Marty Green’s point in “The Guns All Around Me” (Harvard Press, Jan. 22, 2016) reflected exactly the point I have made whenever an acquaintance asserts the need for a gun for personal protection. The likelihood of having the weapon available at the appropriate time, place, and circumstance must be very tiny for the average person. As she points out, training and experience are factors that will significantly influence the mental readiness for acting appropriately and successfully; the average person will not have it.
I, too, was brought up in a family that was trained and used guns for hunting, in rifle clubs, and in military training. As personal familiarity with accidents, suicides, and fatalities mounted, the willingness to have them in the home subsided. More to the point is the inability to verify data on the successful use of weapons in self-defense among the civilian population because, by various legislation, aggregation across governments (local and federal) and agencies is prohibited. In a blog posting in 2013 (“Legitimate Power Requires Knowledge”), I cited a lengthy article in The Atlantic magazine, “Gun Violence in America, the 13 Key Questions”; it discusses a legislation “rat’s nest” in the section entitled “What don’t we know yet?” The entire article can be found at www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/gun-violence-in-america-the-13-key-questions-with-13-concise-answers/272727/, and this section is near the end.
Nothing has changed since The Atlantic article was written, and we still don’t have the data we need to make informed decisions. The power to legislate these matters has been handed to those unwilling to collect and study legitimate facts, and guns are only one of many areas where that is the case. We all need to think about to whom we are handing power when we go to the polls, every time.
Thank you, Marty, for your thoughtful piece.
Lynda W. Moulton
Old Littleton Road
