Books: Guns Unlimited

THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS by Carl Bakal. 392 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

When the Founding Fathers wrote Article II of the Bill of Rights, they considered that the right to bear arms was eminently sensible for a sober people who had to tame a raw land with hundreds of perilous frontiers. The U.S. of 1966 has no marauding Redcoats or redskins, but it still has plenty of guns. Firearms can be bought by any kook or crook in Maryland pawnshops, in Texas sporting-goods stores or from any one of hundreds of mail-order houses—as the assassination of President Kennedy tragically illustrated.

This angry book by a Manhattan public relations man, who has also written half a dozen magazine articles on the subject, is the first ever aimed solely at the problem of arms control within the U.S. Even before publication it provoked a flurry of attention from gun manufacturers, sportsmen’s clubs, self-styled patriotic organizations, and the 700,000-member National Rifle Association, all of which are opposing a bill, now in a Senate subcommittee, that would put stiffer federal limits on the import and sale of firearms. Bakal’s work seems certain to become one of the most widely debated books of the year. The publisher, hoping that it will stir as much commotion as Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s polemic against insecticides, likes to call it Silent Springfield.

Worse than War. Bakal offers some unnerving statistics to back his thesis that firearms have become a national menace. Firearm fatalities amount to 17,000 each year—5,000 murders and 12,000 accidents and suicides. Since 1900, guns have brought death to approximately 750,000 people in the U.S., considerably more than the 530,000 Americans killed in all U.S. wars. Many of the criminal killings would have occurred anyway—a person bent on murder could always use another weapon—but the easy availability of guns undoubtedly swelled the total.

Almost half of the guns used in murders in 1963 and 1964 were bought—with shocking ease—through the mail. Forty-two states do not require persons to get licenses to buy hand guns, and in those states and areas with licensing laws, almost anyone who has the price of a pistol can get one. In Washington, D.C., police checked 200 persons who had received mail-order guns, found 25% of them had criminal records. In New Jersey, the Paterson Morning Call last November marked the second anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination by ordering a .38-cal. revolver by mail in the name of L. H. Oswald. It was promptly delivered.

Though the Federal Firearms Act prohibits the mailing of hand guns, except to military officers, policemen, Government watchmen and other authorized persons, mail-order dealers commonly get around this barrier by shipping pistols and revolvers by common carriers and commercial delivery services. No federal law requires the shippers to question the qualifications of the buyer or notify police. Some dealers also offer a variety of heavy, war-surplus antitank guns and bazookas. One youngster with a mail-order bazooka shot several thousand dollars’ worth of transformers off utility posts before he was arrested. Four California youths, using a 20-mm. antitank gun bought for $150, shot a blast that set fire to part of the Angeles National Forest.

Off Target. Like many polemics, Bakal’s book is weakened by intemperate tone, Sunday supplement style, exaggerations and errors. It is obviously not true that “guns are made only to put a bullet through a living body, in order to kill.” Most ammunition sold in the U.S. each year is shot up by skeet-and trapshooters, rifle-match enthusiasts and wood-lot plinkers—gunmen no more bloodthirsty than golfers or bowlers. Yet that does not detract from the main point: U.S. gun laws are an ineffective muddle, and the nation would benefit from stricter enforcement of existing laws and sterner controls to keep arms out of irresponsible hands.