This was sent me by Charles Schutzen in December, 1998 and the fact that I'm just now getting around to doing something about it is proof if my contention that there are just so many power seeker scams running all at once that it is impossible to keep up with them. But the facts and figures (footnoted so you may research them yourself) in this letter to the editor of the "Washington Times" by Richard E. Vaughan, Esq. are so valuable that you might want to put them into a special "Statistics" file, as I have. If you don't do it today, this article will soon be in "Information Central" on my personal web site whose URL is below, under "Guns and Self-Defense" if you want to do it later.ADDENDUM: I sent a copy of this article to Andrew Hudson, press aide to Denver Mayor Wellington Webb because I thought he would be interested in the facts (Boy, was I ever wrong!). I have been sending him such things for some time for the same reason. I guess we have an excellent illustration here of a politician who isn't worried about ever having to be reelected, since Mayor Webb is in his last possible term, which he won by what he called a "landslide." A landslide, I might add, that that represented just 15% of the people who live in Denver. The only reason Webb ran for a third term in spite of his solemn promise not to is because he saw that there was no one to run against him and it would be a "slam-dunk." It was.
Hudson is the one you'll remember, who called my question about how he figured a criminal, whose reason for living was to break the law, was going to obey a law that said he couldn't have a gun, "stupid." After receiving this article, he wrote me a terse email, demanding that I "take this address off this list" because "I don't read them, and it's wasting your time." A politician? Telling the truth? Wow! I wrote back and told him I wasn't surprised that a liberal refused to read anything that factually refuted his preconceived notions and that people like him made me sick. I haven't heard from him since.
RAY THOMA$
Begin Letter:
From: Charles Schuetzen: chasm@insync.net
Response to article "Unlocked Guns are an Open Door to Tragedy" by Adriennne Washington, Washington Times, 12/01/98 at C2
WASHINGTON 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 the National Safety Council lumped the NCIPC's 30 deaths of "undetermined intentionality" into total gun accidents.
In a nation where approximately 100 million gun owners 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 gun bans.
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 -- [UP] 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.
References:
http://www.public-policy.org/~ncpa/studies/s181/s181d.html
http://www.kc3.com/freedom_or_gun_control.htm
http://www.grnc.org/may97/lyingiia.htm
http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/crime
http://amfire.com/afistatistics/children.html
http://www.scfirearms.org/myths.txt
http://www.claremont.org/wheeler3.htm
http://www.netdepot.com/~donnybob/rights_home.htm
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-284.html
http://www.kc3.com/lott-editorial.htm
http://wildcat.arizona.edu/papers/89/104/03_1_m.html
http://www.kc3.com/Lott%20Editorial_LATimes.htm
http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/community/transcripts/chattr070198.html[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] http://www.nralive.com
["Gun Control and the Subway Class," Wall Street Journal, Jan. 10, 1985.]
- less than 0.2 % of all firearms and less than 0.4 % of all handguns owned nationally are ever used in crimes:
- for every homicide committed with a firearm, there are 65 instances where a gun is used to thwart an attack, and perhaps save an innocent life.
"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United 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
-- The Right to Self Defense is a Fundamental Human Right - RKBA -- Jurist@Attymail.Com
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