Nation: THE GUN UNDER FIRE
(10 of 10)
Such controls would be costly and undoubtedly irksome. Even so, the point has come when they are essential. The frontier is gone, and its folkways cannot reasonably be condoned in a dense, tension-filled urban society. The time has long passed when a firearm can be allowed to serve as an instrument of individual justice—as it too often is even today.
Intelligent gun legislation, as Lyndon Johnson pointed out, "will not in itself end the violence. But reason and experience tell us that it will slow it down —that it will spare many innocent lives." Whatever the cost, it would be worth it to reduce the risk of killing a Kennedy, a King—or a kid gunned down by an ignorant hunter.
* Though, as Freud himself might have conceded, such may not always be the case. Once, when a colleague told him that his ever-present cigar was a phallic symbol, Freud replied gruffly: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
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