Axe Murders

       

Once when I was a kid, we took a trip to visit my brother in Tulsa.  Highway 71 was the route we took in Iowa.  This highway took us through Villisca, Iowa, where we stopped to see the house where there had been a horrific crime in June of 1912.

Sometime during the night of June 9/10, 1912, Josiah (43), his wife Sarah (39), their children Herman (11), Katherine (10), Boyd (7), and Paul (5) were all killed with an axe.  Katherine had invited two friends, Ida (8) and Lena (12) Stillinger to stay overnight.  They were also killed. 

All eight people were bludgeoned to death in their beds with an axe.  Josiah and Sarah were probably killed first, then their children.  Ida and Lena were probably killed last in a downstairs guest bedroom.  Lena was the only person that seemed to have put up a fight, and may have been sexually assaulted. 

There were several suspects for the crime, but no one was ever convicted of the crime.  A Reverend George Kelly was a traveling minister that had been in town and left with his wife early the morning the bodies were found.  He was tried twice.  The first trial ended with a hung jury, and the second trial ended with a verdict of not guilty.  The crime was never solved.

In 1892, Lizzie Borden was a 32-year-old woman accused of killing her father and stepmother with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts.  She was eventually acquitted of the crime.  No one else was ever charged with the crime.  There was a poem written about her.  Kids sometimes skipped rope to the rhyme.  It went like this. 

        Lizzie Borden took an axe

        And gave her mother forty whacks.

        When she saw what she had done

        She gave her father forty-one.

With horrific crimes like this committed with an axe, it was fortunate that our federal government made it illegal for private citizens to own axes.  Oh, what a minute.  That never happened.  It would be stupid to blame the ax for the crime. 

The FBI statistics, from 2005 to 2011, show that far more people were killed with blunt instruments like hammers and clubs than by rifles.  I assume this number would include the so-called assault rifles, but not handguns or shotguns. 

Why do Progressives want the federal government to violate Second Amendment rights for guns?  Personally, I think it is more political and about control than it is about protecting the public.