In reply to Sarah Leonard’s endorsement of Vice-President Gore and his anti-gun policies, I would like to pose a question: What is the purpose of new firearms legislation?

If it is to draw political attention and to unite an ill-informed public in the undeserved persecution of the “bogeymen” of law-abiding gun owners and the NRA, then they are doing an admirable job.

If the purpose is to prevent violent crime and imprison criminals, the effort is sadly lacking.

Ms. Leonard leads off her column with a list of recent, high profile criminals, beginning with Buford Furrow, the shooter in the L.A. community center murders. Her article implies that if only we had stricter gun control, these events would never have occurred. The facts do not support her conclusion; everything a criminal can do with a gun is already illegal.

Uzis are banned under California’s Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act. It is a violation of the Federal Gun Control Act of 1968 for a convicted felon or a person with a history of mental illness to possess a firearm.

Furrow qualified on both counts after being convicted of attacking a nurse in a Seattle psychiatric hospital with a knife.

Mark Barton was suspected of the murder of his wife and mother-in-law in Alabama in 1993.

Captain Jerry Wynn, an investigator in the Atlanta shooting case, was quoted as saying of the Alabama investigators that: “Things should have been done they didn’t do. If they’d done their jobs, maybe 12 people wouldn’t be dead today.”

Incidentally, Barton’s weapon of choice for the first three murders in his July killing spree, those of his wife and children, was a common hammer.

Ms. Leonard writes that: “The gun-related death rate is at an average of 87 people per day.” This totals approximately 31,755 gun-related deaths per year. She neglects to inform us of the 2.5 million times each year that private citizens use firearms in self-defense, usually without firing a shot.

She also fails to mention that civilians with guns can intercede and stop the action before the police can arrive, as occurred in two recent school-related shootings.

In the Edinborough, Penn. shooting, the shooter was subdued by a civilian with a shotgun, who held him for ten minutes before police arrived. And in the Pearl, Miss., shooting, the assistant principal retrieved a .45 from his car and used it to capture Luke Woodham after Woodham killed his mother and two schoolmates.

Ms. Leonard cites a Newsweek article: “At the rate we’re going, three years from now gun-related deaths will surpass those of car-related to become the leading cause of death in the country.”

Newsweek’s information disagrees with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which indicates that the death rates from motor vehicle related injuries have been steady since 1993, while those from firearm-related injuries have been declining.

Citing other news articles, Ms. Leonard writes that “The Brady Bill … blocked the sale of 400,000 handguns.” The Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics disagrees, reporting that between March 1, 1994, and November 29, 1998, 312,000 handgun purchase applications were denied, which represents 2.4 percent of all applications. Additionally, in a report covering the first seventeen months of Brady implementation to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the General Accounting Office found that, of the jurisdictions surveyed, 7.6 percent of denials were for traffic offenses, and 38.9 percent were for administrative reasons. Of the administrative denials, 97.2 percent were rejected because the gun dealer sent the application to the wrong law enforcement agency.

Bottom line, nearly half of the purchase denials were for reasons no more serious than traffic offenses.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough laws, it’s that the laws that we have aren’t being enforced.

Furrow only served five months for his knife attack on the Seattle nurse, where he could have been sentenced for up to life imprisonment for first degree assault, a Class A felony.

In the Springfield school shooting, Kip Kinkel was suspended from school when he was found with a stolen handgun.

Instead of being expelled as required by the Gun-Free Schools Act and arrested for violation of a federal offense under 18 USC 922, he was subsequently released to the custody of his parents whom he killed several hours later.

The GAO report found that 87 percent of the Brady related cases that were referred to the U.S. Attorney were declined for prosecution and that, after seventeen months, only seven people nationwide had been successfully prosecuted.

The Department of Justice Office of Legislative Affairs stated that Brady was intended merely as a deterrent and that ” … the statute was not primarily intended as a prosecutive mechanism …”

Additionally, between 1993 and 1996, the percentage of all federal weapons offenses referred to U.S. Attorneys that were prosecuted in district court dropped from 70 percent to 62.8 percent.

If gun laws are not going to be enforced, why pass them unless the real purpose is to disarm the law-abiding public?

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Craig Whitmore

Assistant scientist

Center for Nondestructive

Evaluation