-Caveat Lector- Covered with blood and growing weaker by the moment, the wounded Anna pleaded with Fuentes to get his gun and "take care of this guy." But he declined. Instead, he allowed them to use his phone to call 911. The sheriff’s deputies came quickly, but they arrived too late. John and Ashley were already dead. Seven-year-old John had been killed while he slept. When the deputies entered the house, the intruder charged them with his pitchfork. Whatever had made the man slow and awkward as he chased the girls down the hallway, it no longer seemed to affect him. Bruce sprang at the deputies, as swift and limber as a wild predator. They shot him 13 times, killing him on the spot. Censored Most people reading this book will never have heard of the Carpenter family or their ordeal. Unlike the school massacres and office shootings that seem to saturate network news coverage these days, the Carpenter tragedy received little national attention. I first learned of the event months after it occurred. Like most Americans, I did not see it on the evening news or read about it in my daily newspaper. Instead, I heard Professor John Lott, the Yale economist who wrote the book More Guns, Less Crime, discussing the case on the Sean Hannity radio show on WABC in New York. Prof. Lott argued that the case revealed the fallacy of safe storage laws. By forcing people to keep their guns unloaded and out of children’s reach, he said, the law prevents both children and adults from using firearms to defend themselves. The Carpenter story made this clear. But most Americans never heard the message, said Lott, because all mention of guns and gun laws had been surgically removed from the story by the newswires. Lott says that an early account of the bloodbath distributed by one news service mentioned that there were guns in the house, that the children were trained and ready to use them, and that the guns had been put out of reach, in order to comply with the law. But subsequent accounts failed to include this information. As a journalist, I was intrigued by Prof. Lott’s observation. I ran a Nexis search and discovered that, with the exception of two local news stories in the Fresno Bee and two opinion columns – one by well-known gun rights advocate Vyn Suprynowicz and another by Prof. Lott himself – no accounts of the incident remained in the public record that so much as mentioned the gun angle. No Heroes Allowed "John Carpenter’s children are probably dead because John obeyed the laws of the state of California," says Reverend John Hilton, the great-uncle of the Carpenter children. In Hilton’s view, the tragedy could have been prevented had the children been provided with easy access to a loaded gun. Many of Hilton’s friends and neighbors quietly agree. Hilton – who is pastor of a pentecostal church in Merced – recalls that, when he was growing up, his father always kept a loaded Colt .45 in a holster fastened to the pantry wall. "He was away a lot of the time, working on construction jobs," says Hilton. "But he made sure that gun was available to us, if we needed it. Without even looking, you could reach over and get hold of the handle." In those days, it was common to let children use firearms. They learned to use them early, safely and responsibly. And there were no school shootings. Ever. Hilton, who is now 66 years old, says that he shot his first deer at age 7. By the time he was 10, he was proficient with the Colt .45 and capable of defending his family with it. Nowadays, Hilton’s father would be putting himself at risk of imprisonment by giving children access to a loaded gun. California law imposes criminal penalties on gun owners if children are injured or injure others while using their guns. Technically, if Jessica or any of the other Carpenter children had managed to get hold of their father’s .357 Magnum and gun down the killer, their father could have faced criminal charges. It was for fear of the law that John Carpenter kept his gun unloaded and hidden on a high closet shelf. "He's more afraid of the law than of somebody coming in for his family," Hilton told the Fresno Bee. Likewise, the neighbor who refused to intervene may well have hesitated out of fear or uncertainty about the law. In today’s legal environment, heroism is not encouraged. The way to stay out of trouble is to sit back and wait for the police – even if innocent children are being slaughtered right next door. No Moral According to their mother, all of the surviving Carpenter children have vowed that they would have shot the killer if only they had had a gun handy. In fact, the wounded girl Anna told her father that, when she saw the man go after her sister Ashley, "I could have shot him right in the back of the head." The children’s bravery and fighting spirit were not considered newsworthy. These elements were left out of the story by the wire services. Instead, the Carpenters’ ordeal was reduced to a depressing yarn of five helpless children attacked by a maniac, a tale without meaning, moral or purpose. Media Bias The Carpenter case is but one example of a larger problem – the problem of media bias. In the Carpenters’ case, their tale ended tragically. But many similar stories have a happier resolution. By some estimates, Americans use firearms successfully to defend themselves against criminals more than 3 million times each year. These incidents are rarely reported in the news. Instead, we are immersed in images of mass shootings by psychotic killers. Each time such an incident occurs, spin doctors from anti-gun groups such as Hand-Gun Control Inc. make the talk-show rounds. But no comparable outpouring of pro-gun commentary can be heard in the wake of incidents such as the Carpenter family massacre. Major news organizations show a clear bias in favor of gun control. A study by the Media Research Center released in January 2000 showed that television news stories calling for stricter gun laws outnumbered those opposing such laws by a ratio of 10 to 1. When it comes to guns and gun rights, we are hearing only one side of the story. Small wonder that few Americans are equipped to debate the issue intelligently. "Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816. But when the press aligns itself with special interests - such as the anti-gun lobby - critical information is censored, and liberty itself hangs in the balance. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be ..." warned Jefferson. <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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