Word: guns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...also bail him out of trouble. Last March, William Bennett, the new director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, temporarily banned imported assault weapons. Bush, a life member of the National Rifle Association, kept his distance in public. Opinion polls backed Bennett's move, but gun owners did not. N.R.A. lobbyists complained bitterly and even withheld a pivotal endorsement of Dan Heath, a Republican congressional candidate from Indiana, just a week before the March 28 special election. Heath lost the race by 1,778 votes...
Each month American Rifleman, the journal of the National Rifle Association, features about a dozen such accounts of armed citizens defending themselves against criminals. Based on newspaper clippings submitted by N.R.A. members, the stories dramatically show how a gun can sometimes prevent a crime and perhaps even save a victim's life...
...gun lobby lands on mushier ground, however, when it leaps from such / examples into a far broader argument: that more lives are saved than lost by the firearms Americans acquire to protect themselves and their property. The N.R.A. emphasized that claim in a two-page newspaper advertisement attacking TIME for its report ((July 17)) on 464 gun deaths that occurred in the U.S. in a single week, chosen at random. "Legally-owned firearms saved the lives of far more Americans than those lost during ((TIME's)) 'seven deadly days,' " the advertisement stated. "According to noted criminologist Dr. Gary Kleck...
...study did not consider the question of lives saved. Nor did he conclude, as the N.R.A. claims, that a crime or an assault had been "thwarted" in each of his estimated 645,000 (the ad upped it to 650,000) annual instances of a protective use of a gun. Kleck notes that his study may have included incidents in which a homeowner merely heard noisy youths outside his house, then shouted, "Hey, I've got a gun!" and never saw any possible attacker...
...even "busted" losing trades by simply destroying evidence of the transaction. Such practices represent "more stupidity than conspiracy," says a Board of Trade official. "It's scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, but it's done with the customer's money. You might as well have a gun and a mask...