-Caveat Lector- The Seven Myths of Gun Control By Richard Poe Introduction The March Toward Gun Abolition The Seven Myths of Gun Control | July 2001 FOR FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD JESSICA CARPENTER, the morning of August 23, 2000 began like any other. Her father had left for work. Her mother had taken the car to get the brakes checked. Jessica had been left in charge, to look after the four other children, Anna, 13; Vanessa, 11; Ashley, 9; and John, 7. Although the day started normally, it was not destined to end that way. It would turn out to be the most terrifying day of Jessica’s life. Shortly after her mother left, Jessica heard noises from the livingroom. It sounded as if someone were moving furniture around. Still half asleep, Jessica assumed that it must be her mother. But it wasn’t. She heard the phone ring down the hall and someone answered it. "I wonder what time it is," thought Jessica sleepily. Her grandmother was coming at nine to pick them up. She rose from bed and went to the kitchen, where the clock on the range showed that it was already after 9. Better wake up the others, Jessica thought. Then she noticed something strange. The sliding glass door in the livingroom had been blocked with furniture. The shades were shut, leaving the house in gloom. Why would her mother do that? Jessica froze. A sudden chill gripped her stomach. At first, she did not want to believe what she was seeing. But she could not deny the evidence of her own eyes. There was a man in the livingroom. A strange man. He was stark naked, and appeared to be trying to pull on his shorts. Something Dreadful "Hey!" the man shouted. Startled and embarrassed, Jessica fled back to her bedroom and locked the door. Her mind raced, seeking a reasonable explanation for what she had seen. Perhaps the man was a friend whom her father had invited over to the house to change clothes, she thought. But then why had he been moving furniture around, blocking the door? Jessica’s heart sank as she slowly came to grips with the fact that something dreadful was happening. A knock came at her bedroom door. "Who is it?" said Jessica. No one answered. The knock came again. And again. Jessica, knowing that her mother had a cell phone, picked up the phone to try to call her. But there was no dial tone. When Jessica’s grandmother had called earlier, the intruder had lifted the receiver and left it off the hook. Safe Storage Cold terror began to seep into Jessica’s bones. She wished that she had a gun. Her father had taught Jessica and the other children to shoot. Jessica had passed her hunter safety course and received her certificate at age 12. She knew that her Dad always kept a .357 Magnum in his bedroom. In deference to California’s safe storage laws, however, Mr. Carpenter kept the pistol high up on a closet shelf, unloaded and out of reach of the children. Even if she could somehow get to the other end of the house to retrieve it, Jessica knew she would have to climb up on something to reach the gun, scramble around for the bullets and then load them. The man would be on her before she had a chance. Mr. Carpenter had always taught the children that if there were an emergency, such as a fire in the house, they should open a window, push out the screen and climb outside. She proceeded to do that. >From another part of the house, Jessica heard a cry that sounded like one of her sisters. But she put it out of her mind. "I knew I shouldn't go to investigate and I should go and get the police," Jessica later told reporters. She slipped out the window and set off barefoot across an open field, cutting her feet as she ran. A "Spooky" Man The intruder was 27-year-old Jonathon David Bruce. The Carpenter family did not know him, but he lived in their small town of Merced, California, where he worked as a part-time telemarketer. Bruce’s strange behavior had long worried his neighbors. He slept all day, emerging only at night. "He was spooky," said neighbor Dawn Carter. "He would walk up and down the sidewalks talking to himself. Talking to the trees. He did a lot of wandering." Bruce hated children. Neighbors had begun keeping their kids indoors when he was around. "He yelled about the children mostly," recalls Ray Adams, a neighbor. "He didn’t like kids. And any little noise bothered him." The police were frequent visitors to Bruce’s house. He had spent a week in jail for resisting arrest, assaulting an officer and being under the influence of methamphetamine. Bruce’s live-in girlfriend had left him several months before, with her two sons, ages 4 and 5. After that, "he just sort of went downhill," said Adams. Bruce was evicted from his duplex apartment in August, just before he broke into the Carpenter home. To this day, no one knows why he picked on the Carpenters. We only know that, on the morning of August 23, Bruce armed himself with a pitchfork and entered their home, barricading himself inside with the five Carpenter children. Jessica managed to escape through her bedroom window. But her little brother and three younger sisters were left behind to face the madman. A Scene of Terror Thirteen-year-old Anna was the first victim. When Bruce failed to get into Jessica’s room, he proceeded to Anna’s bedroom, ordering her to lie on the bed. Then he began jabbing at her with his pitchfork, taunting her and yelling a stream of profanities while Anna screamed and tried to fend off the attack. "He looked possessed," Anna later told reporters. The only thing that saved Anna’s life that morning was her little sister Ashley, age 9. Ashley appeared at her sister’s bedroom door just as the man was pressing the pitchfork to Anna’s forehead. Anna could feel the cold metal against her skin. She knew that, in another moment, she was going to die. "Stop it!" Ashley yelled. "Don’t hurt my sister!" Bruce turned slowly to look at Ashley, the metal prongs of his pitchfork scraping along Anna’s forehead. "Shut up!" he snapped. But Ashley would not shut up. Over and over, she screamed at the man to leave Anna alone. He advanced toward her, pitchfork poised, looking – in Anna’s words – like a lion about to pounce on its prey. Ashley backed away into her bedroom, as he came toward her. It almost seemed as if she were deliberately leading the man away from Anna. "It was like she knew she had to back into her room to get him away from her sisters," says Tephanie Carpenter, the mother. Guardian Angels Vanessa followed the two into Ashley’s room. What she saw made her blood run cold. The man pushed Ashley against the wall and began stabbing her. She bounced off the wall and grabbed his ankles, biting and hitting him while he stabbed her again and again. At one point, the man caught Ashley’s head between his legs. The two sisters’ eyes met. Blood was spraying out of Ashley from every direction. With her hand, she motioned for Vanessa to go. That was the last time Vanessa saw her sister. The hallway was barricaded with furniture. Vanessa had to vault over these obstacles to make her getaway. Behind her, she heard Ashley screaming, "GO! GO! GO!" and she knew that the man must be close behind her. She met Anna in the kitchen. The two girls looked back. To their horror, they saw that the man was right on their heels. Yet something appeared to be slowing him down. "The girls both noticed that he was slow and clumsy all of a sudden," Tephanie Carpenter relates. "It was as though he was having to push his way through a football team. He actually fell onto the bar and was swinging the pitchfork in the air like he was fighting his way through a brick wall. We believe that there was a team of guardian angels at work." Howling Like a Beast The intruder had barricaded every exit from the house. The back door was blocked by a coatrack full of coats, an oak chair and a heavy oak bookcase. Somehow, the girls managed to squeeze alongside the bookcase and coats, and climb over the chair, to gain access to the laundryroom. As Vanessa pulled the wounded Anna through the door, Anna felt the wind from Bruce’s hand on her leg. They shut the door behind them just in the nick of time. But there was no lock. Vanessa held the door shut, knowing that she didn’t have the strength to keep the man out. She braced for a struggle. Instead of trying to force the door, however, the man just knocked. "Let me in," he said. "I won’t hurt you. I’ll be nice now." They could hear Ashley screaming down the hall. Slowly her screams went silent. In her heart, Anna knew that her sister was gone. At last, the girls got the window open. They slipped out into the sunlight. Behind them, the man howled like a wild animal. "They said it sounded like the beast in `Beauty and the Beast,’" says their mother. 911 Outside, the two girls met Jessica, who had already run to one neighbor’s house and found it empty. Together, the three girls ran to another neighbor’s house – a man named Juan Fuentes – and pounded on his door. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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