Date: Thu, 01 Jun 95 11:09:06 CDT
From: [e--aw--n] at [netcom.com] (Ed Lawson)
To: [n--b--n] at [mainstream.com], [texas gun owners] at [ZILKER.NET]
Subject: [Fwd:  TC:  Opinion of NRA/George Bush Flap?]

Forward of Tom Clancy's position........

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Clancy supposes it's time to depose on gun-control laws.

#1, Gun-Control (to me) means hitting the target.

#2, "gun-control" laws seem to me to be something of a fraud insofar as
there is no way I can find that anyone can claim that such laws work at
all.

Consider: in 1960 gun-control laws scarcely existed. Since then such laws
have proliferated, driven by mainly left-liberal political factions, and
America's rate of violent crime has risen by something on the order of
4-500%. Comparison of crime rates in cities/states with strict laws and
cities/states with no laws demonstrates no correlation at all (or perhaps
a reverse correlation); Utah is America's most heavily armed state, yet
has one of America's lowest crime rates, for example; Dallas (no laws) and
New York City (the Sullivan Law) have somewhat similar rates, as another
example--no correlation at all.

People complain that guns are bought in places with lenient laws and
transported to do violence in other states (hence the need for highly
restrictive federal statutes)--BUT, if guns are so inherently dangerous,
why don't the guns create crime in the lenient (and safer) states long
before their evidently more dangerous cousins are transported to such
enlightened jurisdictions as New York?

Assault weapons--the FBI doesn't even keep statistics for them in the
Uniform Crime Report, and the left's objection to them is that they LOOK
offensive; semi-automatic firearms have been on the open market in America
since at least 1905.  Interestingly, two of the criteria for determining
what is an "assault weapon" and what is not are bayonet studs and
flash-suppressors, neither of which seems especially lethal.

There are 500,000+ legally owned machineguns in the country, only one (1)
of which was ever used by its owner to commit a crime (that one was a
Cleveland police officer, I believe). (By the way, I don't own such a
weapon. They waste ammunition.)

The problem, of course, is not control of guns, but control of criminals.
I suggest that if the crime rate was so much lower in 1960 (and it was),
then perhaps we might want to re-discover how we dealt with crime back
thenm. Clearly controls of firearms have not had any beneficial effect on
crime in America.

We live in a practical world. Anti-gun sentiments and laws are based on
nothing more than the fact that some people are morbidly afraid of
firearms and don't want anyone to have them. But the imposition of
personal prejudices on others is anti-democratic; all the more so when
there is no demonstrated benefit from doing so. Why not try something that
works?

TC 


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Ed Lawson,  Austin	
(512)329-8574	     FAX (512)329-0475