Editor,
I want to place a few facts surrounding the ownership of guns.
Criminologists have found that citizens use firearms as often as 2.5 million times every year in self-defense, but in more than 90 percent of these defensive uses, citizens merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off the attacker. No one is killed or even injured in 90 percent of the cases.
Accidental gun deaths among children have declined by more than 50 percent in 25 years, even though the population and the gunstock have continued to increase. According to the National Safety Council, the decline has continued, as there were only 142 fatal gun accidents involving children in 1997.
Twice as many children are killed playing football in school than are murdered by guns, and more children will die in a car, drown in a pool or choke on food than will die by firearms.
So, by the gun-grabber's ideology, law-abiding citizens must have laws regulating where their children can stand in relation to their vehicle, eat their lunch, enjoy the pool or participate in school sports.
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If one is true, the other must be. If the government controls guns, children will be safer. If the government controls the food, children will not choke.
Gun control has done nothing to keep crime rates from rising in many of the nations that have imposed severe firearms restrictions. Readers of USA Today discovered in 2002 that "since Australia's 1996 laws banning most guns and making it a crime to use a gun defensively, armed robberies rose by 51 percent, unarmed robberies by 37 percent, assaults by 24 percent and kidnappings by 43 percent. While murders fell by 3 percent, manslaughter rose by 16 percent."
After enacting stringent gun control laws in 1991 and 1995, Canada has not made its citizens any safer. "The contrast between the criminal violence rates in the U.S. and in Canada is dramatic," Canadian criminologist Gary Mauser said in 2003.
According to BBC News, handgun crime in the United Kingdom rose by 40 percent in the two years after it passed its draconian gun ban in 1997. England is a prime example of how crime has increased after implementing gun control. For example, the original Pistols Act of 1903 did not stop murders from increasing on the island. The number of murders in England was 68 percent higher the year after the ban's enactment as opposed to the year before.
To clarify, criminals do not abide by the law, do not fill out paperwork, do not get trained or registered and will not abide by a gun-control law.
I'm keeping my .357 Magnum in my nightstand.
Jean Aragon
UNM student
