While sitting in the waiting room of America's Tire Company awaiting the replacement of a tire with a nail in it, I found myself flipping through the September 2000 issue of "Outdoor Life" magazine. Right in the beginning of the magazine was an article by the Editor-In-Chief, Todd W. Smith, called "Grappling With Gun Control. Needless to say, it piqued my interest, especially when I saw the length of the article. While the information it contained is hardly new to anyone here, it contained lots of stats and refuted lots of myths, in a well written manner. It touched on many issues: registration, "smart guns", trigger locks, parenting, Australia's issues etc. I managed to find a scrap of paper to jot down a few passages I thought made good points.
"Registration is not going to take guns out of the hands of the criminals who already possess them any more than requiring a driver's license is going to stop drunk drivers or anyone else from driving illegally. In fact, many of our current registration laws allow citizens to legally own handguns without ever having to prove they can use them safely."
"Until we stop plea bargaining and send a message to criminals through stiff penalties that if they use a gun they will go to jail, we're not going to see a reduction in gun related violence."
"Kids need boundaries. We can't rely on the government or schools to set rules for our children. Parents need to set them and at a very young age."
The article ended with a letter from a reader of the San Angelo Standard-Times that was also read on Paul Harvey's radio program. The letter dealt with Columbine, and 'how could such a thing have happened?' The letter ended like this: "It couldn't have been because we teach our children that there are no laws of morality that transcend us, that everything is relative and that actions don't have consequences. What the heck, the President gets away with it."
My thinking is that this would be a good article to share with antis and fence sitters, due to the amount of information that is given and the way that information is presented. I am planning on buying a copy of the magazine this weekend so I can do just that. I hope others here will do the same.
This is not a magazine I would normally read, so I guess I was meant to have that nail in my tire! I'm just glad I noticed it before I left for my 350 mile drive to L.A. at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning! And even more glad that I had paid for the extra warranty on the tires so I didn't have to pay for a new tire. And you have to like a place that stayed open an hour late to put on a new tire, since I got there 2 minutes before closing time.
"Registration is not going to take guns out of the hands of the criminals who already possess them any more than requiring a driver's license is going to stop drunk drivers or anyone else from driving illegally. In fact, many of our current registration laws allow citizens to legally own handguns without ever having to prove they can use them safely."
"Until we stop plea bargaining and send a message to criminals through stiff penalties that if they use a gun they will go to jail, we're not going to see a reduction in gun related violence."
"Kids need boundaries. We can't rely on the government or schools to set rules for our children. Parents need to set them and at a very young age."
The article ended with a letter from a reader of the San Angelo Standard-Times that was also read on Paul Harvey's radio program. The letter dealt with Columbine, and 'how could such a thing have happened?' The letter ended like this: "It couldn't have been because we teach our children that there are no laws of morality that transcend us, that everything is relative and that actions don't have consequences. What the heck, the President gets away with it."
My thinking is that this would be a good article to share with antis and fence sitters, due to the amount of information that is given and the way that information is presented. I am planning on buying a copy of the magazine this weekend so I can do just that. I hope others here will do the same.
This is not a magazine I would normally read, so I guess I was meant to have that nail in my tire! I'm just glad I noticed it before I left for my 350 mile drive to L.A. at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning! And even more glad that I had paid for the extra warranty on the tires so I didn't have to pay for a new tire. And you have to like a place that stayed open an hour late to put on a new tire, since I got there 2 minutes before closing time.
