Gun Control and Who’s in the Right

* In his letter Aug. 10, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Director Michael Beard expressed his true feeling in his support of Mary Leigh Blek and Ellen Freudenheim’s effort to tighten restrictions on handgun manufacture (Orange County Voices, June 7).

Beard and cohorts claim their agenda is to subject handguns to the same safety regulations as toasters and teddy bears. However, Beard’s own statement, “The more we do to restrict the availability of handguns, the more lives we will save,” suggests otherwise.

Beard’s group is not interested in making handguns “safe” as much as in making them illegal for law-abiding citizens to own for defense. Nothing Beard’s group advocates directly affects criminals; the first people to feel the weight of a gun control law are the law-abiding citizens.

Beard also said, “People with handguns kill, while people armed with less lethal weapons injure.” He ignores the fact that most instances in which a handgun is used for protection result in the criminal being captured, frightened away by the display of a gun, or “injured” and not killed.

Most criminals are larger, stronger and more aggressive than those they prey upon. It is difficult to imagine an elderly man or woman having a chance against determined or drugged attacker on PCP with one of Beard’s “less lethal” means of defense. The benefit of gun ownership should be given to law-abiding citizens, not be given by default to criminals who by nature and definition will remain armed no matter what laws Beard and his comrades pass.

MICHAEL THOMAS

Lake Forest

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* I sympathize with Blek. I lost a brother in 1977 to a drive-by shooting five days after Christmas. It was and still is not pleasant to my soul.

Yet I do not wish to ban guns as a deterrent to criminal activity, human instability or political agendas. I believe in crime control and criminal control, the Constitution and the rights of “We the people.”

GARY HILL

Buena Park