Word: handgun
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...proponents of the handgun ban claim it will reduce the availability of handguns and consequently reduce crime, murder, violence, suicide, and fatal accidents. John Buckley, Sheriff of Middlesex County and founder of People vs. Handguns, notes that 54 per cent of all murders are committed with handguns, 33 per cent of all robberies, and 25 per cent of all aggravated assaults. "The key to the issue," Buckley argues, "is that banning handguns will prevent crime before it occurs. If we want to make progress in the area of crime we've got to have prevention...
...afraid there is only one solution to the handgun problem: total elimination other than for police use. Just because a gun is registered, the victim is no less dead...
...individual rights and liberty are to be ignored, there are many ways to reduce crime, death, and violence. Far more people are killed in drunken driving accidents each year than in murders or accidents by handguns. Where are the calls to ban liquor because "the death toll mounts"? Or crime and death could be reduced by repealing the right of the accused to refuse to testify against himself or abolishing the requirements for warrants before the police can search a person's home. But such actions would be unjustifiable infringements on individual rights, just as a handgun ban would...
Additional problems of principle arise from the fact that a handgun ban would mean punishing one man for the crimes of another. It would mean punishing the law-abiding 99 per cent of all handgun owners abridging their rights for the crimes of the less than one per cent who misuse handguns. And most likely this one per cent will keep their guns in defiance of the law anyway. Furthermore, it is doubtful the law would be enforced against this one percent, because few laws, let alone gun laws, are enforced against the reckless criminal today. Common notions of justice...
OPPONENTS of the handgun ban seem to be on firm philosophical ground in focus on the criminal rather than the weapon. If Oswald shoots and kills Kennedy, what killed Kennedy, Oswald or the gun? Clearly Oswald is the killer because he set the killing process in motion...