Letters to the Editor: Guns not the answer

To the Editor:

Alex Wong's column on gun ownership ("The link between gun ownership and less crime," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 12/4/01) recapitulates several frequent fallacies in the gun control debate.

Wong buys into a false dichotomy typically invoked by the gun lobby -- that proponents of gun control seek the total disarmament of American citizens.

Gun control advocates generally support closing loopholes in current gun laws, banning the sale of weapons with no legitimate use in self-defense or recreation and reasonable permit and carrying laws. The most extreme bills ever placed before Congress would not even begin to prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns for self-defense. The real dichotomy is between those who see moderate management of gun ownership as a basic part of public policy, and the National Rife Association, which attempts to defeat or work around every law relating to guns, however reasonable.

Wong cites Yale Law Professor John Lott as proof that guns reduce crime, claiming, "You won't see any similarly hard statistics from gun control advocates, unless they are distorted beyond relevance."

This is simply untrue. For statistical responses to Lott's claims, I suggest as starting points the work of Hazem Dezhbakhsh, Tim Lambert and David Hemenway, all easily found on the Internet. While ignored by conservative media, they have at least as much academic credibility as Lott.

Ian Kaplan

College '01

To the Editor:

I was impressed by the creative use of mathematics in Alex Wong's column on Tuesday. The article cites some statistics from a book by John Lott, entitled More Guns, Less Crime.

First, let me tell you a little about John Lott. In a study in 1997, Lott found that "more black and minority police officers increase crime rates."

That little piece of statistical magic fails to mention that the areas that hire more black and minority police officers are often inner city areas with high minority populations. It completely ignores the fact that crime, particularly theft, robbery and burglary of all types, is the result of the poverty common in inner city areas.

My point is that crime is caused by poverty, not by criminals with guns. I don't need to quote a bunch of numbers to convince you of that. Criminals do not read statistics on gun ownership or concealed weapons permits.

Guns in the home are just as deadly as guns anywhere else in the world. For example, on November 30 in San Joaquin, Calif., a 12-year-old shot his 8-year-old brother with his father's gun. On December 4, Eric McKeehan was put under house arrest for plotting a school massacre "bigger than Columbine" with four friends in New Bedford, Mass. And, of course, we can never forget the massacre at Columbine itself, or the shootings at Edinboro, Pa., Jonesboro, Ark., Springfield, Ore., Paducah, Ky., or Pearl, Miss., all of which took place during the last four years.

The rule is "the more guns, the more death." That is universal. Guns are only good at doing one thing, which is killing people. That's what they are designed to do. Having more of them is never good.

Favoring gun control has nothing to do with being a bleeding heart leftist. It has to do with being human and caring about the lives and welfare of other humans, criminals and crime victims alike. It has to do with being anti-death.

That's why I hate guns. And that's why I want to see less of them and not more.

Jeff Cohen

Engineering '04

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