I meant to blog about this last night, but being as sleep deprived as I’ve been the past several months, I fell asleep as soon as I hit my bed (for those of you who don’t know, that’s where I do all my blogging – in bed, on my laptop).  However, I absolutely need to highlight this piece, for it highlights not only the usefulness of the firearm as a tool of self defense, but also the folly of disarming college students, as well as rendering citizens defenseless in the home.

Bailey said he thought it was the end of his life and the lives of the
10 people inside his apartment for a birthday party after two masked
men with guns burst in through a patio door.

“They just came in
and separated the men from the women and said, ‘Give me your wallets
and cell phones,’” said George Williams of the College Park Police
Department.

Bailey said the gunmen started counting bullets. “The
other guy asked how many (bullets) he had. He said he had enough,” said
Bailey.

That’s when one student grabbed a gun out of a backpack
and shot at the invader who was watching the men. The gunman ran out of
the apartment.

The student then ran to the room where the second
gunman, identified by police as 23-year-old Calvin Lavant, was holding
the women.

“Apparently the guy was getting ready to rape his
girlfriend. So he told the girls to get down and he started shooting.
The guy jumped out of the window,” said Bailey.

I urge you to compare this incident to the tragic case of Carolyn Warren, Joan Taliaferro and Miriam Douglas, who were trapped in a house with armed thugs and raped for 14 hours, waiting for police to arrive in a city where, until very recently, guns were banned.

Don’t remember the case?  Let me remind you.


In the early morning hours of Sunday, March 16, 1975, Carolyn Warren
and Joan Taliaferro who shared a room on the third floor of their
rooming house at 1112 Lamont Street Northwest in the District of
Columbia, and Miriam Douglas shared a room on the second floor with her
four-year-old daughter, were asleep. The women were awakened by the
sound of the back door being broken down by two men later identified as
Marvin Kent and James Morse. The men entered Douglas’ second floor
room, where Kent forced Douglas to sodomize him and Morse raped her.

Warren and Taliaferro, hearing Douglas’ screams from the floor
below. Warren telephoned the police, told the officer on duty that the
house was being burglarized, and requested immediate assistance. The
department employee told her to remain quiet and assured her that
police assistance would be dispatched promptly.

Warren’s call was received at Metropolitan Police Department
Headquarters at 0623 hours, and was recorded as a burglary-in-progress.
At 0626, a call was dispatched to officers on the street as a “Code 2″
assignment, although calls of a crime in progress should be given
priority and designated as “Code 1.” Four police cruisers responded to
the broadcast; three to the Lamont Street address and one to another
address to investigate a possible suspect. (This suggests that when
they heard that there had been a burglary, the police must have felt
that they had a promising lead on a culprit.)

Meanwhile, Warren and Taliaferro crawled from their window onto an
adjoining roof and waited for the police to arrive. While there, they
observed one policeman drive through the alley behind their house and
proceed to the front of the residence without stopping, leaning out the
window, or getting out of the car to check the back entrance of the
house. A second officer apparently knocked on the door in front of the
residence, but left when he received no answer. The three officers
departed the scene at 0633, five minutes after they arrived.

Warren and Taliaferro crawled back inside their room. They again
heard Douglas’ continuing screams; again called the police; told the
officer that the intruders had entered the home, and requested
immediate assistance. Once again, a police officer assured them that
help was on the way. This second call was received at 0642 and recorded
merely as “investigate the trouble;” it was never dispatched to any
police officers.

Believing the police might be in the house, Warren and Taliaferro
called down to Douglas, thereby alerting Kent to their presence. At
knife point, Kent and Morse then forced all three women to accompany
them to Kent’s apartment. For the next fourteen hours the captive women
were raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon one
another, and made to submit to the sexual demands of Kent and Morse.

That was the case of Warren v. District of Columbia, in which the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled that “the police do not have a legal responsibility to provide
personal protection to individuals, and absolved the police and the
city of any liability.”  The women were savaged for 14 hours waiting for their protectors to arrive.  Not one of them had a gun.

I would also urge those of you who are on the fence about restoring college students’ right to armed self defense to think about the folly of banning guns from campus, claiming college students are not responsible enough or mature enough to have guns.  The women in this house were spared the trauma of being raped by their armed attackers by one armed man.  Could one armed human being have prevented tragedy at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007?

Think about it.

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