NRA and Guns: Why Doesn’t the Press Discuss Car Control?

As a longtime National Rifle Assn. member, I wasn’t surprised at Eric Lichtblau’s Reporter’s Notebook column, “Pistol-Packin’ Baby . . . “ (June 17) in which he makes the usual and typical disparaging comments about the NRA, admits his experience with firearms is limited to use of a childhood cap gun, and deplores “all the gun-related tragedies I and every other reporter have covered.”

Why would a “legitimate gun owner” be opposed to those vaunted panaceas to gun violence--registration and waiting period--Lichtblau asks. Indeed, why would gun owners be opposed to greater government control over their lives and over those awful guns? After all, isn’t ever-bigger and more-powerful government the answer to all of society’s problems? I strongly suspect Lichtblau is imbued with the standard elitist leftist media biases, prominent among which is finding abhorrent the freedom of the common people to possess firearms.

Crime, and particularly gun violence, is a favored and major part of the daily grist of newspapers and other media. It is quick and relatively easy to gather and present, it’s sensational, and it sells.

Reporters who cover “all the gun-related tragedies” tend--their left-wing biases notwithstanding--to see them as ubiquitous in our society and fail to view them in perspective.

For example, why isn’t the press clamoring for much greater restrictions on driving privileges and ownership of cars and trucks by the public in light of the nearly 50,000 deaths annually in this country from vehicular mishaps? These deaths are far greater than the deaths from “all the gun-related tragedies” each year in this country.

JAMES R. BENSON

El Toro