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Article written to the Washington Times
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Response to article "Unlocked Guns are an Open Door to Tragedy" by Adrienne Washington, Washington Times, 12/01/98 at C2

"Washington Waaay Off Target"

Dear Washington Times,

I am shocked and saddened to read that Adrienne Washington has bought into the lock-up-your guns alarmist propaganda in her article "unlocked guns are an open door to tragedy."

While I agree that parents should act responsibly to keep dangerous things out of the reach of children, I most emphatically disagree that anything the government can or has done anything to make us safer by further infringing the right to keep and bear arms.

Keep in mind that the government is under no duty to protect you, as court case after court case has held, nor are rapists breaking into your daughter's room likely to obligingly wait while you fumble for keys in the dark.

Like generations of gun-owning Americans, the proper remedy is parental supervision and safety programs such as the NRA's 'Eddie Eagle' program, which teaches kids gun safety.

By now we have learned that Clinton and his supporters seek to make the State the Master -- and not the servant -- of the people by consistently using the phrase 'for the children' to hide yet another means of expanding Big Brother's control over the citizen. This is yet another attempt based on hysterical lies. Here's proof:

The threat to children is far smaller than the alarmists would have you believe. Indeed, the overall rates of accidental gun deaths have declined by 58% since 1968 and are down by 85% since their all-time high in 1904.

These alarmists have been caught time and again dramatically inflating their figures-- which is a nice way of saying that they LIED --- to further their agenda. For instance, gun control advocates have claimed that "[b]etween 1979 and 1991, nearly 50,000 children were killed by firearms."

That was an outright lie.

The actual numbers showed 469 homicides, 188 suicides, 185 accidental gun deaths, and 30 gun deaths of "undetermined intentionality." In other words, the Alarmists inflated their figures by a factor of nearly five.

Far from there being an "epidemic" of firearm accidents, the trend has been toward increasing safety. But that is not what the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), where the Alarmists get their figures, would have you believe.

Recently Congress defunded the NCIPC by $2.6 million for conducting "research" which was in fact anti-gun advocacy.

In 1995, the numbers of accidental deaths in children between the ages of 0 to 14 numbered 200, down 7% from 1994. In 1996, the trend continued downward to 170, without the aid of unconstitutional gunlock laws. The fact that NCIPC only notes 185 gun accidents among children 0-14 suggests that National Safety Council lumped the NCIPC's 30 deaths of "undetermined intentionality" into total gun accidents.

In a nation where approximately 100 million gunowners live in households containing perhaps 170-210 million guns, that reveals that accidental deaths are a mere fraction of a percentage of one percent. A non-epidemic and declining!

Nor are guns anywhere close to being the leading cause of child deaths. A six year study by the Johns Hopkins Injury Prevention Center established the causes of death of children between the ages of 0-14.

Vehicular accidents were the leading single cause of child deaths at 17%, followed by drowning and pedestrian accidents at 13.4% and 12.3% respectively. Fire, aspiration, suffocation and bicycle accidents accounted for 11.8%, 3.7%, 3.5% and 3.4%. "Other" accounted for a whopping 35.3% of child deaths. At the very bottom of causes were firearm deaths at 2.9%. Oddly enough, none of these other, far greater dangers to children are the subject of such fear-stoking campaigns.

Nor can these declining figures for gun deaths be attributed to increased gun laws. In fact, the opposite is true. FBI crime reports for 1997 show that New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore are in the top five of the top six "Murder Capitals" in the USA --- all of which have had long-standing gunbans. (note: NYC, DC and Chicago being de jure, and LA and Baltimore being de facto).

It comes as no surprise that this trend has been repeated in Australia, where guns have now been banned. One year after gun-owners were forced to surrender their personal firearms, homicides are up 3.2%, assaults are up 8.6%, armed-robberies are up 44%.

Let me repeat that -- *Forty-four* percent in a twelve month period.

Being an isolated island nation, Australian versions of Charles Schumer cannot demagogue the issue and blame free states like Florida and Virginia for their skyrocketing victimization of defenseless civilians.

In the Australian state of Victoria, firearms-related homicides are up 300%. Figures over the previous 25 years had shown a steady decrease in firearm-assisted homicides and robberies. Both trends stopped their downward slide and shot up dramatically, now that there was nothing to shoot back with.

In contrast to the top five American gun-banning murder capitols and Australia, the American states that have had the highest growth in gun ownership have in fact had the BIGGEST drops in violent crime rates.

Thirty-one states now have Right-to-Carry (RtC) laws. As states passed RtC reform over the 19 years encompassed by the monumental University of Chicago Lott/Mustard study, the number of multiple-victim public shootings declined by 84%. Deaths from these shootings plummeted on average by 90%, injuries by 82%. Violent crime such as murder, rape and aggravated assaults were down in every category of statistics collected wherever the citizen's right to carry concealed arms was recognized.

Indeed, Americans use privately-owned guns 2,500,000 times each year to thwart violent attacks against themselves and their loved ones. Where concealed handgun laws had been in effect for 5 years, murders declined by at least 15%, rapes by 9% and robberies by 11%. Permit holders were found to be extremely law-abiding, and data on accidental deaths and suicides indicate there were no increases.

In fact, studies have shown that you stand a greater chance of being shot by a cop than by a gun-toting civilian: 11% of individuals involved in police shootings were later found to be innocents mistaken for criminals, while only 2% of those in civilian shootings were so misidentified. Moreover, private citizens in urban areas encounter and kill up to three times as many criminals as do law enforcement personnel.

Women also benefited under the relaxed carry laws, but those who behaved passively when they were attacked proved to be 2.5 times more likely to be seriously injured than women who defended themselves with a gun.

Research conducted by Professors James Wright and Peter Rossi, for a landmark study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, points to the armed citizen as possibly the most effective deterrent to crime in the nation.

In conclusion then -- without even addressing the other issues Adrienne Washington's article trench upon - no additional gun laws are necessary. The sky is not falling, but accident rates for children are.

In Liberty,
Richard E. Vaughan, Esq.

[Richard Vaughan is a member of the Florida Bar and a writer on international trade law]

References:

Post from David Felbeck

THREE PROFOUND FACTS ON MULTIPLE-VICTIM PUBLIC SHOOTINGS:

1. During the period 1977-95, 15 school shootings occurred in NON "shall-issue" states, while ONLY ONE school shooting occurred in a "shall-issue" state.

2. Public-shooting murders dropped 89 PERCENT after the passage of "shall-issue" laws.

3. The overwhelming majority (often over 90 percent) of deaths from public shootings now occur in NON "shall-issue" states. (Only 19 states are non "shall-issue", INCLUDING MICHIGAN AND COLORADO.")

"[S]hall issue laws reduce the number of multiple victim public shootings. Attackers are deterred and the number of people injured or killed per attack is also reduced, thus for the FIRST TIME PROVIDING EVIDENCE that the harm from crimes that still occur can be mitigated...Not only does the passage of a shall issue law have a significant impact on multiple shootings but it is the ONLY LAW RELATED VARIABLE that appears to have a significant impact." These facts are all available in the seminal paper by Lott and Landes, now on the Web: http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Publications/Working/index.html ... David Felbeck

CNN - 10/1998 - A study ordered by President Clinton after a series of deadly school shootings finds schools generally are getting safer. A White House conference on school violence opens Thursday with findings that suggest the school violence problem may be smaller than an outbreak last year led people to believe. http://www-cgi.cnn.com/US/9810/15/school.violence.01/

Cas Gadomski posted this:

Rush was discussing the tragic event yesterday in Colorado. On his show today, he read the first part of a post from the FreeRepublic. It was posted by 1Oldpro and there are some valid points. Here it is:

"All these school shootings have occurred during the Clinton Administration. All these shootings occur in government/teacher union run schools, shootings are not occurring in home schools, charter schools, parochial or private schools. All these shooting have occurred after the passage of the Brady Law which was supposed to stop unstable people from acquiring guns. All these shooting happen in an environment where no guns are allowed thereby preventing adults from possessing firearms for deterrence and/or protection. All these shootings are used by liberals and media to further restrict ownership.

How to stop these shootings:

cas@alaska.net (Cas Gadomski)"

"[t]he 1995 law that banned guns within 1000 feet of a school was well-intentioned, but has had unintended consequences. Rather than making schools safe for children, these laws have made it relatively safer for bad people to threaten our children. I don't think that all or even a significant number of teachers or administrators need to be allowed to carry concealed handguns, but my research has indicated that allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns has a huge deterrent effect on multiple victim public shootings.

Looking at multiple victim public shootings from 1977 through 1995 indicates that the passage of right-to-carry concealed handgun laws is associated with an 84% drop in the rate at which these multiple victim public shootings occur. To the extent that shootings still occur in those states with concealed handgun laws, they tend to overwhelmingly occur in those parts of the state where concealed handguns are not allowed. No other factors, like the death penalty, arrest rates for murder, waiting periods, or background checks have any affect on reducing these multiple victim shootings."
-- Lott

http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/community/transcripts/chattr070198.html

"Attacking his article in a letter-to-the-editor, a female gun-banner pointed to the infamous Arthur Kellerman "study" published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 1992, which proclaimed that "a handgun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill the owner, a family member, or a friend, than to kill an intruder."

Kellerman's study was completely disingenuous, and indicates--as does his financing and publication by gun-control zealots James Mercy at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Jerome P. Kassirer, editor of NEJM--that the intent of these so-called studies is to produce pro-gun-control soundbites for Sarah Brady's Handgun Control, Inc., rather than scientific knowledge. The CDC's anti-gun propaganda was so flagrant and outrageous that the Congress threatened to cut off its funding entirely.

The Kellerman pseudo-study was refuted by several well-qualified sources, including sociology professor H. Taylor Buckner; Henry E. Schaffner, Ph.D.; and J. Neil Schulman, in his book Stopping Power: The Humanistic Case for Civilian Arms, Centurion Press, 1994. His sampling methods, methodology, analysis of data and conclusions have all been censured as unscientific.

But, perhaps most telling was the study by Professor Gary Kleck, head of the criminology department at Florida State University, which was summarized in his paper Guns and Violence: A Summary of the field prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, which was held at the Washington Hilton, August 29 through September 1, 1991.

Unlike Kellerman, Kleck's award-winning study has been peer-reviewed.

The paper (and his book Point Blank:Guns and Violence in America) are replete with facts, stemming from an extensive telephone survey of 4,978 households in the 48 contiguous states, indicate that American civilians use their firearms approximately 2.4 million times annually defending themselves against criminals, in 1.9 million of those incidents they use handguns. The figures exclude police, security guards and the military.

Fifty out of 5,000 people responded that they had used handguns in an actual confrontation against another human attempting a crime. In 47.2 percent of the cases, the criminal was armed. About one in six were armed with a firearm, the rest with knives, clubs or some other weapon. In 73.4 percent of these gun-defense incidents, the attacker was a stranger to the intended victims. Defenses against a family member or intimate were rare--well under 10 percent. This disproves the Kellerman myth that a gun kept for defense will most likely be used against a family member or someone you love." --- "Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics," by Joe Pierre

Howerter's Debunking of Kellerman's "43-to-1" Lie

Kellerman's "43-in-1" Lies Exposed

Caught Lying - CDC's Funding Cut by Congress

Guns and Public Health: Epidemic of Violence or Pandemic of Propaganda?

Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths

A Legacy of Government's Monopoly: The Lack of a Right to Protection

We must work to insure our children are not swayed by the subtle but constant emphasis of liberal "ideals" in the media and in their schools.

Caught Lying - Congress Cuts $2.6 Million From CDC Budget Even After Being Exposed; CDC Continues to Spread Lies

Yes, THESE are the People that got caught lying; THESE were the people who got their funding cut and THESE are the people that fed their disinformation to Rosie O'Donnell

"Where Did You Get *That* Statistic?" [Good Question Indeed]
National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

In contrast, this regarding RKBA research methodology, from an anti-gunner no less:

"I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. If I were Mustapha Mond of Brave New World, I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police ... What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. ...I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research. Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe." -- Dr. Marvin Wolfgang (The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, Volume 86, Number 1, Fall, 1995): Dr. Wolfgang is acknowledged as one of the foremost criminologists in the country.

"Also striking is the disparity between claims made in public debates and reality: Although gun control advocates make claims like, "Between 1979 and 1991, nearly 50,000 children were killed by firearms," (4) the actual numbers for the most recent year for which data is available, 1994, were 469 homicides, 188 suicides, 185 accidental gun deaths, and 30 gun deaths of "undetermined intentionality," (5) suggesting that such advocates inflate child homicides by a factor of nearly five. Violence among children is clearly less frequent than gun control advocates would have us believe." -- "Better Lying Through Science II"

"The nationwide crime trends as calculated by the FBI show crime tracking downward in every category for the past five years." FBI Statistics

Fatalities Among Children 0-14 - Excellent Pie Chart: Fatalities Attributable to Weapons Being Smallest Category Tallied

Surprise! American murder rate LOWER than many European Countries

Ten Myths About Gun Control

"Boys who own legal firearms have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns." - Source: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention NCJ-143454, "Urban Delinquency and Substance Abuse," August 1995.

Crime, Self-Defense, and the Right to Carry a Handgun by Jeffrey R. Snyder - "Shall Issue" CCW Reform Saves Lives

Lott - Guns in the Home; Family Guns a Danger Myths Debunked 2.5 Million Defensive Gun Uses Each Year

LTE Defensive Gun Use; Accidents; Police 11%, Civilians 2%

Lott - "How to Stop Mass Public Shootings" When citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons, death and injuries from shootings decline.

General Firearms Facts & Statistics

Out of all the privately owned handguns, legal and illegal, in the United States, the percentage of them are not used in a murder/crime of any type? 99.998% of all privately owned handguns in the U.S. are not used in a murder in any given year. -- Boortz

Kates/Kleck/Lott - Gun Bans Merely Disarm the Law-Abiding

MURDER STATISICS ARE BEING SCRUTINIZED Wash. Times, 07/02/1998 at C5

"In the first half of 1997, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles led the nation in slayings. Baltimore placed fifth and the District [of Columbia] sixth, according to statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

[interview conducted by Ginny Simone with Keith Tidswell of Australia's Sporting Shooters Association: "Surprise, Surprise" [Archive News]

["Gun Control and the Subway Class," Wall Street Journal, Jan. 10, 1985.]

UN Gun Control Agenda Planned in Secret, Overseas, with US Tax Dollars

"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of theUnited States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. "
--Samuel Adams

" ...arms discourage and keep invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property...Horrid mischief would ensue were [the law-abiding] deprived of the use of them."
--Thomas Paine


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