Word: bakal
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...RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS, by Carl Bakal. Like many polemics, this angry book is flawed by errors and exaggerations, but it offers unnerving evidence that U.S. gun laws are an ineffective muddle and that sterner controls are needed to keep firearms out of irresponsible hands...
...RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS, by Carl Bakal. An often intemperate but thought-provoking polemic against the easy availability of firearms, which cause close to 17,000 deaths yearly...
...provoked a flurry of attention from gun manufacturers, sportsmen's clubs, self-styled patriotic organizations, and the 700,000-member National Rifle Association, all of which are opposing a bill, now in a Senate subcommittee, that would put stiffer federal limits on the import and sale of firearms. Bakal's work seems certain to become one of the most widely debated books of the year. The publisher, hoping that it will stir as much commotion as Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's polemic against insecticides, likes to call it Silent Springfield...
Worse than War. Bakal offers some unnerving statistics to back his thesis that firearms have become a national menace. Firearm fatalities amount to 17,000 each year-5,000 murders and 12,000 accidents and suicides. Since 1900, guns have brought death to approximately 750,000 people in the U.S., considerably more than the 530,000 Americans killed in all U.S. wars. Many of the criminal killings would have occurred anyway-a person bent on murder could always use another weapon-but the easy availability of guns undoubtedly swelled the total...
...Target. Like many polemics, Bakal's book is weakened by intemperate tone, Sunday supplement style, exaggerations and errors. It is obviously not true that "guns are made only to put a bullet through a living body, in order to kill." Most ammunition sold in the U.S. each year is shot up by skeet-and trapshooters, rifle-match enthusiasts and wood-lot plinkers-gunmen no more bloodthirsty than golfers or bowlers. Yet that does not detract from the main point: U.S. gun laws are an ineffective muddle, and the nation would benefit from stricter enforcement of existing laws and sterner...