LETTERS IN VIEW : Gun Control Arguments Aim at Targets

The United States pays a terrible price for its misguided reasoning on the question of gun control. Your article “On the Firing Line” (June 14) telling of the accidental deaths of two teen-aged boys in the Anaheim Hills home eloquently outlined the problem and recited the usual arguments of the gun lobby, but carefully sidestepped the inevitable conclusion.

Here we have 65 million handguns and thousands of accidental killings per year. If you would ask a citizen of any other country in the Western world what should be done, it seems fair to say the answer would be something like “For God’s sake, limit in some way the private ownership of handguns.” The American attitude against this reasonable suggestion is incomprehensible to most people abroad.

Education in how to shoot a gun isn’t going to do it. Does training a person how to drive a car in any material way reduce the number of auto accidents per year? Putting guns in locked drawers at home flies in the very face of the argument of owning a gun for home protection. When you need the gun in case of a break-in, you need it quickly.

No, the old arguments don’t wash. The poor father in Anaheim who mourns his son and believes “there’s nothing wrong with keeping a gun” is misguided. In a nation where everyone owns a gun, not one woman, man or child is safe.

DAVID KUHNER

Pomona