Letters

From the February 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Statistics first. In answer to Lambert, there are two different sets of official English crime figures --the British Crime Survey figures, which Lambert cites, and the annual, and sometimes more frequent, figures produced by Scotland Yard.

For the most recent rates, those since the 1997 handgun ban, I have depended on Scotland Yard's figures. These indicate that from 1997 through 2001 violent crime as a whole more than doubled. There are good reasons to credit the police figures. They are not likely to exaggerate the rates of the most serious crimes and have been corroborated by independent studies. The police found not only a 53 percent increase in armed robbery between April and November 2001 --a statistic Whitehead dismisses as "almost certainly a random fluctuation" --but also that murders with a firearm rose by 87 percent during the same period. In fact, in the three years from 1998 to 2001, firearm-related homicides increased by 49 percent. This trend is supported by a Kings College, London, study that found handgun crime rose by 40 percent in the two years after the handgun ban.

If all this constitutes gun control's success in reducing gun crime, one wonders what these men would regard as failure. As for violent crime generally, a U.N. survey of crime in 18 industrialized countries, including America, found people in England and Wales experience more crime per head than people in the other 17 countries and also have the worst record for "very serious" offenses.

Now for self-defense. Whitehead is correct that government has a responsibility to keep order. But that is not the same as giving it a monopoly over the individual's right to protect himself by depriving him of all credible means of protection. As a member of the British House of Commons argued, "one has to remember that there are many places where society cannot get, or cannot get there in time. On those occasions a man has to defend himself and those whom he is escorting. It is not very much consolation that society will come forward a great deal later, pick up the bits, and punish the violent offender." The English case shows that public safety is not enhanced by depriving people of their right to personal safety.

True Patriots

Reading Jacob Sullum's objective and measured "Pride and Prejudice" (November), contrasting Bill Bennett's and Noam Chomsky's views on patriotism, I realized that neither seems to have grasped the greater truth.

This country's bedrock survival policy for 200 or so years has been the "balance of power," preventing any one hegemonic power from dominating a major segment of our planet. This policy found its most serious challenge in the Cold War.

We beat the Soviets not only by outproducing, outspending, and out-maneuvering them. We beat them by buying friends, bargaining with tyrants, bribing undesirables, and intimidating the weak. In dealing with the corrupt and greedy of the world, we simultaneously fell short of Bennett's shining, flawless ideal and offended Chomsky. Of course we made enemies --to eliminate a global threat.

Ronald M. Wade
Rockwall, TX

Jacob Sullum thinks "it is the deliberate targeting of civilians that is the sine qua non of terrorism." But my dictionary's only definition of terrorism is "the systematic use of terror, violence, and intimidation to achieve an end."

Even using Sullum's definition, it seems our government's policies in the Middle East, in Colombia, and in a very long list of past foreign interventions easily qualify as "systematic use of terror, violence, and intimidation to achieve an end." Don't mostly civilians suffer from these policies?

That Noam Chomsky's death figures for the Iraqi embargo or Afghan bombings are a "wild exaggeration" doesn't mean these government policies weren't terrorism. How many have to die? Weren't those civilians targeted?

I was disappointed Sullum let our government off so easy.

Carmen Yarrusso
Brookline, NH

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.13.10 @ 12:20AM|#

btrh

log in or register to reply