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by Larry Pratt

The war against self-defense has opened the door to the tragedies produced by the terrorists who launched attacks against the United States.

The anti-gun groups such as the Brady Center to Stop Gun Violence have been cheerleaders for the campaign to convince Americans that guns in private hands are bad.

Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) got elected to Congress largely on a wave of sympathy for her husband who was gunned down in a multiple killing on a Long Island commuter train. In a television debate I asked her if it would have been wrong for someone to have pulled a concealed firearm (carried legally or illegally) and shot the murderer. Rep. McCarthy had no response to that. Neither did she respond when I asked her if it was wrong for the Mississippi high school assistant principal to get a gun and illegally carry it onto a school yard, where he stopped a student who was killing other kids. When I challenged her by saying that her silence meant that she did not believe in self-defense, she still had no response.

The ability to defend ourselves is the most basic right of all. It has been denigrated and circumscribed until many Americans are in an impossible situation. Where they live and work they are legally required to be unarmed as they face a well-armed criminal element.

The gun grabber crowd would have police crack down on people who simply possess and carry guns. This is because their answer to crime is to criminalize self-defense and ignore the criminals.

That philosophy facilitated terrorists with knives being able to take over four airlines in which gun control had worked 100%. No armed passengers. No air marshals. No armed pilots. Just helpless victims.

Representative Ron Paul has introduced a bill that begins to reverse the present insanity. H.R. 2896 would allow pilots to carry firearms.

How different might have been the hijacked airline tragedies if the knife-wielding terrorists had been met by gun-firing pilots? I have had Brady Center types cry out with alarm when shooting back was offered as the answer to crime: "Are you crazy? Innocent people could be shot!"

Let's be honest. Of course an innocent person could be shot. And the force of that concern has resulted in there having been no alternative to 266 passengers on four airlines being murdered, along with hundreds and hundreds of victims at Ground Zero.

Life can be risky. But the solution is not to surrender the responsibility for self-defense to the government. The government has proven they cannot protect us.

If we cede our most basic rights to the government, what response do we have to the assertion by politicians and bureaucrats that we should also not be able to take care of our own retirement, health, education of our children, and the use of our property?

A wonderful offer has been made by Ignatius Piazza of the Front Site Firearms Training Institute of Las Vegas, Nevada. Front Sight is offering to train for free any pilot wishing to carry a concealed firearm in his cockpit. Hopefully Piazza will be meeting lots of pilots when Ron Paul's bill becomes law.

This is the time to tell the anti-self-defense crowd that blood is on their hands, and we are taking back control of our own defense. Their deadly experiment in criminalizing self-defense must come to an end.

We already trust the lives of passengers to these pilots. We should also be eager to trust the pilots to protect their passengers with their guns.

Larry Pratt is a member of the National Reform Association Board of Directors. He serves as the executive director of Gun Owners of America (GOA) in Virginia. You can contact GOA at 8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA or by phone at 703-321-8585. Their web site is: www.gunowners.org.

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