The soft path of the brass knuckles

As the shock and anxiety over the attempt on the President's life gave way to joyous relief, the gun control lobby went into high gear. But it never breathed a syllable over a curious fact: More than a million rifles lie in the attics of Switzerland, each entrusted to an able-bodied man on his discharge from constitutionally required military service; yet not one shot has ever been fired from these rifles in anger. When a fact demolishes your argument, don't give up the argument; censor the fact.

And more similarities for the energy student: The loudest voices clamoring for gun control belong to those who dismantled the FBI, crippled the legal process, and generally weakened government in its fundamental, legitimate task, protecting the population from wrongdoers and aggressors.

Terrorism, censorship, and outrageous inconsistency: All three are well known to the student of energy. As the media fantasize about nuclear plant sabotage (incomparably more difficult, and even if successful, far less effective than blowing up a dam above a city), they write nothing about Jose Maria Ryan, a Spanish father of five children, who was kidnaped and murdered in cold blood by Basque terrorists because he was chief engineer of a nuclear plant; his was the sixth death in terrorist actions against the plant since 1976, when Basque separatists, like Prof. George Wald and the very reverend Berrigans, embraced the antinuclear cause to further their political creed.

Renewed action at the Brokdorf nuclear site in West Germany was mostly reported by the US press as another "antinuclear demonstration;" little mention was made of the 128 policemen injured by 3,000 of Hitler's children and Ellsberg's cousins as they fought for soft energy paths with rocks, clubs, spears, brass knuckles and slingshot-fired jagged metal.

And closer to home, whom are we to believe, Amory Jekyll as he coos soft soap about sun and wind, or Amory Hyde of the Friends of the Earth whose hard policy is "to raise the social costs of nuclear power"? Should we accept the soft words spoken by Ralph Nader or the hard facts presented by the stormtroopers of Seabrook and the thugs of Rocky Flats?

But insult is added to injury when nuclear power, stifled by terrorism in the streets, bans by the courts, and delays by the bureaucracy, is accused of not being able to make it in a free market. Eleven plants stand idle and ready to conserve petroleum by burning uranium which has no other uses, producing their gigawatts more safely than anything else that can produce them; politics, ignorance and bureaucracy keep them unlicensed while the consumer pays the cost and Tom Hayden lectures on free enterprise.

And not only Tom Fonda, himself an ex-thug acquitted on a technicality; but Nicholas von Hoffman, whom many may have thought to be a friend of capitalism. Bankrupt of arguments, he parrots Sternglass' superstitious TMI absurdities in unison with the National Examiner, and in unison with it he censors the dispassionate and debunking figures released by the Pennsylvania Dept. of Health and the facts of nature known to every health physicist. At least the tabloids do not masquerade as champions of liberty; but von Hoffman fails to measure up to the National Examiner.

It is the stormtrooper's way to beat a victim unconscious; and it is the stormtrooper's mentality then to say: "You see? The guy can't even stand on his own feet!"