8 Chapter Eight Barring All Guns Years ago, Ambrose Bierce wrote that prisons were places of punishments and rewards. He added that “the poet assures us that 'Stone walls do not a prison make/ but a combination of the stone walls, the political parasite and the moral instructor is no garden of sweets.' A prison is an institution of plotting and planning, as well as a graduate school of crime. It is a highly regulated and controlled society, and it is also a heavily armed society, on both sides of the barred cell door. Prisons are a paradox. Weapons flourish where there are to be none. Inmate ingenuity has given rise to weapons made from the most unusual and mundane items. Late in 1977, for example, Mexican national police made a thorough sweep / search of the infamous Jalisco State Penitentiary after a riot over inhumane conditions there. Nearly 1,500 weapons were confiscated, including 30 pistols and two submachine guns which had been built in the prison entirely from fabricated parts. Stories like that make a total mockery of the contention that antigun laws keep firearms out of the hands of criminals. A 1982 article in Gun Week quoted an inmate in a Michigan prison who actually had a price list for buying