Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns Subject: SCHEER ARTICLE 1 From: [mark bunner] at [mgmtsys.com] (Mark Bunner) Date: Sun, 12 Jun 94 11:38:00 -0500 Playboy Magazine July 1994 Page 53 Reporter's Notebook GUNS II -- I STAND CORRECTED opinion By ROBERT SCHEER The National Rifle Association is right. That's how I began my column on gun control in the March issue. My point was that the National Rifle Association was correct in calling the Brady Bill bogus. A mandated five-day waiting period prior to the purchase of a handgun will not reduce violent crime. California already has a waiting period of 15 days on all guns, yet the homicide rate remains higher than the national average. As numerous readers have since pointed out, I copped out when I said, Let's ban guns anyway, because what have we got to lose? A lot, readers responded, and I must admit to being influenced by the more thoughtful letters. First of all, I had used a hoary but misleading statistic employed frequently by advocates of gun control. This statistic asserts that a person who keeps a gun at home is "43 times more likely to kill a family member or friend than a robber." This statistic first appeared in a report published in the June 12, 1986 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. It was based on a small study conducted in one county in Washington State, and the data are more than ten years old. This study did not make a case for gun control. The implication is that the guns are fired accidentally, killing a family member rather than an intruder. That is false. What the study said was that of the 43 gun-related deaths surveyed, 37, or 86 percent, were suicides. The evidence is quite clear that people who want to kill themselves will find a way to do so whether or not guns are available. In Japan, where personal ownership of guns barely exists, the suicide rate is several times that of the U.S. When Canada enforced stricter gun control, suicides by gun went down but the suicide rate remained the same. Those so inclined jumped off bridges or recycled their car's exhaust. Accidental gunshot deaths accounted for only one of the 43 deaths, compared with one intruder killed. But this still doesn't tell us whether the families who owned guns were safer, because the study ignored cases in which an intruder was wounded or scared away. The study also conceded: "Cases in which would-be intruders may have purposely avoided a house [in which the occupants were] known to be armed are also not identified." Not to include estimates of crime deterred by the presence of a gun in the household rendered the "43 times" statistic more alarming than it is. That is merely one example of how, as my letter writers pointed out, hysteria rather than logic fuels the drive for gun control. Basic to the hysteria is the notion put forth with increasing abandon by politicians that the nation has been experiencing "an epidemic of violence" that is intrinsically connected with the fact that Americans own more than 200 million guns. The proposition is misleading on two counts. Most of America is no more violent than it was during the preceding decade. The alarming rise in violence is centered in our cities and is fueled by the poverty, alienation and consequent drug dealing of significant numbers of minority youth, not by the mere ownership of firearms. One correspondent, Dr. Edgar A. Suter of San Ramon, California, puts it succinctly: "Although it has become quite fashionable to speak of an 'epidemic of violence,' analysis of recent homicide and accident rates for which demographics are available shows a relatively stable to slightly declining trend for every segment of American society except inner-city teenagers and young adults primarily involved in illicit drug trafficking." That is one reason I am for decriminalization of most drugs. The killing in the inner cities is primarily caused by fights over enormous profits from the illegal drug trade. Why doesn't someone tell the DEA fanatics and their allies about the law of supply and demand? While the government has systematically cut back programs that can train people in the ghetto for legitimate jobs, it has simultaneously created a growth industry in narcotics. And the rest of us, black and white, rich and poor, provide the profit margins when we become the victims of stickups and burglaries that feed the addicts' habits. Violent crime is largely the work of a small group of habitual criminals so alienated from the normal reward system that the will kill, no matter the legal consequences -- and with a rock if they have to. Guns are a scapegoat for a society that no longer believes it can solve basic problems. The growing enthusiasm for gun control is a cop-out because it blames social decay on a mechanical device -- the gun. It doesn't deal with the disintegration of civilized life in the inner cities. It's the collapse of a work ethic, a lack of jobs and the breakdown of schools and families that leave crime as the only alternative for so many. At last count, one out of four young black males was a charge of the criminal justice system. When it says that "guns don't kill, people do," the NRA is on to a basic truth. The problem is. The NRA doesn't go far enough. Where do these killers, often still children, come from? Don't give me the old one that it's the result of a permissive society that has coddled criminals. For the last decade, we have ratcheted up the minimum time served for violent and drug-related crimes. Now both the enlightened state of California and President Clinton are committed to "three strikes and you're out." It doesn't work. They've already started putting people away in Los Angeles under the new law and I haven't run into anyone who feels safer. The prisons are already overcrowded. After we double the capacity and fill them, people may finally realize that imprisonment doesn't work. The logical alternative is to spend the money now spent for prisons on schools, housing and jobs programs that would make the inner cities habitable. Ideally, the NRA should join me in advocating a real war on poverty, something this country has never waged, as an alternative to the hysteria over gun ownership as the source of crime. Gun ownership obviously brings some peace of mind to tens of millions of Americans who no longer believe their government can protect them. This is a sad state of affairs, but the onus ought to be placed on the government for its failure to keep the peace -- and not on a frightened citizenry. ---------------------------------------- Mark Bunner; INTERNET: [mark bunner] at [mgmtsys.com] RIME: ->MINDLESS --- ß 1st 1.11 #1461 ß Guns don't kill, gangs do.