Letter to Bill Johnson of the Denver Post

This is a letter I wrote in response to the following article in the Denver Post by Bill Johnson:

“Handguns Make it Way too Easy for Criminals to Kill Good People”
March 23rd, 2011

Just like that.


It is a sentence, or at least a fragment of one, that should have a question mark pinned to the end. But I think I have been around much too long to really ever be surprised anymore.

"Give me all your money," the man waving a black semiautomatic handgun and wearing a black bandana to hide his face barked at the young couple early Friday.
The young woman, Elizabeth Roach, figuring it all a joke although it was 2 in the morning, but also because it was Boulder, yanked the bandana from the man's face.
"I'm not (expletive) around. Give me all your money!" the gunman then replied, firing one shot into the air for emphasis, as if the 900 block of Pennsylvania Avenue was some dusty road somewhere in the Old West.
Somehow still not convinced, the woman grabbed the young man she was with, Todd Walker, 20, by the arm and set out.

"Come on, we're leaving," she said.

At this point, Walker, apparently also still unconvinced, shoved the gunman, who shoved back.

"This is ridiculous. Leave her alone," Walker told the man holding a gun.

The gunman raised his gun and shot Walker once through the heart before running south down an alley.

Todd Walker died. Just like that.
All of it ticks me off. It has since the day I first read it. You have no idea.

Have we really reached a point in our evolution where a young man's life can be taken so cheaply?

I would pose the question to every politician who mattered, but they retreat, frozen as if truly stupefied, for fear of angering every last gun group and gun lobbyist, who you have to know by now got us here and Todd Walker in the ground in the first place.

Not even the president, a half-dozen people slain in Phoenix and a congresswoman shot through the brain, can muster the courage to at last say, enough.
No one says it, and people continue to die.
I have been grinding on this for better than two decades of column writing now, so I know exactly the argument: The gun did not kill Todd Walker. A stupid criminal did.
Stupid criminals I can abide, sort of.
I cannot and will never abide this society's turning a blind eye to the very instrument that allows them to take the life of a kid like Todd Walker.

Handguns, and I have said this so many times, are an abomination in this society. They are the preferred tool of the crazed and weak. They believe it gives them power.
They make good people, like Todd Walker, a sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, where he was a business major and played football, easy victims.
And we should talk about the handgun and Tucson.
Did you know that from the January slaughter there until mid-March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 2,405 people in the United States have been shot and killed?
Think about that. How can such a number of gun deaths, such violence, be tolerated?
In the days since Todd Walker's killing, Boulder police arrested Kevin McGregor, a 22-year-old sandwich-shop employee. He has been charged with first-degree murder, and prosecutors are considering the death penalty.
Yet more killing.
I tried without success to reach Mark and Pam Walker, Todd's parents. It is never an easy assignment.
Mark Walker, in the Colorado Daily the other day, spoke of his son's killing and called him a hero for trying to protect his companion during the attempted robbery.

"It seems like a really, really silly reason to take a life," he lamented.

When a handgun is involved, it is really, really way too easy, as well.

Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.


My letter:

Dear Mr. Johnson,


After reading your opinion in “Handguns make it way too easy for criminals to kill good people” on March 23rd, I felt compelled to reply. I have never replied to an editorial before, so please bear with me. As you will come to find in reading further, I happen to be one of the power-crazed weaklings you label—you know, the people in possession of the “abomination of this society”—handguns.

I appreciate your heart-felt sympathies for victims of senseless violent tragedy. I too share your angst over the death and destruction of human life for such menial reasons. However, I am constrained to point out a glaring hypocrisy in your stage-one thinking pertaining to handguns and their use.

Your mantra claims that Todd Walker, the murdered individual your article speaks of, was an “easy victim” simply because a handgun was used in his murder. Rather than decisively label you immediately as an overly emotional individual with no real education on firearms, I decided to follow your train of thought and ask the next valid question. If Mr. Walker had a handgun and used it to defend his life and the life of the young woman, would you be equally critical of Mr. Walker as you were of the criminal? Would you label Todd as “crazed and weak” and a power-crazed individual using the “abomination of society” to easily victimize someone? If the roles were reversed and Todd used a handgun to defend his life would you continue your rant of being outraged that society continues to turn a blind eye to the very instrument that allows this type of violence? My contention is that you would not because to do so would be illogical and half-witted and I do not think you are stupid or irrational. I believe you are a smart man with a good heart; however, in my opinion, you are misguided in your stance to handguns and violence.

Allow me to offer a hypothetical scenario in an effort to further shed light upon the hypocrisy that comes from the attitude that handguns are evil. Let us imagine for a moment that humankind never invented the handgun or firearms altogether. The technology was never discovered, and therefore, the very word “gun” is totally foreign to all humans on the planet. Would you still have written your article with as much revulsion toward the murder weapon if Mr. Walker was murdered with a club or a sword or knife or rock? Although this is a hypothetical question, I feel it loses none of its relevance because clubs, swords, knifes and rocks exist today—along with a myriad of other implements that are used to murder, and yet you only choose to demonize the handgun.

My question, and the question of most of us who do not agree with your stance is: Why? Why are you so adamantly determined to excoriate and misrepresent guns? The logic just doesn’t add up. Any half-wit can look at the surface of this issue and label the physical gun as the crux of the problem; however that makes about as much sense as claiming it is a pencil’s fault for misspelling a word. I fear expressing your anti-gun emotions to any “politician that matters” will be in vain largely because your arguments do not intelligently articulate in a convincing manner that guns are the root-problem and should therefore be aggressively protested against.

Would you support legislation that completely bans handguns, or at least makes it extremely difficult to purchase one? If your answer is yes, then allow me to offer another side of the debate that you have possibly not considered. Constitutional reference and 2nd Amendment arguments aside, banning handguns will only succeed in disarming the law-abiding citizens and significantly hindering their ability to defend themselves against the criminals who will still obtain handguns illegally. For example, current legislation prohibits a convicted felon from purchasing a handgun; however, anyone can easily observe that the legislation does not curtail them from coming into possession of handguns. This is because they are criminals. Another way to put it is that they are outlaws—they choose to live outside of the law. Restrictive gun legislation dose not apply to those that choose to live outside of the law. Unfortunately for law-abiding citizens however, restrictive gun legislation will successfully limit their ability to legally own a gun, and therefore limit their ability to defend themselves against those that do have the guns.

Evil lives in the world. People commit unexplainable acts of cowardice and violence every day. Evil has always been present in humankind, and unfortunately, evil will continue to be a part of the world. Human life has been taken cheaply throughout our history, not just since the handgun came into being. The fact that a criminal has a gun in his hand while he perpetrates an evil act is mostly irrelevant to the genuine root of the issue and the actual evil act itself. People kill people Mr. Johnson—it happens. The fact that handguns exist does not aggravate the issue any more than the fact that knives, swords, baseball bats, and chainsaws also happen to exist.

I own a handgun, yes, one of the “abominations of society” and I have never shot it at another human being nor do I have the desire to ever do so. This is because I am a sane and responsible citizen with a healthy respect for life and the power of firearms. Furthermore, I do not fear firearms because I possess a lengthy education on the proper use of them. Unfortunately, there are plenty of violent individuals, without the proper respect or education, who succumb to cowardice and selfishness and choose to use handguns to perpetrate unthinkable acts. However, according to your fuzzy-logic, by virtue of the fact that I possess a handgun, I will undoubtedly use it in an act of senseless violence because I believe it gives me “power.” Because, obviously, possessing a handgun automatically overrides my ability to make rational decisions, use good judgment and common sense, and reject my natural instinct to respect life. (Obvious sarcasm there…)

Rest assured Mr. Johnson, if I ever found myself in a situation in which my life or the life of another was being threatened unjustly by a “crazed and weak” individual, if circumstances allowed, I would utilize my handgun against that individual in an effort to preserve innocent life and circumvent a violent criminal from creating another statistic that you can later emote about in another article. I would do this with a clear conscience knowing the sanctity in defending one’s own life or the life of an innocent person. Yes, I would use my handgun to protect innocent life, even if that innocent life was yours.