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Old–Yankee.Com » Response to Letter in Post Gazette « |
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This was received May 30, 1997, postmarked Newcastle, PA. Isn't This Marvelous!Someone without the nerve to sign his own name is calling someone else a wimp. I'll leave the sender's ability to spell alone. There are some interesting things to note about this. Although tempting, it wouldn't really be right to use garbage like the scrawled note and the ignorance of the sender to characterize the entire gun control movement. However, the rest of it is fair game. First, note the text above the Cease Fire name and logo: "A gun in the home is much more likely to kill a family member than to kill an intruder." With the poor research done by gun control researchers such as Dr. Arthur Kellermann, one wonders how they know this with such certainty. For the sake of discussion, assume that it's true. What does it mean? Nothing!! For it to have importance in one's decision whether or not to keep a gun in one's home, it would have to be true that:
In fact, an attacker is killed in only a small percentage of self-defense situations. Most of the time, people don't even fire when defending themselves. Talking about a gun, pointing to it or brandishing it is often sufficient to deter a criminal. Further, the goal when you are attacked, at home or elsewhere, is to end the attack, not to kill the attacker. The least amount of force that can be used to accomplish this is probably the best. The number of annual firearms deaths in this country, including murder, suicide and accident, and excluding justifiable homicides, is around 33,200 (National Center for Health Statistics, 1991 figures). Dr. Kleck estimates there are roughly 2 million cases in which guns are used in self defense annually. This means that for every one of those 33,200 people killed by a gun, there were more than 60 situations prevented in which one or more people feared death or serious bodily harm at the hands of criminals. You can see the kind of dishonesty involved when organizations like Cease Fire distribute propaganda phrased this way. People are being misled and their lives put in jeopardy by such gun control organizations because they are disuaded from using an effective means of self defense. Second, note the text on the tag on the picture of the revolver. This refers to a tragic situation in which a girl hid in a closet in the family's home in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Louisiana while the family was out. When the family returned, she jumped out of the closet and yelled to surprise them. They were so surprised that the father thought he was being attacked by someone hiding in his home and shot the daughter. It is really despicable to use situations like this to try to sway people emotionally when they need to be very rational. The idea of the gun control organizations is to get people to believe that their families are in more danger by having a gun in the house, when in fact it is the reverse. There are accidents, yes, but with education and training, the number of accidents are dropping steadily and are at their lowest levels ever. This situation might or might not be considered an accident, I don't know. In either case, it was unfortunate. But the fact that the father was armed indicates that he was very worried about being the victim of a criminal attack. Those attacks are much more frequent than such tragic shootings. In such a neighborhood, it is, on balance, much more likely that having a gun will prevent injury or death than it will cause injury or death. |
Last Updated — June 20, 2008 |
