To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (36656 ) 5/2/1999 8:34:00 PM From: jbe Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Lather, I have to confess that I personally have not studied up on all the facts & facets of the gun control issue. Hence, I do not have a ready-made opinion on it. (After all, one does not have to have an opinion on everything !)Concluding that guns should be banned is an unwarranted leap of logic. It is the undisclosed injection of an opinion concerning policy. Undisclosed ? How would you know that their policy recommendation is to declare gun ownership a Health Crisis if they had not disclosed it? (I realize that you said the "injection" was undisclosed, but that does not make much sense to me, so I am presuming that is not what you meant.) More importantly: government agencies often make (and act on) their own policy recommendations, usually enshrined in the form of "regulations" of one sort or another. Is the CDC any different, in this regard? criminal activity with guns, generally the kind that can be anticipated. If I recall correctly, a goodly percentage of murders by firearms in this country are committed by "non-criminals", such as the upstanding citizen who in a fit of passion grabs a gun from the bedside table and shoots the cheating spouse dead on the spot. Don't say that he (or she), if deprived of a gun, would simply bludgeon or knife the spouse to death. A gun puts a distance (psychological as well as physical) between the non-criminal impulsive murderer and the victim; I would suspect that he would not have the stomach to murder anyone up close. A gun makes it too "easy". We have a serious violence problem in this country. I don't want to softpedal that. But imho a lot of it has to do with our law enforcement and judicial culture.
