Can anyone spot the blatant bias in this "news summary"? Focus on that word "despite." Now try reading the same item, substituting for the word "despite" the phrase "Helping to explain ..."

One more time: Nut cases only succeed in multiple killings when they can be confident their prospective victims are disarmed.

As Marilyn Henry reported for the Jerusalem Post on Aug. 12, under the headline "U.S. Jewish gun advocates call for self-defense":

"Aaron Zelman isn't calling for gun control after the Tuesday shooting at a Los Angeles Jewish center that wounded five people, including four children. Quite the reverse: He is aggressively pushing Jewish self-defense."

" 'The Jewish community is blind,' said Zelman, the chairman of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. 'We must be able to defend ourselves against evil-doers.' ...

A Marine Corps veteran who believes "gun control" will eventually lead to an American police state, Zelman told the Post that Israelis -- who have experienced no such terror attacks since they started arming teachers, day care workers, and even parent volunteers -- could teach America's liberal politicians a thing or two about self-defense.

" 'I chose to move out of the city of Milwaukee and take my children out of a Jewish day school because the people who run these schools don't give a damn about security. What they call security doesn't amount to a $25 system from K-Mart,' said Zelman, the father of two.

" 'I am not going to subject my children to being sitting ducks because of what I call Jewish stupidity. They are not going to be victims like these kids today,' he said."

Mr. Zelman was even more strident in a subsequent interview with the Internet publication World Net Daily, declaring: "It's time for the American gun owners -- Jewish and non-Jewish alike -- to take a stand together, shoulder to shoulder, and tell the 'victim disarmament' crowd that the blood is on their hands for what happened (in Los Angeles)."

" 'The JPFO is not a bunch of redneck, paranoid Jewish gun nuts,' Rabbi Reuven Mermelstein, director of the group's editorial board, told Ms. Henry of the Post.

" 'It says in our Torah, "And you must surely guard your life." I understand this injunction to mean stay out of inclement weather, eat wisely, and be armed.' "

"While California's state constitution has a provision for the issuance of concealed weapons carry permits, it is the long-standing position of the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff Department that no permits are ever issued," Rabbi Mermelstein wrote in an Aug. 11 Internet "alert" to JPFO members.

"We were, are, and will continue to be victims. If anyone attempts to arm him or herself, he or she will be in violation of the law and tried as a criminal. ... A layman's rendering of Exodus 22:1 would read, 'When you are threatened with deadly force, don't look to Me. You have been commanded to take whatever measures are necessary to ensure your own survival.' "

The world is, sadly, overpopulated with psychotics like the Los Angeles shooter, says Rabbi Mermelstein. "But Americans have always had the cure. (Only) the whims of capricious legislators living inside their gated communities ... prevent its use. It is a national disgrace that ... potential victims are denied the only known disease prevention that is easily carried in a waistband or handbag."

Of course, those with an irrational phobia for firearms -- the tools with which Americans won their independence and brought down Adolf Hitler -- will whine, "Turning our child care centers into armed camps will never do; fighting violence with violence is never the answer."

Really? So when the folks at the North Valley Jewish Community Center dialed 911 last week, they specified "Now, please don't send us the kind of officers who carry guns, since we believe guns never solve anything"?

Of course not. They hoped the LAPD would send the best shooters in town. We already do fight guns with guns. The only mistake we make is in believing the police will ever arrive in time to stop the nut from working his will on his victims -- the cretinous assumption necessary to embrace "gun control," which really only means "victim disarmament."

What are culture and technology good for, if we don't use them to protect the progeny to whom we hope to hand down these achievements? Yet while great Americans like Samuel Colt and John M. Browning gave us the tools we need to protect our children, our current crop of politicians make it harder and harder for that technology to be used by law-abiding citizens.

We tolerate tax rates which require mom to work outside the home just to pay the taxes on dad's paycheck, which is all that creates the need for "day care centers" in the first place. Yet does anyone blame the IRS and its tax code for such shootings?

Air bags have killed more American kids than school shootings since 1983 (82 dead in school shootings, according to the National School Safety Center; 99 killed by airbag deployments, even if 21 of those have yet to be confirmed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.) But do we wheel out brain-damaged cripples in wheelchairs under the TV lights, prodding them to mumble out a memorized plea for "Air Bag Control"?

"It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed, a program costing the government more than $500 million dollars," according to a letter-to-the-editor published in the Orange County Register Aug. 4. "And now the results are in: ... Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent). In the state of Victoria, homicides with firearms are up 300 percent. ...

"Bet you won't see this data on the evening news," the California letter-writer concludes. "It's time to state it plainly: Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property."

John Lott, a law professor at the University of Chicago, agrees: "The safest course of action by far for someone to take when confronted by a criminal -- whether the criminal's armed or not armed -- is to have a gun yourself," Lott told World Net Daily this week.

Lott's studies -- the most detailed ever undertaken -- show women who behave passively when confronted by a criminal are 2.5 times more likely to be injured than women who actively attempt to defend themselves -- especially by pulling their own gun.

"If you look across the United States, those states with the highest gun ownership rates tend to have the lowest murder rates and lowest violent crime rates across the board," says Professor Lott. "And probably more importantly, those states that have had the biggest increases in gun ownership have had the biggest relative drops in violent crime."

Which state has the most onerous victim disarmament regulations, by the way -- now including the first statewide attempt to actually confiscate semi-automatic rifles once ruled legal?