-- More than 90% of police chiefs and sheriffs surveyed agree that criminals are not affected by a ban on any type of firearm, while more than 70% oppose "waiting periods" for the same reason. -- A prisoner survey conducted by James D. Wright et al. found that unarmed felons listed tougher penalties for using a gun as an important reason for not arming themselves. -- 75%-80% of U.S. violent crimes are committed by career criminals, many on some form of conditional or early release (30%-35% of career criminals are rearrested with previous criminal charges still pending). -- Gary Kleck found that using a gun for protection from violent crime -- rape, robbery, assault -- reduces the likelihood that the crime will be completed and that intended victims will be injured. Clearly, the issue at hand is not gun control but, rather, crime control. According to Mr. Gartner, "this year about 3,000 teen-agers . . . will use handguns to kill themselves. Some 9,000 adults will do the same." Suicides are, without doubt, tragic events affecting parents, families and society. Is how these people killed themselves the real issue, or is why more important? The unfortunate truth is that if a person is desperate or depressed enough to commit suicide, he will find a way to do it. Guns or no guns. The most important fact of all must not be overlooked. Criminals don't care about gun-control laws. They never have and they never will. Frank T. Iorio Mamaroneck, N.Y. --- As a life member of the National Rifle Association, I agree with Mr. Gartner -- it is not too much to ask for a nationwide "seven-day `cooling-off' period" (the Brady Bill) to give the authorities time for background checks. As a law-abiding citizen, it would be of comfort to know that other potential handgun buyers would be screened and keep those with a criminal past from owning a handgun. The reason Washington has yet to enact serious gun-control laws is due to the enormous voting and financial pressure of the pro-gun lobby. While Congress is congratulating itself on how well it acted during the vote on the Persian Gulf war, more than 100 body bags were filled here in the U.S. due to handgun violence. The NRA has not acted prudently and is alienating the support and respect of many legislators, police departments and its members. James Forbes Atlanta --- It is refreshing to read the actual motives of those who claim they simply want a waiting period for the purchase of a handgun. Mr. Gartner has now made it abundantly clear that his goal is the elimination of handguns from our society. I find it incongruous that the president of NBC News, a man who should believe in the broadening of constitutional rights, obviously has no regard for the Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. I am sure that if there were a movement to narrow and restrict the First Amendment freedoms of the press, he would be at the forefront of the opposition. Mr. Gartner ignores the key issues regarding suicide and crime. The problem is not the instrument used to kill oneself or someone else. The problems are the breakdown of the family (black and white); an education system that fails to educate; poverty; illegal drugs, and emasculated police, justice and penal systems. This has been the message preached by the NRA for years. As evidenced by New York City and Washington, which have the nation's strictest gun-control laws and virtually ban the ownership of handguns by law-abiding citizens, Mr. Gartner's placebo doesn't work because it ignores the root causes of suicide and crime. Richard W. Bonds Cordova, Tenn. --- Mr. Gartner should have read The Federalist No. 46 by James Madison before he wrote his anti-gun diatribe. If he had, he would understand that the constitutional guarantee of uninfringed firearms possession is for protection against tyranny. It has nothing to do with duck hunting or target shooting. Furthermore, Madison makes it clear that state militias, by the fact of their being organized, would give private arms their greatest effectiveness in the resistance to tyranny. Otherwise, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, "the citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair." Thus the "well-organized militia" phrase in the Second Amendment was not intended to restrict arms to those in the militia -- as the anti-gun lobby would have us believe. When we realize that the individual right to keep and bear arms is our ultimate defense against tyranny, all of the arguments about magazine capacity, armor-piercing bullets, sporting use, etc. suddenly stand before us in their naked falsity. Robert M. Beckett Fountain Valley, Calif.
The Wall Street Journal received four letters on gun control in response to an op-ed article. A life member of the NRA endorsed the Brady Bill waiting period and criticized the NRA's work against it. Three others argued: that criminals don't care about gun-control laws and having a gun for self-protection reduces the serious effects of crime; that the op-ed piece showed the real objective of the waiting period is to eliminate handguns from our society while it's the society, not the guns that are at fault; and that the individual right to keep and bear arms is our ultimate defense against tyranny.