Editor:
As a lifelong gun owner who
has never used a firearm inappropri-
ately, like 99.9 percent of us, I can’t
help but be offended by Ms. Diane
Daiute’s letter to the editor in the
August 1st edition of The New Era.
Actually, as a human being, I am of-
fended.
She stated that Americans don’t
care about or grieve for the children
killed in gun-related deaths. What!
I don’t know a single person who
doesn’t grieve over the loss of a
child, accidental or otherwise!
I grieve for any and every child
lost to any accident, whether a car
accident, drowning in a bucket or a
pool, stuck in household furniture,
run over by a lawnmower, backed
over by a delivery truck, or a bike or
skateboard accident.
It is horrible under any circum-
stances, but terrible accidents hap-
pen.
Editor:
As a lifelong gun owner who
has never used a firearm inappropri-
ately, like 99.9 percent of us, I can’t
help but be offended by Ms. Diane
Daiute’s letter to the editor in the
August 1st edition of The New Era.
Actually, as a human being, I am of-
fended.
She stated that Americans don’t
care about or grieve for the children
killed in gun-related deaths. What!
I don’t know a single person who
doesn’t grieve over the loss of a
child, accidental or otherwise!
I grieve for any and every child
lost to any accident, whether a car
accident, drowning in a bucket or a
pool, stuck in household furniture,
run over by a lawnmower, backed
over by a delivery truck, or a bike or
skateboard accident.
It is horrible under any circum-
stances, but terrible accidents hap-
pen.
The law-abiding gun owner side
of me takes even greater offense to
her statement that she feels all gun
owners are bad or as she states,
“only bad people own guns.” The
Sweet Home community must have
at least a 70-85 percent instance of
gun ownership so she is surrounded
by bad people.
As a bit of irony she believes
that combat veterans should be
leading the cause to ban
firearms.
You know why they, by and large,
don’t? Because they have been to
the messed-up countries where the
dictatorships have taken away the
citizens’ guns and seen that there,
in fact, only the bad people have the
guns.
That’s why we have to spend
trillions of dollars going in and
cleaning up their mess while sac-
rificing our soldiers’ precious lives
because they have no means of pro-
tecting or defending themselves.
Only the law-abiding follow the
laws; this is elementary thinking
here.
Giving Bill Clinton’s ineffec-
tual gun/high capacity magazine
ban credit for a reduction in crime
is laughable. All that it really did
was make it more expensive to ob-
tain still perfectly legal
firearms and
magazines.
If anything, it was a hindrance
to crime
fighting as it made it much
harder for police officers to obtain
high-capacity magazines to
fight
crime with. The red tape involved in
doing this discouraged many officers
into just giving up on the process. I
saw it with my own eyes many times
over. It lasted for 10 years and when
it expired there was virtually no one
interested in renewing it because of
its utter uselessness and was a prov-
en failure in every way.
The statistics thrown around are
very misleading. First of all, most of
the quoted ones are from the CDC.
This organization is as anti-gun as
the NRA is pro.
Anyone under 18 is considered
a “child” in these statistics. Homi-
cides are not broken down into jus-
tifiable and non-, so every 17-year-
old gang-banger shot by a police
officer or law-abiding citizen in self
defense is considered a “homicide.”
If that doesn’t skew the facts, I
don’t know what does! Inter-gang
homicides are also not taken into
account, rightly or wrongly.
I also don’t understand compar-
ing the number of pre-schoolers to
police officers as some kind of sta-
tistic. She quotes “those same two
years” but doesn’t specify which
two years. There are 26.7 million
children up to the age of 5 in the
U.S. and around 800,000 law en-
fforcement officers.
So out of 26,700,000 children
roughly 86 to 87 children were trag-
ically killed with
firearms, per year,
in some random two-year span, a
terrible thing. According to her sta-
tistics, out of the 800,000 police of-
ficers, 89 were killed in the line of
duty.
That is the most misleading sta-
tistic quoted by Ms. Daiute. That’s
44 to 45 per year but how many were
killed by
irearms? Accidents, espe-
cially traffic accidents, have been the
leading cause of death for police of-
icers in the line of duty until 2011. I
am saddened by any innocent death
but the percentages hardly suggest
an epidemic justifying the sacri
fice
of a constitutional right. The per-
centage of pre-schoolers killed by
a
firearm each year comes out to
0.0000032 percent. And for police
officers it is 0.000055 percent.
Also, why does the gun get the
blame? It is an inanimate object.
When a drunk driver kills someone,
no one blames the car. Someone
could do a lot more damage with a
Prius than an AR-15 and would be a
lot harder to stop.
If the gun doesn’t get the
blame, the NRA does, as proven by
Ms. Daiute’s letter. The NRA trains
1,300 law enforcement of
ficers each
year. That hardly suggests as Ms.
Daiute does, that “they have their
little gun safety classes, etc.”
In the state of Oregon, as well
as most others, you must take hand-
gun training in order to get a Con-
cealed Handgun License from an
NRA-certi
ied instructor. The NRA
is the acknowledged authority on
firearms training.
The NRA also has an excellent
gun safety program for children,
called the Eddie Eagle Program,
which could all but eliminate these
accidents in the
first place. It is com-
pletely free to any school or orga-
nization because it is paid forby us
evil NRA members.
This program has no political
aspirations. It simply tells the child
that, if they
ind a gun: don’t touch
it, leave the area and tell an adult. It
is as simple as that but it is not used
enough because of politics.
Our schools inform our chil-
dren about drugs, alcohol, smok-
ing, dangerous driving and sex-ed
but nothing about guns and then we
wonder why accidents happen. It’s
mind numbingly ignorant.
Now, for some real, plain-as
-the-nose-on-your-face numbers.
According to a year 2000 study and
survey/poll published in the Jour-
nal of Quantitative Criminology,
U.S. civilians use
firearms to de-
ffend themselves from crime at least
989,883 times per year.
Another 1994 survey, by the
CDC, found that Americans use
firearms to frighten away intruders
breaking into their homes 489,000
times per year. Even they couldn’t
deny reality.
Ms. Daiute, you ask “what’s
more important to me – my chil-
dren or my guns?” I’ll take the
0.0000032% chance of an acci-
dent (actually a lot less than that,
since my children have been taught
gun safety practically from birth)
against the fact that I am in the
group that has used my gun to stop
criminals from plying their trade,
and so have innumerable people I
know very well.
Guns in the hands of law-abid-
ing citizens stop crime, it’s an abso-
lute fact!
There was also some obscure
reference made about the set-
tlers along the Oregon Trail killing
themselves off with their shoo-
tin’ irons faster than hostile Indi-
ans could do it.
I doubt that statistic as much
as your other skewed ones, but I do
believe that the number of settlers
killed by hostiles was low and I
know why: They had guns!