My letter to the editor:
Dear Sirs,
The desperation of the anti-firearms genre is epitomized in your editorial piece. The anti-firearms culture has changed "gun control" to "gun safety" in an exercise of softspeak that would do George Orwell proud. Even you have participated in this softspeak dialogue by changing the usual "12 kids die every day from gunfire" (which includes "kids" through age nineteen) to "And every day the United States sees more than 11 people under the age of 20 die from bullet wounds ...". A far more honest statement but still anti-firearms propaganda reworded.
While you gleefully report that "This includes deaths from intentional homicide, suicide, police shootings, and accidental shootings, ..." the part of the firearms story that you refuse to report is that the majority of firearms deaths are self murders by people who, without the access to a firearm, would take the far more acceptable and respectable exit of throwing themselves off of a building.
You mention the shooting at a fender bender that was perpetrated by a criminal but you fail to report that the "blood in the streets" theory that has been assigned exclusively to lawful concealed carry holders has not come to pass.
You speak of the 65 million handguns in private possession but focus on the 7,361 (assuming one murder per gun) handgun murders while ignoring the 64,992,639 handguns which were not used to take a life.
You mention the 30 firearms murders in Britain but fail to report that the British press is reporting that there is virtual anarchy in the streets as 3 million firearms, including machine guns, has flooded the country since the firearm ban was enacted.
You speak of the 15 firearms deaths in Japan but you fail to mention that the 1998 suicide rate in Japan exceeded 32,000 people for the first time since figures have been kept.
You mention that there are regulations on aspirin bottles yet fail to mention that the number one and two poisons of young children is iron and aspirin in spite of those regulations.
You mention that waiting periods can prevent impulse purchases of firearms for aberrant purposes but fail to mention that California has had a fifteen day waiting period for over twenty years to no real effect. The crime rate still rose with, or higher than, the rest of the nation.
You also failed to mention that the American crime rate, including the murder rate, is down giving the false impression to the uninformed that the crime and murder rate are up. In addition, you failed to mention that the accidental firearm death rate is at the lowest it has ever been since statistics were begun to be kept in 1903.
Yes, the desperation is showing as you grasp at every death, every suicide, every accident to try to keep the "rampant death and destruction" myth alive. Your problem is that more and more people are becoming educated to these lies and omissions and they are starting to see the press for what they are; lackeys for the anti-firearms extremists.
Sincerely,
Jim Peel
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Gun Control: The proposition that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her own panty hose, is more acceptable than allowing that same woman to defend herself with a firearm.
