Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 21, 1993 TAG: 9301210453
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID A. de WOLF
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
COUNTERING THE NRA
"NEWSPEAK" is the official language of Oceania, one of the three remaining countries in the world in George Orwell's novel, "1984." Its political leaders use Newspeak to suppress and manipulate their brainwashed populations with constant misinformation to further their own political goals. One of the chief characters is even made to believe that 2+2=5.The above comes to mind when I read the bizarre statements made by the National Rifle Association, a well-organized gun-owner's group with an extremist leadership whose lobbying efforts have been successful in blocking adequate gun-control measures. The NRA is totally obsessed by a desire to remove all obstacles to unlimited possession of firearms. There is little evidence that the NRA really cares about anything else, and as such it is a menace to society.
I am not religiously against gun ownership under reasonably controlled circumstances. However, the obvious connection between violent deaths and the much-too-easy availability of firearms mandates much tighter forms of gun control than now exist. Sensible protective measures are blocked by the NRA, which presents us constantly with a barrage of "arguments" against gun control that are silly, unproven, or false and refutable.
I shall label them "myths." Here are the most common ones:
Myth 1: "The right of individuals to bear arms is supported by the Second Amendment."
Fact? The courts have never been able to decide whether this amendment does or does not require an organized militia for the right to bear arms. The conclusion that individuals have the right to bear arms is only an opinion offered misleadingly as a factual statement. Myth 2: "Gun control is useless because criminals will get guns anyway."
"Useless"? The fact that criminals have guns does not make gun control useless! Gun-toting criminals are only a very small fraction of the population. Total lack of gun control leads to guns in the hands of very many people.
That is what makes Somalia, to name a recent example in the news, so dangerous. And now our inner-city schools are at risk because gun-toting juveniles roam the halls. Most bloodshed that we read about in the United States comes from acts of violence by firearms in which perpetrator and victim know each other. Gun control is aimed largely at reducing that.
It is not just misleading to state that gun control is hopeless; in the face of evidence that it works in European countries, it borders upon willful misinformation.
Myth 3: "Not gun control but better education of the population and harsher punishments of criminals will decrease the crime rate."
"Better education"? Try waiting for that to decrease drug use. (I.e., don't bother trying to get rid of the drug pushers). "Harsher punishment"? Available statistics do not prove that capital punishment is a deterrent to murder. The overwhelming statistical evidence of much higher death rates due to firearms in the United States than in European developed countries make it quite obvious that gun control would lessen those rates here.
Myth 4: "The right of a citizen to protect his home and family should not be infringed upon."
Self-protection? Sounds like the law of the jungle to me. I'll just have to hope my neighbor doesn't gun me down when I walk up to his front door to borrow a cup of sugar! And imagine what might happen between angry car-drivers involved in even minor traffic accidents if every automobile were equipped with guns! It seems reasonable to me that society recognizes that anger is easy, and that we should be protected from expressing it in public with easily available guns.
Myth 5: "Criminals - not guns - kill."
Criminals? Most gunshot deaths are not caused by criminals but by ordinary people. As stated above, statistics showing considerably lower death rates by violence in European countries with gun control require complicated (and suspect) theories to explain away. It is highly likely, if not outright evident, that availability of guns is the root difference.
Myth 6: "Strict gun-control laws in cities such as Washington and New York go hand in hand with high crime rates; therefore gun control is useless."
Useless? This statement simply ignores the facts. Gun-control laws in these cities are relatively recent, and the presence of hordes of firearms partly predates those laws. Of course there is a greater abundance of firearms in cities where population densities are also very high. Even more to the point, the laws are local, and residents simply need to cross state lines to purchase guns in much more lenient areas.
Cities such as New York and Washington lie adjacent to a number of states, and Virginia in particular is notorious for its lax gun laws. Furthermore, the high crimes are not related to gun control but to quite different factors: drugs, frustration due to poverty, and unemployment, to name only a few.
Gun control is not a panacea, a cure for all ills. However, we can stop the constant bloodshed caused by people under stress who have easy access to firearms. We can stop it in the obvious common-sense way: by immediately ending the further distribution of the most dangerous guns - automatic weapons and handguns, which have no legitimate hunting purpose.
We also should remove undesirable firearms already in private hands, no matter how hard it may be to enforce such a removal. The fact that something is hard to do should not discourage us from trying. The cost (in hospital costs, lawsuits, jail/prison terms, etc.) to society of all these firearms deaths is certainly much higher than the cost, for example, of offering even an appreciable monetary reward for turning in one's firearms. There is plenty of room for regulating hunting and target-shooting without unrestricted access to firearms.
Guns are appearing in the hands of elementary-school children, simply because they are so easily and widely available. The NRA is partly, if not largely, responsible because it continues to block the legislation needed to make society safer for us and our children. Remember that the NRA represents only a small but vocal minority of people in this country, who are anti-gun control to the point of being plainly irrational as well as antisocial.
David A. de Wolf is a professor of electrical engineering at Virginia Tech.