WOW, it comes up junky unless you cut and paste -- here's the articles:
PRO
Point of View: Guns in America: credit the value of deterrence...
By F. PAUL VALONE
SHERRILLS FORD -- Imagine if a Standard & Poor's analyst wrote a report on Microsoft by tallying only the company's debts and ignoring its earnings and then, based on the sham, pronounced the company insolvent. Laughable? Certainly. But that's the rigged accounting used by Duke University researcher Philip Cook and his colleagues in a paper titled "The Medical Costs of Gunshot Injuries in the United States." Widely touted for concluding that "Gunshot injury costs represent a substantial burden to the medical care system. Nearly half this cost is borne by U.S. taxpayers," the paper conveniently appeared just as Handgun Control, Inc. was encouraging litigation against gun makers. Having filed one such lawsuit, Miami Mayor Alex Penelas slavered over Cook's conclusion, insisting it "validate what we in government have known all along." (Those in government are wiser than you and I). While Cook makes a credible tally of gun injury costs ($2.3 billion in 1994), he seems blind to the possibility that defensive gun uses might actually save lives and money. By contrast, Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis totals both sides of the balance sheet on guns. He first examines wildly variable estimates of the price of gun violence ranging from $1.4 billion to $440 billion per year. (Some studies cook the books by "guesstimating" values for intangibles like victims' future productivity). But the NCPA review also cites 15 surveys estimating between 764,000 and 3.6 million cases annually in which citizens use guns for self-defense. Because merely displaying a firearm often deters crime, criminals are shot in less than 3 percent of cases. A widely cited self-defense survey by criminologist Gary Kleck estimates 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. Given the cost of crimes prevented by defensive gun uses, the NCPA report concludes that even under assumptions most favorable to gun control advocates, the net benefit of guns in society ranges up to $3.5 billion. Cook equally ignores the benefits of crimes deterred. When researchers James Wright and Peter Rossi surveyed convicted felons, for example, they found 39 percent avoided committing crimes when they feared victims might be armed. And when economist John Lott studied concealed handgun laws, he found they deter rape, murder and aggravated assault. He concluded that universal adoption of such laws could prevent 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, and 60,000 aggravated assaults each year. If you doubt criminals avoid armed victims, I'll cheerfully provide you a sign for your front door proclaiming "Proud To Be Gun-Free!" Finally, let's consider the "good riddance factor." Hardly the Brady Bunch, gunshot victims are often criminals. In a study of Charlotte shootings, 64 percent of victims had been convicted of a crime. In another study, 71 percent of drive-by shooting victims were members of street gangs. Homicide victims with arrest records average 9.5 prior offenses per "victim." Take Tracy Hopper. Killed this summer in a Charlotte bar, he'd achieved two prior convictions and a standing indictment for murder. Dead at the tender age of 20, Hopper typifies what gun control advocates mislabel "children killed by guns." Then we have Adrian Rodricka Cathey who, last fall, had the misfortune to pick the wrong victim. When he broke into a woman's apartment and attacked her with a knife, she shot him dead. He had been arrested for five violent felonies (including three sexual assaults); DNA evidence later showed Cathey's busy career included four recent rapes. Can we attach a price to prevention of rape? Or perhaps to Cathey's future victims? By Cook's bookkeeping, wounded predators would represent a "burden to the medical care system." A Tennessee Law Review paper described this sort of research by saying, "the anti-gun health advocacy literature is a 'sagecraft' literature in which partisan academic 'sages' prostitute scholarship, systematically inventing, misinterpreting, selecting or otherwise manipulating data to validate preordained political conclusions." Biased researchers carefully ignore what should be a central question of the gun debate: Not whether we can dredge up 100 or 1,000 cases in which firearms are misused, but whether gun ownership, on balance, is a detriment or a benefit. Their refusal to acknowledge the question might suggest they already know the answer. F. Paul Valone is president of Grass Roots North Carolina.
ANTI
Point of View: ...Arguments against regulation miss the points
By HENRY A. LANDSBERGER
CHAPEL HILL -- Recent mass killings involving guns have raised to a new level of intensity the issue: are guns responsible for these killings? Five arguments against the assertion that guns are a very important cause turn out, on examination, to be very weak. There is something to said for every one of them. No human phenomenon, including death by firearms, is simple and explained by one cause: not ethnic wars or the high divorce rate. But it is equally illogical to exclude as one very important cause of America's out-of-sight gun-caused homicide rate our poorly regulated ownership of over 200 million guns. Argument I: Guns don't kill people, people do. True, someone has to pull the trigger. But this appealing one-liner doesn't cover all the complex ground. Guns are exceptionally deadly because no alternative means of killing are as surely effective, so easily result in accidents, and as acceptable to the user. You could be stopped before you had the time to throttle, or use a knife to kill those nine people in Atlanta, or by knocking them on the head. Nor would many murderers be able to bring themselves to do it that way. Drive-by killings can't be done by poisoning or hanging. The technology and the psychology of the gun make it incomparably more lethal. International statistics confirm it. In Canada, Europe and Japan, gun ownership is severely limited and strictly regulated. In the U.S, not only gun-caused homicide rates, but also gun-caused suicide and accidental death rates per 100,000 are anywhere from four times to 20 times greater than in these other countries. And those other folks don't use alternative methods of committing homicide to "compensate" for not having guns. Their homicide rates using other methods are, on the whole, quite similar to ours. It is only the availability of guns that turns our perhaps greater inclination toward violence into death-as-a-fact. Argument II: Better enforcement of existing laws is all we need. Everyone favors better enforcement, though the gun lobby has usually not supported better funding of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Control. But again, the situation is more complex. To reduce criminal acts in any sphere of life, more than one approach is needed. To protect people from being robbed of money, we don't just put more police on the streets. We encourage folks to keep their money in bank accounts, and to have PIN numbers to access cash machines. Like having locks on guns which only the owner can open. Why oppose that? We require car owners to register cars, and don't permit private sales without immediate registration and hence background checks. Why not the same for guns? So we use many ways to reduce situations in which dangerous acts can occur. Keeping guns scarce is one crucial way to reduce the occasions in which they might kill. Neither teachers nor parents find it easy to predict which angry boys might start killing their schoolmates. Nor is it easy to restructure families, instill ethics and improve access to psychiatric care to lessen the likelihood that certain kids and adults will kill. We should work on all of these -- but also on gun control. Argument III: More guns would protect the noncriminal from the criminal: thugs are less likely to attack if they fear you might shoot them: there might be an epidemic of armed break-ins and street robberies if robbers knew you had no gun. What we do know is that guns in homes kill mostly family members and friends; very few kill intruders. And on the streets: criminals, too, would have fewer guns, not just their victims -- that's the whole idea of drastically limiting the production and availability of guns. Other countries have shown it can be done. Argument IV: The Swiss have guns in their homes, yet their homicide rate is low: so the prevalence of guns can't be the cause of homicide. But: they're predominantly not handguns, and belong to the government as part of their militia. They are not privately owned; their storage is strictly regulated; real private ownership is highly restricted. Argument V: The Second Amendment guarantees us the right to own guns. (1) The legal literature indicates that the courts, with one very recent exception which is on appeal, have held repeatedly that except as part of a militia, there is no constitutional individual right to possess guns, and that the government may regulate gun possession. (2) Gun-proponents know this so well that they have hardly ever tried to use the Second Amendment in court cases. They've made the public think they have, but they haven't. The five main arguments used by opponents of gun control don't hold much water. Henry A. Landsberger is a retired professor of sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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If you can't fight City Hall, at least defecate on the steps.
