Gun-Control or Victim-Disarmament?

I recently stumbled upon a video clip of a discussion between Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy and MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson concerning a piece of legislation she had introduced, the Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2007. In the clip, Tucker points out that the bill would regulate weapons with a “pistol grip, forward grip, or a barrel shroud.” He asks McCarthy why these weapons should be regulated. After dodging the question twice, she eventually admits that she does not even know what a “barrel shroud” is and says “I think it’s a shoulder thing that goes up.”

The ridiculousness of specifically mentioning firearms with “pistol grips” and “barrel shrouds” in a gun-control bill becomes clear when you understand what exactly these things are. A “barrel shroud” as defined in the proposed legislation is “a shroud that is attached to, or partially or completely encircles, the barrel of a firearm so that the shroud protects the user of the firearm from heat generated by the barrel…” A “pistol grip” as defined in the bill is “a grip, a thumbhole stock, or any other characteristic that can function as a grip.”1 So these objects are essentially harmless, inanimate pieces of plastic or metal. One might look to Congresswoman McCarthy’s statement that the guns mentioned in the bill were guns that were “most used by gangs and criminals to kill our police officers” for an explanation. However, this doesn’t make a lot of sense either when you realize that these accessories are found on fairly common firearms. Thumbhole stocks are commonly used on varmint hunting rifles and long-range competition rifles. Pistol grips and barrel shrouds can be purchased for shotguns, a type of firearm regarded by many as one of the safest home defense guns due to its low wall-penetration characteristics.2 I can only see the addition of a pistol grip and barrel shroud to a home defense shotgun as making it even safer by increasing ease of maneuverability and shielding the homeowner from barrel heat. Regardless, the bigger issue here is that Congresswoman McCarthy is promoting a bill that she obviously knows very little, if anything, about.

This video reminded me of how many of the gun control advocates I have encountered over the years have either been extremely misinformed or frankly, completely ignorant about firearms and private firearm ownership. It inspired me to share my own personal experiences and views on private firearm ownership. There have been many books written and studies published on this issue, most of which would likely be far more comprehensive and compelling than anything I could write. Nevertheless, my hope is that I might expose someone to an idea or two that they haven’t already yet considered.

I was seven-years-old when my father gave me my first firearm. It was an old semi-automatic, .22 caliber rifle that his father gave to him as a young boy. My dad was, and still is, a very responsible firearms owner, and he did an excellent job instilling that same sense of safety and responsibility in me. When I got a little older my dad and I took a hunter safety course together and I upgraded to a .410 gauge shotgun. We didn’t hunt a lot, but every year or two during my teenage years my dad and I, along with some of my uncles, would get together and hunt various game birds. In my mid-teens I competed in a trap shooting league on my uncle’s team. My dad always came out to watch and occasionally brought my grandfather with him. This last year my girlfriend and I took a handgun safety course together and I’ve spent a lot more time at the indoor pistol range with my friends. Needless to say, I grew up around guns and some of my most memorable family experiences involve them.

It is pretty widely accepted that our personal experiences play a significant role in the development of our minds, so I understand that my good experiences with firearms have at least somewhat influenced my ideas on gun ownership. Likewise, I have found that many of the gun control advocates that I have encountered have had bad, few, or no experiences with firearms, and I believe this has been a contributing factor in the development of their ideas on restricting private gun ownership. I don’t pretend to be unbiased, “objective”, or neutral on this issue, or any other issue for that matter. I am a firm believer that to be purely neutral or objective on any issue is impossible. I have, however, always attempted to be fair in considering opposing viewpoints, and I will attempt to be fair in accurately representing them in this piece.

There are hundreds of different facets to the ”gun control” debate, and I could probably write several pages on each one, but that would be pretty redundant and far too time-consuming. I’ll try to touch on only the arguments I feel to be of most importance.

Will regulating/restricting/banning guns make America safer?

I think it is safe to say that the driving motivation behind the “gun control movement” is the belief that by regulating, restricting, or banning guns all together, our country would be a safer place to live. Nearly every argument in favor of gun control is based on this idea. In responding to this idea I could reference to hundreds of different statistics from various sources about death and crime, gun ownership and state laws, and point out correlations between states with less gun regulation and lower crime rates or accidental deaths to support my belief that “gun control” actually makes us all less safe, but I’m going to shy away from doing that as much as I can for a couple of reasons. First, it’s already been done a hundred times over. An excellent example of this is More Guns Less Crime by John R. Lott, Jr. Second, statistics can be misleading. Because of this, I’m going to try to base my arguments more on reason than simply on “the statistics.”

I understand why people believe that passing laws to make it harder for individuals to legally purchase firearms, or banning firearms all together, would make America safer. Guns can be dangerous, so one might assume that making them harder to acquire will make America less dangerous. The problem with this argument is that laws don’t necessarily make things harder to get, they make things harder to get legally. We saw this with the prohibition of alcohol in America from 1920 to 1933 when alcohol consumption actually increased, and we’re seeing this again today with the prohibition of drugs in America. It has been 36 years since Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1972, and still today, almost every kind of drug in existence is readily available to anyone with a little cash and the willingness to break the law.

Similarly, there is also a “black market” for stolen and unregistered guns. I was in my late teens when a friend of mine, who was three years too young to legally purchase a handgun, bought a .45 auto on the “black market”. From what I was told, the gun was sent from southern California to Arizona, and then hand delivered to him in Las Vegas, all in about a week. On top of that, he paid about $300 less than what he would have paid if he had bought the gun legally. From this experience I witnessed firsthand that guns, like drugs, are available to anyone with money and the willingness to break the law.

The kinds of people we should be most worried about owning guns are the kinds of people who are always willing to break the law… criminals. A criminal is not going to change his mind about robbing a convenience store or murdering someone because he will have to break the law to acquire the gun he needs to do it. With this realization it shouldn’t be hard to understand why gun control is ineffective in lowering violent crime. “Gun control” laws are only effective in disarming responsible, law-abiding citizens. I would even go a step further and say that gun control may actually encourage crime because criminals have less of a chance of getting shot by an armed citizen and, therefore, less to worry about when committing a crime. So I guess I agree with the “gun control movement”. Regulating, restricting, and banning firearms do make America a safer place to live… if you’re a criminal.

If regulating/restricting/banning guns don’t make us safer from criminals, will it make us safer from the danger of accidental shootings?

The argument is often made that if less people owned guns there would be less fatalities and injuries from accidental shootings, especially involving children. I agree with this argument, just like I believe that if less people owned bathtubs and swimming pools fewer children would die from drowning, which was actually around 30 times more likely to occur in 2001.3 But most of us don’t typically blame the bathtubs and swimming pools when these accidents occur. We blame the irresponsibility of the parent. We don’t rally behind organizations to lobby for restrictions on bathtubs and swimming pools because we know that would be an unreasonable solution. We consider it unreasonable because most of us don’t like the idea of the government intruding into our lives and telling us what we can and cannot do simply because some other citizens chose to be irresponsible. “Gun control” laws should be considered as the same… an unreasonable solution. It is unreasonable to deny someone the ability to protect their life and the lives of their family simply because some other firearms owners have been irresponsible.

Why do citizens need to own guns when we have police and security guards?

Another argument in favor of “gun control” is that citizens don’t need to own firearms because we have police to protect us.

It is always interesting to me how often when I am debating with someone on the issue of gun control they are completely against individuals owning firearms unless they have a badge, as if police and security guards are some kind of superhuman species that can do no wrong and never have an accident. I suppose these people believe that police and security guards receive some kind of special training in safety and accuracy that citizens don’t have access to. The Front Sight Firearms Training Institute located right outside the city I reside in, Las Vegas, is one of the largest firearms training facilities in the United States. They train tens of thousands of students every year.4 And even though it’s a “civilian” training facility, law enforcement and military officers from all over the U.S. travel to Front Sight for training they consider to be better than what they received in the military or police academy.5

I recently applied for and received my concealed carry permit. Here in the state of Nevada, concealed carry permit applicants must complete a course approved by the Sheriff. The course I took required that you pass a practical shooting exam by hitting a target within certain rings from various distances. Out of around 40 people who enrolled in the course, the only one that failed the shooting test was the guy most people would probably feel safest around if they saw him on the streets. He showed up in full police-style attire, with a badge and utility belt holding his club, cuffs, and gun. I assumed he worked for an “armed-response” security company. They put him in the lane right next to me, and I watched him completely miss the paper silhouette time and time again from just 5 yards away. But that was not the first time I’ve seen shooting that bad. I’ve been in lanes next to police officers that shot almost as terrible. It scares me to think that some people rely on individuals that can’t shoot a paper target from 5 yards away for their protection.

But for the sake of argument, I will pretend that all police and security guards are some kind of superhuman species that are safer, more responsible and more proficient with their firearms than any “civilian” ever could be. First, the courts have ruled time and time again that police are not legally obligated to protect you. In the case of Warren v. District of Columbia, three women sued the District for failing to protect them and lost. Two of the women called the police after they heard their friend being attacked by intruders downstairs. The police never showed up, and the three women were “held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of their attackers.” The D.C.’s highest court exonerated the District and its police, saying that it is a "fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen."6

Second, even if police were obligated to protect the people, it is absurd to assume that a police officer is always going to be able to arrive on scene in time to save you from a violent attacker. There are somewhere around 660 thousand police officers7 in a country with a population of around 300 million people.8 It is the sole responsibility of the individual to protect his or her own life, and the lives of his or her loved ones.

Benjamin Franklin once said “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security deserves neither and will lose both.”9 I believe this is especially true for “gun control”. By relinquishing our natural right to keep and bear arms in hope to gain more security, we lose both our right and our security. But not only do we lose our 2^nd amendment right and our security from violent criminals, we render ourselves defenseless against potential despotic government actions.

Thomas Jefferson, among the other founders, seemed to understand this concept very well. He once said, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”10 Similarly, in a letter to William Stephens Smith he wrote, “What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."11

The founding fathers understood how dangerous it was to trust the government because they knew how easily men in power become corrupt. It is strange to me that more people don’t have this same understanding today, especially given the fact that we have witnessed so much government corruption over the past 100 years. Some experts estimate that some 260 million people were killed by their own government last century.12 Others have also pointed out that nearly every major genocide last century, from Turkey to Nazi Germany, Uganda to Rwanda, was preceded by the disarming of the victims through “gun control” legislation.13

But some individuals, like the author of the essay titled “The Myth of Nazi Gun Control”, argue that “there are no lessons about the efficacy of gun control to be learned from the Germany of the first half of this century.”14 In this essay, the author first argues that gun control was introduced in Germany in 1928, long before Hitler and the Nazis rose to power. He then admits that this legislation was extended by the Nazis in 1938, but argues that Hitler and the Nazis were already firmly in control of Germany having won over the support of the German people. Next he argues that a resistance to the Nazi rule “did not exist.” Finally, he argues that private firearm ownership was not that widespread even prior to the 1928 law, and that even if it were, an armed resistance would be extremely unlikely and would not have led to “any weakening of the Nazi rule”, even if one did exist.

I agree with much of what the author of this essay asserts. I agree that one can only speculate as to the true reason behind why the Jews were defenseless against the Nazis. It could have been the 1928 law, or the Nazi 1938 law, or just that the majority of the Jewish people never felt compelled to acquire firearms. I agree that Hitler was a cunning individual that won over the support of the people, and did not need “gun control” laws to gain power. I agree that, overall, the Jews were very compliant in going along with the exterminations. But there are two major points that this author and I disagree on.

First, I do not agree that a resistance to Nazi rule “did not exist.” I found at least a few examples of resistance in Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. In Lomazy, when the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 collected 1,700 Jews to be slaughtered, “several of the young Jews jumped from the moving trucks and made good their escape”, while “another attacked a German corporal.”15 On another occasion, “one Jew sprang at Drucker [a German policeman] with a syringe but was quickly subdued.”16 In the spring of 1943, Reserve Police Battalion 101 “uncovered a forest camp of escaped Russians and Jews who offered armed resistance.”17 In another “rare instance”, a German policeman and a Polish translator went to investigate a Jewish “hiding place” that was revealed to them after interrogating other captured Jews and were “fired upon” by “Jews with arms. Reinforcements were summoned, and a fire fight broke out.”18 As more and more Jews realized they had little hope of surviving, resistance grew. “The Germans encountered resistance when they tried to carry out the final liquidation of the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos, and revolts broke out in the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor when the work Jews there realized that the camps were about to be closed.”19 In all of these instances the Jews were mostly unsuccessful in evading the Nazis, but these examples prove that not every Jew was ready to give up without a fight, even as defenseless as they were. They also offer some evidence in support of the idea that had more Jews been armed, a larger more successful resistance could have formed.

The second major point that I disagree with the author of “The Myth of Nazi Gun Control” on is the belief that “there are no lessons about the efficacy of gun control to be learned from the Germany of the first half of this century.” The basic lesson (and quite an important one at that), to be learned from Germany and all of the other genocides last century are crystal clear: Governments throughout history have killed their people. This is reason enough that we should always remain armed and prepared to organize violent resistance against tyrannical governments whenever it is absolutely necessary.

Moderate “gun control” laws can’t hurt anyone, right?

The final argument that I would like to address is the belief that there exists some reasonable, “moderate” forms of gun control. One example of this is California’s “safe storage” law, which imposes criminal penalties on firearms owners if children are injured or injure someone else while using their gun.20

On August 23, 2000 in Merced, California, “fourteen-year-old Jessica Carpenter had been left in charge to look after her four siblings, Anna, 13; Vanessa, 11; Ashley, 9; and John, 7. Jessica heard noises from the living room. Still half asleep, she rose from bed and walked to the kitchen. Then she froze. There was a man in the living room. He was stark naked [and armed with a pitchfork].

Jessica fled back to her bedroom and locked the door. Someone knocked. Then he knocked again. And again. Jessica picked up the phone, but heard no dial tone. The intruder had taken the receiver off the hook.

That’s when Jessica thought of her father’s gun. Mr. Carpenter 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.

So Jessica climbed out the window to get help. But her little brother and three younger sisters were left behind to face the madman.

Somehow Anna and Vanessa managed to escape out a window. Outside, the two girls met Jessica. They ran to a neighbor’s house – a man named Juan Fuentes – and pounded on his door. 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 Fuentes 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 dead. Seven-year-old John had been killed while he slept. When the deputies entered the house, the intruder charged them with his pitchfork. They shot him 13 times, killing him on the spot.”21

This is an excellent example of how a seemingly reasonable form of “gun control” can put people’s lives at risk. In order for any gun to be useful, it must be loaded and easily accessible. Technically, if Jessica or any of the children would have managed to get a hold of their father’s gun and shot the intruder, their dad could have faced criminal charges. This is what influenced John Carpenter’s decision to keep his gun unloaded and far out of reach from his children. “He's more afraid of the law than of somebody coming in for his family,” said Reverend John Hilton, the great-uncle of the Carpenter children.

The other point I’d like to make is that even seemingly reasonable forms of gun control where there are no recorded incidents in which the laws cost someone their life are still a bad idea. Gun restrictions, no matter how reasonable they sound, set the precedent for further, unreasonable restrictions. They set in motion the systematic erosion of our natural right to keep and bear arms.

I don’t know how else to end this piece other than to say that I hope my ideas on firearm ownership influence someone to reconsider their beliefs surrounding “gun control”. I, like anyone else, wish that we lived in a peaceful world where we never had to worry about protecting our lives and the lives of our families from violent individuals. But the world is filled with evil people, and the gun is a tool which can be used for evil, or to combat it. May we never adopt laws that take this tool from the hands of the innocent while it remains in the hands of the evil.

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Endnotes


1. Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, “Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2007,” The Library of Congress (February 13, 2007),http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.1022.IH:. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)


2. John Schaefer, “Some Thoughts on the Combat Shotgun,” 1997, http://www.frfrogspad.com/shotgun.htm. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

Firearms Tactical Institute, “Tactical Briefs #10,” 1998, http://www.firearmstactical.com/briefs10.htm. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

I also observed the low wall-penetration characteristics of a number 8 shotgun round in a video shown in my Concealed Carry class. Out of various handgun and rifle rounds tested, the shotgun was the only one that did not penetrate through more than two walls.

3. Guy Smith, “Gun Facts Version 4.2,” 2007, available from GunFacts at http://gunfacts.info/. (Last visited June 15, 2008). 26.

4. Front Sight Firearms Training Institute, http://www.frontsight.com/. (Last visited June 15, 2008).

5. Front Sight Firearms Training Institute, http://www.frontsight.com/testimonials.asp. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

6. Peter Kasler, “Police Have No Duty to Protect Individuals,” 1992, http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kasler-protection.html#4. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

7. International Association of Chiefs of Police, http://www.theiacp.org/faq.htm. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

8. Central Intelligence Agency, “The World Factbook,” June 10, 2008,

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

9. Brainy Quote, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/benjaminfr109844.html. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

10. Think Exist, “Thomas Jefferson Quotes,” http://thinkexist.com/quotation/no_free_man_shall_ever_be_debarred_the_use_of/225698.html. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

11. John P. Kaminski, The Quotable Jefferson, Princeton University Press, 2006. 391

12. Rudolph J. Rummel, PhD, “20^th Century Democide,” November 23, 2002, http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

13. Aaron Zelman, “Gun Control Kills Kids!” Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, 1996.

14. N.A. Browne, “The Myth of Nazi Gun Control,” July 21, 2001, http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcnazimyth.html. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

15. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. 80

16. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. 109

17. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. 124

18. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. 125-126

19. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. 137

20. Brady Campaign, http://www.bradycampaign.org/legislation/state/viewstate.php?st=ca. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

21. Richard Poe, “The Merced Pitchfork Murders,” November 3, 2003, http://www.lewrockwell.com/poe/poe1.html. (Last visited June 15, 2008.)

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Websites of interest

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

Gun Owners of America

Front Sight Firearms Training Institute

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Videos of interest

Child Protectors or Child Predators?

A recent story headlined "Child Protective Services Supervisor Accused of Child Molestation"1 started me on a web search for more information on the “child welfare system.” The story reported that David Wigton, 58 was arrested and booked into Maricopa County Jail after being accused of “sexually molesting a 4-year-old girl and two teenage boys.” I had been meaning to do some research on this subject for quite some time. I’ve heard horror stories about social workers ruining families’ lives on more than one occasion, but hadn’t gotten around to doing any investigating until just recently. I didn’t have to scratch very deep to uncover a world of corruption.

The concept of the “state” or “governing-class” breaking up the family and raising children away from their biological parents dates back at least to somewhere around 300 B.C. in Plato’s The Republic. In Plato’s ideal society, women and children would be held in common. Infants would be snatched away at birth and raised by other members of the ruling-class so no one would ever know who their child was. The idea behind all of this was to force the people to embrace everyone as their family.

Today we have a similar system of breaking up the family and raising children away from their biological parents. It goes by many names: DSS, CPS, DCFS, DFPS. The idea behind these agencies is to “protect” young children from “neglectful” or “abusive” parents. But what do you do when the agencies sent to “protect” young children are even more abusive than the parents from whom they are taken?

In 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a study conducted by CPS Watch found that children “are 5 times more likely to die from physical abuse and 11 times more likely to be sexually abused in the child protection system than in their own homes.”2 If that isn’t enough, the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) admitted in a 2003 Los Angeles Daily News series that “half of the children in the system had been unnecessarily taken from their families and placed in a more dangerous environment because of financial incentives in state and federal laws.”3

As I dug deeper, the words “financial incentive” kept appearing in report after report. And this certainly was not an isolated problem, with Texas Comptroller Carole Strayhorn alleging that the DPRS “offers caregivers a perverse financial incentive to keep children in restrictive environments by paying them more money to provide children with expensive and restrictive placements”4, to California’s Linda Wallace Pate, a veteran attorney in foster cases, stating that “its scandalous that the California foster care system has been reduced to a ‘kids for cash’ system.”5

It appears that Plato was well aware of the potential corruption that money would bring if the “governing-class” of individuals were ever paid for their services. In Plato’s ideal society, the “Rulers” were not allowed to own private property and were only paid in food. It seems this kind of idea would solve a lot of problems in our society today if applied to politicians. Unfortunately, a change as drastic as that, if possible at all, would be a long way off. It is obvious then that the next best solution would be at least to eliminate the financial incentives to keep kids in the system. This would most certainly reduce the amount of children being unnecessarily removed from their homes, but I don’t believe it would solve everything.

What I think Plato failed to remember is that some people simply enjoy being in power and love the ability to dominate other people, wealthy or not. Lord Acton said it best when he proclaimed “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For this reason, “due process” is extremely important in keeping corrupt bureaucrats from wrongfully terrorizing innocent families. But as Massachusetts State Representative Marie Parente explained in a 2003 Massachusetts News article about the Department of Social Services, “…there really isn’t any for families.”6

Child welfare cases are handled in kangaroo courts. The argument for this is that these child “protective” agencies should be granted the ability to remove a child from a dangerous environment immediately, rather than having to wait and go to trial. This sounds like a reasonable argument, until you find incident after incident of children being torn from their families over such absurd reasons as missing school7, to a father unwittingly giving his son a bottle of lemonade that contained alcohol8. A former CPS worker said that retaliation is also a "common" reason for taking a parent's child and that CPS "can take anyone's kids away on a moment's notice - and get away with it," in a Kentucky Target 32 report. The same report mentioned Vanessa Shanks who "had her kids taken away and, when she fought back, her relatives had their children taken away. Then, after she won in court, her attorney's child was taken away."9

Further proving my point that the “take-kids-now, ask-questions-later” principle these agencies operate on is a bad idea is the fact that “on average, a foster child will spend at least three years in the system and live in three different homes during their stay in foster care” according to CPS Watch in the San Francisco Chronicle, and that “nearly half of the children in California’s foster system should never have been removed from their families” according to The Little Hoover Commission, a California state government oversight organization.10

Worse than all of this is the fact that “thousands of foster children are missing across America.”11 Rilya Wilson, a 5-year-old Florida foster child, went missing for “15 months” before anyone even noticed and is still missing today, according to the New York Times.12 Many children even turn up dead while in foster care, like Alfredo Montez, a 2-year-old that was murdered while in Florida care. Kathleen Kearney, the head of the DCF admitted that “something we could have done may have averted this tragedy.” The caseworker, Erica Jones, was “charged with falsifying records -- paperwork that said she had checked on the child the same day the boy was killed, saying he was fine -- even though she never made such a visit according to authorities,” reported CNN.13

Knowing all of this, how can we as citizens allow these agencies to continue to take children away from their families? I assume that many social workers mean well, but the system itself is inherently flawed. Not a single child more should be taken until the system can be trusted, and if the system can never be trusted, then no child should ever be taken again.

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Endnotes

1. CBS News Channel 5 KPHO, "Child Protective Services Supervisor Accused of Child Molestation," http://www.kpho.com/news/16121583/detail.html. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

2. Christine Borders, Ariel Coyote, "Foster Care is un-American," San Francisco Chronicle (May 2, 2004), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/02/EDGC76DA4O1.DTL. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

3. Troy Anderson, "Reuniting families turning into success story for county," Los Angeles Daily News (June 19, 2004), Copy available on pg. 6 of PDF file from http://www.fightcps.com/pdf/expose4.pdf. (Last visited May 29, 2008).

4. Carole Keeton Strayhorn, "Forgotten Children: A Special Report on the Texas Foster Care System," April 2004, http://www.window.state.tx.us/forgottenchildren/. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

5. Christine Borders, Ariel Coyote, "Foster Care is un-American," San Francisco Chronicle (May 2, 2004), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/02/EDGC76DA4O1.DTL. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

6. Edward G. Oliver, "Committee Chair Is Troubled By DSS," Massachusetts News (December 1, 2003), http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/2000/12_Dec/parente.htm. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

7. Target 32 WLKY, "Kentucky's Child Protective System Investigated," July 6, 2006, http://www.wlky.com/target32/9478131/detail.html. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

8. Brian Dickerson, "Hard lemonade, hard price," Detroit Free Press (April 28, 2008), http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080428/COL04/804280375/1081. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

9. Target 32 WLKY, "Social Workers Allege Child Protection Service Abuses", November 14, 2007, http://www.wlky.com/target32/14596226/detail.html. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

10. Christine Borders, Ariel Coyote, "Foster Care is un-American," San Francisco Chronicle (May 2, 2004), http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/02/EDGC76DA4O1.DTL. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

11. Carole Keeton Strayhorn, "Forgotten Children: A Special Report on the Texas Foster Care System," April 2004, http://www.window.state.tx.us/forgottenchildren/. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

12. Dana Canedy, "Miami 5-Year-Old Missing For Year Before Fact Noted," New York Times (May 1, 2002), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E1D91431F932A35756C0A9649C8B63. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

13. CNN, "Boy's death another scandal for Florida child welfare agency," CNN (July 13, 2002), http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/07/12/florida.murdered.toddler/. (Last visited May 29, 2008.)

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Websites of interest

Fight CPS.com
American Family Rights Association
Legally Kidnapped (added 5/30/08)

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Videos of interest