  Yet I think of myself as a liberal.  I'm funda-
mentally egalitarian, anti-totalitarian, passionately committed to the rights
and dignity and freedom of the individual -- especially the peaceful, produc-
tive one.  I respect anti-gun activists' kind hearts.  But most of those I've
known have never been in a fistfight, or so much as touched a gun.  When it
comes to discouraging dirtbags or using guns, they don't know their butts
from their bores.

    Eight years ago, as my 73 year old father sat stopped at a red light, a
dirtbag smashed him in the head with a rifle-butt, dragged him out of his car,
stole his wallet, and ran.  I rationalized the incident.  My father should
have moved, or at least changed his driving habits when his neighborhood
turned bad.  He should not have been at that stop light.

    Three years ago, a friend of mine was pistol-whipped and raped in her home
by two drug-addict ex-cons.  I rationalized that incident this way:  She was a
woman; she lived alone, without a home security system.  She was too good a
target to resist.

    One year ago a friend of a friend was robbed at gunpoint outside a nice
Huntington Beach restaurant.  The robbers didn't shoot the man or his wife,
whom they also robbed.  But the man was so frightened he voided his bowels.
I distanced that story by laughing -- besides, I didn't know the man.

    On arriving at the West Fork of the San Gabriel River, less than an hour
from Los Angeles, a fellow fly-fisherman was shocked to see gang graffiti
everywhere.  He was more shocked when the tattooedgangbangers showed up.  He
was packing a 4-weight fly rod -- they were packing .357's.  He believes they
let him go because they liked exercising the power to do so.  I distanced that
incident too, remembering that San Gabriel trout are small, so I never fish
there.

    Now, less than twenty-four hours after Bill Shadden died, a firend
rationalizes.  "He resisted -- he shouldn't have done that."

    The reason for rationalizing and distancing is clear.  To do so minimizes
fear, reassuring us that we are safe from such atrocities.  But what do our
rationalizations imply?  That there are huge areas of the city, and the
country, where people shouldn't go, especially if they are old.  That a woman
should have a roommate, preferably male, and pay for elaborate security
systems, and even then can't feel safe in her own home.  We take an appreci-
able risk just leaving home, even to go to a nice restaurant in a "good" part
of town, or to relax on a small tame trout stream.  If someone wants something
from us -- something we worked for, something that is ours -- we can't say
no.

    Even a turkey squawks, dragged to the slaughter.  But, bit by bit, we've
let out independence and our adulthood be stripped away, our self-reliance
drummed out of us.  "Please Sir, may I have another?", our votes say.

    The long term answer is better parenting, less population growth, less
crowding, a healthier economy, a more effective legal system, and more educa-
tion of the intellectual and moral kind.  But it's the short run that bothers
me.  Bill Shadden didn't live to see the long run.  Neither will many other
people, unless we, as good citizens, fight back.

    More police would help the situation.  But the answer is not simply "hire
more cops."  The last twenty years have seen an explosion of the "rights" of
criminals, and a correspondind decrease in the ability of the police to pro-
tect law-abiding citizens.  If you doubt this, ask any cop.  Besides, even an
army of police could not protect all of us all the time.  Ans who would pro-
tect us from the Army, the Founding Fathers wondered, leading to the constitu-
tional right of U.S. citizens to keep and bear arms.  If we are to be even
moderately safe in these perilous times, we must protect OURSELVES against
armed criminals.  To do so effectively, we need the right to carry arms
ourselves.

    If I could make all guns disappear, I would.  The same for nuclear bombs.
And bows and arrows, while I was at it.  But nothing short of nuclear
annihilation is going to make guns disappear.  Anti-gun laws simply stack the
deck in favor of criminals.

    Do you think Bill Shadden's murderers had a permit for their gun?  Do you
think with the millions of guns already in this country, a criminal would have
any trouble buying or stealing an illegal gun?  As one of society's peaceful,
productive citizens, I'm faced with a terrible choice.  I must either go about
my business unarmed, fearing criminals, or go about it armed, fearing the law.
That's life in Los Angeles.  To more and more of my friends -- upstanding
citizens of whom you'd never guess it -- breaking the law seems like the
lesser risk.

    I'm already a safe shooter, and a good shot.  Yet I'd gladly take classes
and pass a test -- like a driving exam -- to qualify for a license to carry a
gun.  Other states have instituted such tests, and widely granted such
licenses.  California should follow suit, giving responsible citizens a chance
to live less fearful lives, knowing they can lawfully defend themselves.

    I wonder if, riding his bike, Bill was afraid?  I wonder when he knew he
would be shot.  What did it feel like when the bullet hit?  Did he die
instantly or lie there thinking about what was happening?  Did he believe all
his hard work, all his big plans could so quickly become irrelevant?  Did his
sense of irony function at the end?  He'd just come back from hitch-hiking
through Italy.  Maybe he was too young to be afraid.  Charles Bukowski defines
a paranoid person as "one with all the facts."  If Bill had survived, he would
have been paranoid.

    I don't know whether carrying a gun would have saved him, or if he would
have been willing to carry one.  I do know that just the POSSIBILITY of his
being armed would have made his bicycle a riskier prize.  As a boy, I learned
this truth.  Enter the woods unarmed, and some kid with a BB gun would plink
at me.  Carry my own BB gun openly and confidently, and no one would dare
attack.  On a world scale, we call it detente.  Without it, we'd likely be
dead.

    John Donne wrote, "Any man's death diminishes me."  I'm diminished by the
loss of Bill Shadden.  California is.  The country is.  I don't want to lose
any more students, or loved ones, or good citizens.  I want to tell my woman-
friend, "Yes, I'll protect you."  I want her to be able to protect herself.
I want the right to protect myself.  I want the courts to stop coddling and
excusing, the public to stop tolerating, the media to stop condoning,
publicizing, and glamorizing dirtbags and their dirty crimes.  Violent
criminals need to be seem as what they are; losers plain and simple, most of
them beyond redemption and not worth our compassion or our time.  I fear them
most because the law has tied my hands and left theirs free.

    Maybe all that Bill Shadden needed was a credible threat to make the
dirtbags fear him.  All I ask, as a good still-living citizen, is that they
have reason to fear me.
==============================================================================

.......Dr. Webb is a professor of English at California State University at
       Long Beach.  His writing was first published in Press Telegram on
       June 13, 1993.  The Firing Line thanks Life Member Lewis Sprague for
       forwarding this article to us.

