HANDCUFFS AND GUNS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19436, 23 October 1925, Page 11

HANDCUFFS AND GUNS

(To the Editor). Sir, —I’m not sorry that you choked off the correspondence between “J.D. ” and myself—it was leading nowhere, and there are more important matters to be dealt with in a very short time. The posters of the L.V.A. are telling the electors that “Good laws need no guns.” Don’t they? Why, sir, good laws sometimes need things even worse than guns. The murderer doesn’t have the melancholy satisfaction of choosing a gun. Some years ago a young man raised quite a scare not a hundred miles from Palmerston North by burning a school and terrorising belated pedestrians. In virtue of a good law against highway robbery and arson a posse of police was speedily on his track, and he woke out of his sleep in a hay loft one morning to find himself covered with Constable X’s receiver, and his brief career of crime came to an end. A good law and a useful gun! The point of the story is this. The brewers and other liquor men of the U.S. America have lost their lucrative monopoly, and some of their number have taken to the gun to try and bring law and order into disgrace, with a short-sighted intention of getting their monopoly back. Can any self-respect-ing Government put up with such a thing as that? And whose fault is it that the police of America are after the law-breakers with weapons of war? Do the L.V.A. of New Zealand wan< to convey a threat to us peaceful citizens that if prohibition is carried on November 4 and comes into force on June 30 next, they will be polishing their revolvers and opposing the good law by force of arms? Not the least danger. New Zealand doesn’t do things that wav. There’s useful employment waiting for everybody in the trade, from the boss brewer down to the man that slushes the casks. Then there’s the handcuff question. “Your boy,” say the posters, “doesn’t need handcuffs to keep him decent.” Even a certain old party who is not supposed to deal much in veracity sometimes even he blunders into the truth. That remark about the boy and the handcuffs is absolutely true. A great majority of the young men of New Zealand have no craving for the whisky drug. Oh, no! It isn’t Hie bovs that need the handcuffs, and handcuffs are no use for the trade. Something far more solid than that. It might have been of the liquor traffic that Spurgeon was thinking when ho wrote, (N. 8. altered a little): “A good-for-nothing lazy lout, Wicked within and ragged without; We don’t want to have it about: , Vote it out! Vote it out.!” I am, etc., JAMES AITKEN. October 22, 1925.