Books: Guns Unlimited

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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.