Taking Shots at Carl Rowan’s Liberalism

Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan, a crusader for more stringent gun control laws, grabbed an unregistered handgun and shot and slightly wounded a teen-age intruder at his Washington, D.C., home. What took a more direct hit, however, was Rowan’s reputation as a liberal.

Rowan, 62, called the Tuesday morning incident a matter of self-defense. But he has not gone over to the side of the pro-gun lobby.

“I would love to have a situation where only legitimate law enforcement officers could have handguns,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday, “but I don’t see that happening. If somebody can scale an 8-foot fence, help themselves to your property . . . maybe come into your house, people are going to insist on having a gun.”

Others saw it differently.

“He’s certainly a hypocrite,” said Richard Gardiner, assistant general counsel for the National Rifle Assn, the Washington-based pro-gun lobby with a membership of 2.8 million. “And there must be a stronger word.

‘An Understatement’

“To say it’s ironic is an understatement. Now here’s this individual who’s made these (anti-gun) statements who all along while he was writing those very words was in violation of not only D.C. law but probably also federal. . . . his credibility is virtually nothing.”

“Nouveau liberalism at its worst,” said state Sen. H. L. Richardson (R-Glendora), founder of Gun Owners of America and a leader in the successful effort to defeat Proposition 15, the statewide gun control initiative in 1982.

“I hope to tell you it’s a little embarrassing,” he added. “It would be something like me sending in a contribution to Handgun Control Inc. My heart went out to him, as a fellow gun owner gone astray. There’s going to be a lot of yuks out of it around the United States . . . I lay you a dollar to a doughnut that 70% of the liberals have firearms in their homes.”

However, Barbara Lautman, director of communications for Handgun Control Inc. in Washington, which claims 200,000 members, 40,000 of them in California, said, “We’re just not commenting. I don’t think this is a situation that’s worth talking about.”

Handgun Control Inc., she indicated, is busy with legislative matters.

Rowan described the shooting incident early Tuesday morning: “I was awakened about five minutes till 2 by someone messing with my bedroom window. I lay there wondering if I dreamed this. Then I heard a woman screaming or shouting and I thought, God, that sounds like it’s on my property.”

Rowan said he got up and went to the opposite corner of his house, from where he could peek out to the pool and Jacuzzi area, and “saw four moving bodies. I ran back to my breakfast nook and called the police. Then I waited (for about 10 minutes before police came).”

He became concerned, Rowan said, for the safety of his wife, who was still asleep in their bedroom, and at that moment he remembered that there was a gun in the house--a handgun given him “four or five years ago” by his son, Carl Jr., who was then an FBI agent. His son had been concerned, Rowan said, because “we were getting a lot of death threats in my family. . .stuff I’d written. . .he decided despite my opposition to handguns that it was stupid not to have a gun here.”

He found the .22 caliber revolver under some papers in a bureau drawer in the bedroom, along with some bullets, he said. So he loaded it.

Hearing police arrive, he said, he opened a sliding glass door onto his patio, on his way to unlocking a gate to let police in, when he “was confronted by a young man who was smoking something. . . . I realized I was dealing with somebody who was irrational, stoned on drugs, something. . . .”

“I told him to freeze. He came towards me. I said to him, ‘Halt, I have a gun.’ . . . I cocked the trigger. I said, ‘This is your last warning, I have a gun.’ He said, ‘Aw, hell, man’ and lunged towards me. . . ..”

Then, Rowan said, “I fired a warning shot down towards his feet but apparently hit his left wrist. The guy lies on the patio, bleeds a little, gets up, walks around between the police and gets back in my Jacuzzi. I went out and told the police what had happened and I gave them the gun.”

(Police charged Ben Neal Smith, 18, of nearby Chevy Chase, Md., Smith, who was clad only in his underwear, and a companion, Laura Bachman, 19, of Bethesda, Md., with unlawful entry but the charges were dropped pending further investigation. Police said they found beer cans and marijuana cigarette butts in the Rowan yard. Smith was treated for a wrist wound.)

Rowan noted that the police, figuring the hot water in the Jacuzzi might help the victim’s hand wound, let him stay there until an ambulance came.

In a column that appeared in newspapers on Jan. 6, 1981, Rowan, a former deputy secretary of state, former U.S. ambassador to Finland and a regular guest on on television’s “Inside Washington,” advocated that, if crime is to be cut, “. . . anyone found in possession of a handgun except a legitimate officer of the law goes to jail--period!”

Further, Rowan wrote, “Anyone committing a crime with a handgun goes to prison, with 10 years added to his term, without parole--period!”

“I haven’t seen that quote,” Rowan said Tuesday, “and I don’t want to go into that.” Gardiner pointed out that D.C. law prohibits possession of handguns unless they were registered prior to 1977 and mandates a five-year sentence for an aggravated assault conviction. Rowan said authorities had told his son that the gun, which was his son’s personal gun, did not have to be registered in the district because it had been properly registered federally while he was an FBI agent.

For possession, Rowan could be charged with a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison. Gardiner suggested that he might also have violated federal law, depending upon where the gun was purchased: “Either way you cut it, the only question is how many laws did he violate.”

Asked about the possibility that he might go to jail for using a handgun, Rowan said, “I’m not even remotely worried about it. It’s such a ridiculous idea. This business of trying to use a technicality to make the victim a villain is one of the most outrageous things that happens in this society.

“I should be the villain?”