Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: GQ articles [July 1994]
Summary: typical emotional bs
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 1994 03:36:55 GMT
GQ has really outdone themselves this time. I guess it's time to cancel my
subscription. There is a 20 page section in the July 1994 GQ bashing
handguns with purely emotional entreaties. I have included the lead-in
article and very brief summaries of the rest of them (even I can't type
that fast). There is no debate, but lots and lots of appeal to the emotions.
Typical powder-puff articles worthy of say, The National Enquirer.
There is a bright point though. GQ now has an email address:
[g q mag] at [aol.com]
and they ask for your daytime phone number as well. So let's show GQ that
the Internet community is not swayed by sensationalism and while we
might be proud, we definitely are not few. Let's go for quality and
quantity and bury the bums. Write now!
==============================================================================
From GQ [July 1994]
Reprinted without Permission
Address:
GQ Letters
350 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10017
email: [g q mag] at [aol.com] (include daytime phone number)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blown Away
stories by Tom Junod, Scott Raab, and Peter Richmond.
photographs by Dan Winters.
pg. 90
[facing page: b&w photo of a large revolver with barrel pointing at you]
"If this is the last thing you ever see, then you will, in your final
moments, understand that the handgun exists for one very simple purpose."
Seventy-one million handguns in the United States of America and every
one of them designed, cast, tooled, calibrated, marketed, sold and loaded to
end a human life.
Admire them if you wish: their perfection, their beauty, their
efficiency. But do not deny the purity of their purpose. There is no
logic to the handgun. During World War II, the Allied Forces developed a
.45 single-shot called the Liberator and planned to get the gun to the
Resistance, to assassinate the German leadership. Thousands were
manufactured, and then the plan was abandoned. It had dawned on the
intelligence community that, after the war, there would be no way to
recover the guns. And who could possibly justify arming an entire
continent with easily concealable weapons of death?
The illogic of the handgun, which was so apparent to men of war
only a half-century ago, has escaped us. Handguns are made readily -
legally - available to all but the manifestly lunatic and the criminally
convicted. We refine the technology of the guns and the bullets so that
they are ever more lethal and then use this efficiency as a selling point.
we blame the rising death count on crack or the underclass or single
mothers or anything but the gun.
We offer people an instrument that allows them to cause another
person's death and then we ask them not to use it. Of course, many of them
do; thirty-six times a day, somewhere in the US, somebody surrenders to
his rage or his fear and kills with a handgun. Yet the voices persist:
that the carnage is the price we pay for freedom, that the gun itself is a
measure of our democracy, that a society without guns is a society of
slaves. What is a gun? It is capability. It is blank potential.
Theologians have explained the presence of evil in our world by saying that
God wanted His creation to be free, and a man cannot be free unless he can
choose between good and evil. It is the same with the gun; you hand it to
a man, and he is no longer forced to obey the law. No, he has won the
power to choose to obey the law; you have empowered him to kill and
entrusted him no to, and as long as he holds the gun close to him, he is as
powerful as any man can be, and as free. He is Adam, free to fall, and
already falling.
-----------------------------------------
The rest are too long to type in but in summary:
-----------------------------------------
Pull the Trigger
"Tony didn't even like killing. That's the funny thing about it.
Like it or not, though, John Collins is dead."
by Tom Junod
[Essentially a piece about a two-bit fuckup sent up for armed robbery
who killed an innocent bystander for no reason.]
midpage factoids
"There were 13,220 handguns murders in the US in 1992; that year, there were
262 handgun fatalities that were ruled justifiable homicide."
"Number of handgun murders in 1992 in australia: 13; In great britain: 33;
in sweden: 36; in japan: 60; in canade: 128; in the US: 13,220."
-----------------------------------------
The Guilty Party
"Kevin did nothing wrong. He defended himself. He knows this.
But Kevin can't stop hearing that boy scream just before he died."
By Scott Raab.
[Tells about a man who shot and killed a 14 yr old boy with a gun he bought
after being robbed at his night manager job.]
midpage factoids:
"Handguns are involved in 73 percent of the homicides of children aged 10
to 14... 15 children are killed each day by firearms."
"More than 60 percent of firearms homicides are committed with handguns;
just 1 percent are committed with semiautomatic rifles."
-----------------------------------------
The Black Talon
"Winchester built the best bullet in history. It's not
Winchester's fault that Jason White and Marilyn Leath were murdered with
it."
by Peter Richmond
[Long piece about two people killed by black talons and how the evil bullet
came to be developed. Lays it on pretty thick.]
midpage factoids:
"More americans were killed by handguns from 1990 to 1992 (over 70,000) than
were killed in Vietnam during the war (47,364)."
"931,000 violent crimes were committed with handguns in 1992 ... there are
more than 284,000 licensed gun dealers in the US."
"A new handgun is produced every 20 seconds ... 50 of the 68 officers who
died in the line of duty in 1991 were killed with handguns."
-----------------------------------------
--
Question Authority and the Authorities will question You.