Gun shy.

PositionEditor's Note - Editorial

AS THE EDITOR of a magazine that has long defended gun rights, I feel obliged to make an embarrassing confession: I've never squeezed the trigger on anything more powerful than a BB gun--and even that only a few times.

When I was 12 or 13, I had the opportunity to join a shooting club that practiced in a range setup in the basement of a nearby junior high school. (This was some 20 years before Columbine.) Excited at the prospect, I broached the subject one evening with my father. He had served as an infantryman in Europe during World War II, and I figured he'd share my enthusiasm to learn proper gun etiquette.

Instead, he became extremely agitated and upset. He stood up, pulled up his shirt, and placed my hand on five faded scars on the side of his stomach and his back. "Feel those?" he asked. "That's where I got shot in the war. That's what guns are good for--shooting and killing people." After that dramatic gesture, I decided not to join the club.

My father was right, of course, and he spoke with the authority of someone who had, as his discharge papers put it, "loaded, aimed, and fired rifles in combat with the enemy." Guns are good for shooting and killing people. That's the main reason that supporters of gun control want to impose severe, even unconstitutional limits on the right to own and bear arms. Yet it's precisely because guns are such powerful weapons that concentrating them into fewer and fewer hands creates many more problems than it solves.

That's one of the lessons of this issue's cover story, "Gun Control's Twisted Outcome," by historian Joyce Lee Malcolm, author of the indispensable new book Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard). Surveying changes in British law that have greatly restricted the right to self-defense...

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