NRA Attack on Center Funding

Your Oct. 9 editorial, “An NRA Potshot at Science,” does not accurately explain why NRA members are asking that the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control be de-funded. The NCIPC, like its parent, the Centers for Disease Control, is using tax dollars to lobby for more gun control laws. How can anyone support forcing 3.5 million NRA members and the millions of others who share our views to pay for a government agency to lobby against us? Who can support wasting tax dollars to promote gun control laws that have proven completely ineffective at reducing either accidental or criminal gun deaths?

If you want to reduce crime, join the NRA and get involved in our CrimeStrike program. NRA-supported three-strikes laws and parole reform are proving more effective at combatting crime than the 20,000-plus gun control laws already on the books. Stiffer penalties for gun crimes, another NRA-supported measure, would help keep violent criminals off the streets, or they would if these laws were actually enforced. Waiting periods and gun bans haven’t reduced crime in California--keeping violent criminals in prison will.

As for gun accidents, I have yet to see anyone from the gun control lobby credit the NRA and its education programs for their part in reducing accidental death and injury. Since 1930, the number of deaths due to firearms accidents has decreased 55%, despite increases in both population and the number of privately owned guns. Accidental firearms deaths among children are down 64% since 1975.

JOHN M. BENNETT

Communications Chairman

NRA Members’ Council of the South Bay

Torrance

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* The CDC’s Center for Injury Prevention and Control published a paper in 1993 entitled “Public Health Policy for Preventing Violence.” The authors recommend restrictive licensing and outright prohibition of gun ownership as strategies for preventing firearm injuries. This is contrary to your assertion that they avoid any direct stand on gun control.

Worse, the CDC funded a newsletter published by the San Francisco gun prohibition group the Trauma Foundation. In this federal-tax-funded newsletter the reader is advised to organize picket lines at gun manufacturing sites and to work to “weaken the gun lobby’s political clout.”

These activities constitute clearly partisan and distinctly unscientific conduct.

TIMOTHY WHEELER MD, Director

Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership

Claremont

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* Timothy Morton’s call for more gun control (letter, Oct. 9) is typical of the “quick fix” mentality that permeates our society. California already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country and with no appreciable decrease in crime.

If you truly want to make a difference, try enforcement of the existing laws, then convicting and locking up these ignorant, arrogant and undisciplined killers. As long as you are willing to ignore or not enforce the existing laws, stop trying to engineer social change by introducing new ones! Try gang control instead of gun control. You’ll be surprised at the difference.

RONALD D. BLACKWOOD

Irvine

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* Invariably the bottom line in studies made of gang violence is a call for more jobs (“Medical Researchers Call Gang Killings ‘Epidemic’ in County,” Oct. 4). However, the infusion of job money into the economy by all levels of government is being reduced. Until we collectively decide that the pain and fear we are enduring is worthy of reversing that trend in order to provide for the underprivileged, the killing fields in our streets will continue to flourish.

HENRY CERVANTES

Marina del Rey