Word: handgun
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...wake of the shooting of President Reagan, the lobby is ready to ward off another wave of proposed gun laws. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Congressman Peter Rodino of New Jersey last week introduced a bill that would ban the import, manufacture and sale of cheap, easily concealable handguns, known as "Saturday night specials," and require a three-week wait between the purchase and pickup of any handgun. Not only does the gun lobby have its cross hairs set to shoot that bill down; gun lobbyists even hope to pass a gun bill of their own that would riddle...
...sound and the fury of the gun lobby can also be seen whenever a bill is proposed in state legislatures. In Missouri, for example, a proposal was made to ban private handgun sales. At the hearings on April 1, only two people showed up to testify in favor of the ban. But the N.R.A. corralled 6,000 fervent opponents to converge on the capital, Jefferson City (pop. 57,000), jamming traffic into town. Willis Corbett, the N.R.A. regional representative, said such a bill was "dangerous." At a public hearing on a New Jersey bill that would ban handguns, held...
...primitive impulses originate. To go partners with that throwback, Americans have carried out of their own history another curiosity that evolution forgot to discard as the country changed from a sparsely populated, underpoliced agrarian society to a modern industrial civilization. That vestige is the gun-most notoriously the handgun, an anachronistic tool still much...
After one more handgun made it into American history last week (another nastily poignant little "Saturday night" .22 that lay Uke an orphan in a Dallas pawnshop until another of those clammy losers took it back to his rented room to dream on), a lot of Americans said to themselves, "Well, maybe this will finally persuade them to do something about those damned guns." Nobody would lay a dime on it. The National Rifle Association battened down its hatches for a siege of rough editorial weather, but calculated that the antigun indignation would presently subside, just as it always does...
Americans themselves are profoundly discouraged by the handguns that seem to breed uncontrollably among them like roaches. For years the majority of them have favored restrictions on handguns. In 1938 a Gallup poll discovered that 84% wanted gun controls. The latest Gallup finds that 62% want stricter laws governing handgun sales. Yet Americans go on buying handguns at the rate of one every 13 seconds. The murder rate keeps rising. It is both a cause and an effect of gun sales...