Violence Policy Center comes out against ":smart guns"

J

jimpeel

New member
In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, Josh Sugarman came out against "smart guns" because they will increase sales. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/05/135l-030500-idx.html

This is in keeping with the organization's official policy. http://www.vpc.org//fact_sht/smartgun.htm

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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.
 
I haven't read this article since Sunday, but there is an interesting reference to Colt's claim that smart gun technology will result in 60 million new handguns sold to people who don't want a gun now. Whaddaprofitinthemaking. Also 60 million TFLers to be. John
 
These folks are just not very bright. Adept, perhaps, at flaming public opinion, but other than that, they skate on very thin ice.

At their own admission, accidental death by firearms is a very small number given our population. The lives saved through the self-defensive use of firearms clearly is greater than the accidental deaths (and probably greater by far than all deaths from handguns.)

Their point that suicide is one of the "big two" categories of death from firearms assumes that if you remove all firearms from the society, you would remove all suicides. Anyone who has looked at the numbers in countries without firearms realizes that suicides result from despair, not from having a gun around. People without firearms find other ways of killing themselves. Look at Japan, Australia, and so on.

The second of the "big two", death from handguns resulting from crime, is the most ridiculous, since criminals would always find weapons, whether from a molotov cocktail to a stick of dynamite, or a blade. Officers of the law will always have guns, so violent criminals are always going to die from firearms. Their victims may start dying from other weapons.

Where does that leave these folks.

Mental masturbation is how I see it.

[This message has been edited by Joseph (edited March 08, 2000).]
 
Joseph, I had some of the same thoughts.

Actually, if you read Sugarman carefully, he makes a pretty good RKBA case. His words may haunt him.

That's the tricky thing about the truth - it has a pesky way of sprouting, no matter how much you try to restrain it ...
 
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