Gun control, not bans

The April 7 letter "Violent people" stated that gun control laws do not reduce crime. Yet the writer said he "has no problem with improving the background checks for gun purchases."

U.S. Justice Department statistics show that the 1994 federal Brady Law requiring background checks blocked 1.5 million felons and other prohibited persons from purchasing firearms. It helped reduce homicides from more than 18,000 a year in 1993 to about 12,000 in 2005.

Reasonable gun control laws help keep guns from criminals, youths, the dangerous mentally ill and domestic abusers. We need to expand the Brady Law to cover all gun sales, not just those at gun stores.

Although my organization does not advocate banning handguns, we note that Washington's gun homicide rates decreased by 25 percent following its 1976 handgun ban (April New England Journal of Medicine). Rates would be lower were criminals unable to acquire guns from states.

United Kingdom criminals acquired guns from other countries after the 1996 handgun ban, and gun homicide rates increased slightly, but the number decreased from 73 in 2004 to 59 in 2007. New restrictions on gun importation should further decrease deaths.

Background checks on gun sales do not take guns away from "law-abiding" citizens. We hope the writer and other responsible gun owners join us to call for reasonable laws to reduce easy access to guns by dangerous people.

Lisa Price

Executive Director (Retired)

North Carolinians Against Gun Violence

Durham

Straight-shooting story

I thoroughly enjoyed your April 21 article "Gun event aims to make women friends of firearms" about the Ladies Day Event at the Sir Walter Shooting Club.

I was pleased to see a shooting event such as this appear in a local newspaper. Normally the only gun news in the paper is the bad news that is created by bad people misusing guns.

Guns are not bad, only some people who misuse them.

Tom Wetherington

Raleigh

Judgment is the issue

In latching onto the guns in the April 9 article "Dueling priorities," I think people have missed the point.

The article quoted Roxane Kolar of North Carolinians Against Gun Violence as saying, "You have to assume a school knows what's best for their school." Usually, I would agree but not in this case. How can we, given that school officials found out about the competition a mere seven months after the club started training for it?

Guns are serious business, but not as serious as the care and education of public school students. If firearms activities are considered dangerous enough to merit a policy against them, how are we to evaluate the judgment of those who failed to notice an apparent open violation of that policy for three-quarters of a school year? And how are we to judge the educational wisdom of those who throw away, at the last minute, seven months worth of students' preparation and training because they, the administrators, were not paying attention? (We are not talking about keeping tabs on the underwater basketweaving team here!)

The danger here has nothing to do with guns. It has everything to do with the ignorance and lapse in responsibility of school officials.

Kathleen S. Volcjak

Garner

Selling snake oil

Regarding the April 16 Point of View piece "Acting against gun violence" by the esteemed leaders of Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill:

It is sad that they, too, have resorted to recycling the worn-out idea of gun control as a means to reduce violent crime. Generally, it is self-serving politicians such as mayors, governors and congressmen who promote gun control snake oil -- now apparently renamed as "sensible gun laws."

Yet another gun control law would be as effective in reducing violent crime as canceling the Duke lacrosse season was for rape prevention.

John Posthill

Chapel Hill

Playing on emotion

In response to the April 16 article "Gun protesters mark Virginia Tech anniversary," I am concerned to see Eve Carson and other recent local shooting victims' names mentioned. I am disappointed that these protesters would use the anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings to try and bolster their political message and further attempt to draw in Eve Carson and these other shootings.

Obviously, this anniversary combined with the still recent events of local shootings draws a lot of emotion into this issue. Any organization that relies on emotion rather than reasonable arguments to get points across should be considered with heavy scrutiny.

Combine this with the fact that the majority of the protesters' proposed solutions have nothing to do with the VT shooting (the guns used in the VT shooting were bought with a background check at a gun store and not at a gun show) and even less with these local shootings, and you have an organization that is using the deaths of these students to play to the advantage of its political agenda. It bothers me that a nonpartisan public university official would take such a major role at an event disguised as a memorial but clearly a political protest.

Stephan Hudson

Chapel Hill

Gender and violence

As a UNC-Chapel Hill student, I want to thank Duke President Richard Brodhead and UNC Chancellor James Moeser for their April 16 Point of View piece in which they addressed the importance of stricter gun laws.

I feel it is crucial, however, to call attention to what they did not mention: gender.

The overwhelming majority of interpersonal violence -- 95 percent to 99 percent -- is perpetrated by men against women and by men against men. It is not just people or students committing the crimes cited by Brodhead and Moeser, but men. It is not youth violence; it is men's violence against women.

Investigating the deep systemic problems in our criminal justice system is absolutely a must, but we must also face the deep systemic problems in our social constructions of what it means to be a man, and the grievous repercussions this has for the women in our lives. Many men do not commit acts of violence against women, but all men are part of the system of masculinity.

We cannot end violence if we do not acknowledge the role sexism, power and dominance play in our reality and how each of us perpetuates these norms by not naming the perpetrator.

Megan Rolfe

Chapel Hill

Spinless sources

I am writing in response to the April 15 letter "Fighting with facts," which suggested three Web sites where one should seek statistical information regarding gun injuries and death. Predictably, all these Web sources were agenda-driven (anti-gun) sites, the most-glaring of which was the "Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence."

In reality, the only sources I would consider to be without "spin" are the various local/state/federal law enforcement agencies. These sources provide raw statistical information, which lends itself to interpretation free of bias. In addition, the metrics provided annually by the National Safety Council, National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Department of Human Services can often be helpful in providing the perspective necessary for comparing the numbers of firearm deaths (both accidental and intentional) with all other causes.

Brian Sorber

Wake Forest

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