Word: handgun
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Many gun owners say this "right" to carry a handgun is guaranteed by the second amendment to the Constitution, which speaks of the states' rights to support a militia. But the Supreme Court has ruled time and time again that the second amendment has nothing to do with the individual's right to bear arms...
...There's a legitimate place for the handgun in self-defense, because there are a lot of cases where only very violent methods of self-defense are sufficient," Cassidy, an ex-marine, says. "In most violent crimes, the victim is older, less vicious and weaker than the attacker. You've got to remember that originally, guns came into effect as equalizers...
However, gun control advocates have long been citing statistics showing that when the victim of a crime is carrying a handgun, the odds are better than six to one that his assailant will use it against him. As long ago as 1968 a report by the Eisenhower Commission on Firearms and Violence concluded that nationally, the use of guns had thwarted only about two per cent of burglaries and home robberies...
...Eisenhower Commission was the result of a growing furor that arose after easily acquired rifles had killed President Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and after Robert F. Kennedy was killed by a handgun a child could have bought...
Last winter, Dr. Gerald Wohlberg, a psychiatrist at Boston State Hospital, was doing a routine day's work when a patient of his burst in with a handgun and shot him in the head. His wife Janet watched with her children as Wohlberg, in a coma for weeks, died a slow death. "It was such a small wound," she said at a press conference announcing the formation of People vs. Handguns, which she helped found. "But it blinded and deafened, then paralyzed him, and finally it stopped his respiration and suffocated...