4A
Wednesday, August 31, 1994
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Laws to control handguns magnifv violence
DAVE HULL
There is logic in the gun control movement but weak examples used to justify it.
Sixty-six point seven million.
It is a large number but it is little more than a quarter of all the firearms in the United States.
Those 66.7 million guns are handguns. And, actually, according to the Department of Justice, they are used to terrorize far more people than they kill.
Considering 22,000 people are killed with a handgun each year, the figures for those terrorized must be great. And they are.
Each day 33 women are raped by assailants wielding handguns, 575 people are robbed and another 1,116 are assaulted.
Given these figures, it is no wonder people like Senator John Chaffee of
Rhode Island and organizations like Gun Control Incorporated want to ban handguns.
But what is the relationship between the number of handguns in circulation and the rate of violent crime?
Chaffee and the folks at GCI believe the relationship is a directly proportionate one.
In support of this claim, they point to examples like Great Britain and Japan, countries with strict gun control laws and very low rates of violent crime.
If the logic of Chaffee and GCI were sound, countries like Switzerland, New Zealand and Israel should have violent crime rates much higher than they currently do.
Even on our own shores there are examples counter to the claims of Chaffee and GCI.
But they fail to acknowledge counterexamples. South Africa and Mexico both have very strict gun control laws and a murder rate twice that of
Florida, for example, has had a falling rate of violent crime since the introduction several years ago of a state law that makes it easier for ordinary citizens to carry concealed handguns.
the United States.
Even more impressive is the fact that Florida's murder rate has since fallen below the national average.
As of November, 1993, 183,561 permits had been issued and only 17 had been revoked because the holder committed a crime with a handgun.
On a national scale, according to the thinking of Chaffee and GCI, the U.S. should have experienced a dramatic increase in the rate of violent crime during the 1980s.
In that decade, the number of handguns in circulation increased by a million each year. In fact, violent crime rates in the United States remained below the peak levels of the previous decade.
Why, then, do proponents of gun control continue to call for the banning of handguns?
The answer is simple. It is easier to
pass laws banning handguns than it is to address the underlying motivations of violent criminals, namely that the risk of terrorizing others with a firearm is more profitable than working a legitimate job.
There is another factor at work as well. Criminals must weigh the possibility that victims will be able to fend them off.
And with each passage of a new restriction on handguns, criminals find themselves looking at a pool of victims increasingly unable to defend themselves.
Save Hull is a Wichita senior in history and philosophy.
VIEWPOINT
Extending Saferide program would make summers safer
The Saferide program is one of the most popular and widely used programs sponsored by the Student Senate. Saferide provides
a ride home for KU students who do not feel safe either walking home from the library or studio at night.
dents stay in town over the summer Saferide's value increases.
The Student Senate should offer Saferide in the summer by adding a
SAFERIDE
the summer
Saferide is a great program that needs to be available to students who stay in Lawrence over the summer.
or driving themselves home after a night on the town.
This invaluable service is not available during the summer semester.
nominal fee to the summer student fees.
As more and more stu-
Additionally, Saferide should be made available in the summer to
students who are not taking classes, but are enrolled in the coming fall semester, by giving them the option of joining the Saferide program for a small fee.
LOU MULLIGAN FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD.
Hiroshima bomber display sparks Smithsonian debate
The airplane that ushered in the modern era is shrouded in controversy nearly 50 years later. The debate surrounds Enola Gay, the
nese as victims.
B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
REMEMBERING WWII
The moral and military decision to use the bomb has been debated for years. However, it is not the museum's job to con-
Veterans will finally get their wish to see the plane
The Enola Gay should be displayed as a piece of history, accompanied only by nonbiased factual information.
in the Smithsonian.
tinue the debate.
Museums should present works of art and history,but they should not interpret
The controversy is about the way the plane is to be displayed. It reportedly treats the United States as aggressors and the Japa-
them.
The Enola Gay is far too important to be ignored or misconstrued. Let America see it and draw its own conclusions.
RICHARD BOYD FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD.
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Editors
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Letters should be type, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words. They must include the University of Kansas name include class and hometown, or faculty or staff position. Letters must include a university code.
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Not scheduling an instructor for the fourth section of Music History 136 is an administrative slip, readily understandable and excusable.
However, Music History 136 is a purely lecture course, with no laboratory to limit to the number of hearing terminals. With about 100 students in a section, distributing the fourth section to the other three will add about 33 more to each class.
It calls for no more burden on each of these three instructors than having to grade 33 additional papers for two or three hourly exams and a final.
Once it is more than 10 or so students, talk of instructor-student ratio is academic gibberish, whether it is one to 100 or one to 1,133 (with the fourth section distributed) makes little difference.
It is a burden an instructor must not only not grudge, but be excited about. "A seer is sayer" (Emerson), meaning, he who has worthwhile knowledge is under compulsion to say or disseminate it to as many as possible. The larger his audience, the more his excitement should be.
Also, it is a matter of 100 students being burdened with their section canceled or three instructors being a little more burdened, a ratio of 33 to one.
Big additional money or funding need not be forthcoming to pay the three instructors extra in proportion to their over-loading.
That such response and solution did not "instinctively occur" is a reflection of the sere and materialistic lack of "university spirit" and "scholarly temperament" on KU's faculty.
T. S. David Graduate Student
Robert Minor, in his rather simplistic "politically correct" analysis of gender conditioning for KU students, was wrong to include the church as an institutional culprit. ("Prof. Cautions KU Students on Gender Roles"). Also, he failed to mention the contribution of the feminist movement to the current battle between the sexes.
My years of experience as a psychotherapist convinced me that women who take religion seriously are much stronger than those who don't. They have a center of self-understanding from which they can relate much more independently to males. Women without religion are more likely to treat a relationship with a male idolatrous, (i.e., he loves me, therefore I am) making her more dependent upon the male and therefore more vulnerable to exploitation. Feminist leadership has done women a major diservice in leading them to believe, in the brain-washing crypto-therapeutic nonsense they call "consciousness-
raising," that they can solve the primary problem of identity apart from religion.
Both church and synagogue have always condemned the double standard and the sexual exploitation of women. The feminist movement, based largely upon an atheistic Marxist-class war dialectic (and therefore, without grounds for any serious discussion of morality) has betrayed women by encouraging a double standard for them also, and by doing so have delivered them right into the hands of the enemy, the exploitative male.
COLUMNIST
Instead of encouraging women to keep their legs closed and insisting that men shape up, feminist leadership, so eager to advance their real objective, an onslaught on the absolute moral standards of the church and synagogue, encourages immorality and exploitation by women, also leading to the next obvious problem, pregnancy, abortion and in general turning the relationship between the sexes into a loveless, abortion-riddled wasteland.
The feminist movement as presently conceived cannot fully succeed as long as church and synagogue stand. They are at odds on the true nature of women. For it to succeed would mean the end of love, for God, we are told, is love.
Leonard Magruder
DAVID ZIMMERMAN
Life's meaning found in faith not rock lyrics
This summer I saw Kansas in concert. The concert was like you would expect: a band with a bunch of guys, about the same age as your father, jumping around and playing songs from 20 years ago. They played a couple of new songs and all those that made them popular.
When the concert ended, the crowd went wild. They had all come to hear Kansas' songs, but the band hadn't played the most popular song they ever released. After letting the crowd warm up, the band finally returned and began to sing "Dust in the Wind."
Normally, if someone told you that you were only "a drop of water in an endless sea" you would deny it. People don't want to hear that their lives are worthless. But people were chanting to a song that blatantly told them they were nothing in the big picture.
If this song correctly captures the nature of the universe — that we are tossed around by random forces beyond our control like a piece of dust in the wind — we are forced to conclude that our lives are meaningless. Though this is a logical conclusion, hardly anyone wants to come right out and say it.
I immediately think of Nietzsche as one exception. He acknowledged that there was no absolute meaning behind the universe, and called you "sick" if you tried to find a source for meaning. If I had such a hopeless view of life, I would go insane too.
Another exception is the Bible,
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!" Everything is meaningless" (Ecclesiastes 1:2).
The Book of Ecclesiastes is one man's search to find meaning for his life. He tries to find meaning in wisdom, pleasure, work, advancement and money but concludes that they are "meaningless, a chasing after the wind" (Ecclesiastes 4:16).
After his attempts he says, "Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man" (Ecclesiastes 12:13). He found meaning in God.
If we search for meaning in our lives, we are left with two choices: We are simply tossed around by random, impersonal forces beyond our control, or we live in a universe governed by a loving God, a God who loved the world so much that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
David Zimmerman is a Wichita senior in communications studies.
HUBIE
By Greg Hardin