Letter From the Editor

This past Tuesday, according to the Los Angeles Times, the Supreme Court “agreed to hear the Bush administration’s claim that the government’s national data on guns used in crimes need not be turned over to lawyers for the city of Chicago, which is suing the gun industry.” The city had sought records concerning the use of guns in violent crimes kept by the Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The city is seeking compensation for the release of a flood of handguns around the city, undermining the city’s ban on the purchase of new handguns and, in the words of city attorneys, creating a public nuisance within the city. That’s a polite way of saying that the flood of new guns within the city led to murders and violent crimes using guns. In light of the success of the GOP in the most recent election, which has largely been interpreted as a referendum on President Bush’s leadership, I was extremely disheartened to see the administration fighting an American city’s attempts to make use of public records to fight gun violence in its neighborhoods. This decision certainly comes from the top, since the average cop or federal law enforcement agent on the street tends to be pretty enthusiastic about gun control. I urge everyone who cares about preventing violent crimes, and the tragedies that result from them, to make clear to this administration that approval of their policies on national security and foreign policy does not translate into a mandate to coddle the gun industry at the expense of the American people. A person killed in an argument turned deadly by the introduction of a gun, or by a violent criminal, is just as surely dead as one killed by a terrorist attack, and approximately 10,000 people are killed in this way every year. Imagine the horror of the World Trade Center bombing repeated four or five times over, year after year, and you’ll have some idea of the human cost of gun violence. Instead of blocking local efforts to reduce gun violence, let’s see this administration support them by proposing a national licensing system for all handguns. If we can license cars, we can and should license handguns.