In The News
This Week Magazine
March 6, 2007
Sometimes when I'm talking about gun rights and the efforts by many to take away our guns, I find that people on both sides of this issue assume this issue popped up in the last 10 to 15 years. Those of us with a bit of gray on top know better, but today I ran across an article that helps explain things.
Thanks to my father, Grits Gresham, being a packrat, and also being a very early gun rights activist, I have a copy of this article from 1955. The ads are fun to read: Stanback powders for headache neuralgia, Lifebuoy soap ("There's No Excuse for BO"), and even "Polio Pointers for 1955."
Bruce Smith is identified in a photo caption as "head of the Institute of Public Administration."
Note the same rhetoric used in 1955 as is used now, and the premise that we are incapable, or too stupid, to use guns to defend ourselves. Of course, at that time, we didn't have the benefit of the university level studies which show that people use guns effectively for self defense literally millions of times each year in the U.S. Note, also, how the letters which follow sound as though there were written last week by today's generation of gun owners.
It does make you wonder if we can't present our case more effectively than we did more than a half-century ago.
Please, feel free to copy this article and share it with your friends. Post it to internet groups. I would appreciate it if you would include a link back to www.guntalk.com so they can see where it came from. Note: The typos you see are, I'm sure, mine. I tried to copy the spelling and punctuation exactly as it is in the article. I retyped this entire article because I think it's worthwhile for today's gun rights activists to understand the history of this fight.
Tom Gresham
"THIS WEEK MAGAZINE"
July 31, 1955
"There are 20,000,000 pistols in America's homes and shops, and they're worse than no protection at all -- they're a menace. That's why a famous police official warns..."
GET RID OF THAT GUN!
By Bruce Smith
As told to A.E. Hotchner
The pistol, unregulated and unchecked, is dangerously out of control. Two thirds of all the homicides committed in the United States now involve firearms. Armed burglaries and robberies have sharply increased since the end of World War II. Suicide by bullet is a growing tragedy. The menace of the pistol casts an increasing shadow over our communities.
There are an estimated 20,000,000 civilian-owned pistols in the U.S., more than in any other country in the world. Americans have always regarded the possession of a loaded pistol, tucked away in a closet to use on burglars, as a traditional "duty." When you realize, too, that many GI's brought home guns as "souvenirs," you begin to see the extent of our gun problem.
I recently spot-checked communities for guns in dwellings. The police of Bridgeport, Conn., a city of 160,000, estimated one out of three families kept pistols on their premises: the Chief of Police of nearby Westport, population 12,000, estimated that 50 per cent of the homes in that area had pistols tucked away in them. In St. Louis, police estimates coincided with Bridgeport's. Although there are no official statistics on the subject, I would guess that about one out of every three American families keeps one or more pistols in the home.
These pistols have a triple peril.
1. They lead to crimes of opportunity. For example, in Boston during 1953, six gun murders were committed -- and not one of them involved professional criminals. Four involved husbands and wives, and the other two resulted from drinking bouts.
In all six cases somebody died because a pistol was too handy.
In Cincinnati in 1953, there were 13 gun killing, all crimes of opportunity. Two eighth-grade boys in Queens, New York, recently admitted the holdup-killing of a druggist; they robbed the druggist, they said, because they needed money to go roller-skating. And where did they get the gun? An older brother had a pistol stashed away in a closet. Clearly, one more crime of opportunity.
2. They get into the hands of criminals. Professional gunmen like to use guns that cannot be traced to them, and that's why pistols stolen during house and store burglaries are so desirable.
Several months ago a mad killer named August Robles staged a spectacular gun battle with police in Harlem. Two hundred police fired almost 300 rounds of ammunition, two detectives were wounded and an apartment building burned from tear-gas bombs before Robles was shot to death. In his hand the cops found a stolen German-make Luger.
3. They draw the fire of armed robbers, and in this exchange, the householder or storekeeper usually comes off second best.
Now I realize that the American people are very attached to their personal six-shooters. We are gun-toters from way back, as witness the classic picture of the Pilgrim Father on his way to Thanksgiving church service carrying a huge blunderbuss. But the time has come for our people to realize the extent to which the pistol has put us in peril, and flying in the face of tradition, I make this appeal to the innate good sense of our citizens:
Get those pistols out of your homes and out of your stores.
After the end of World War II, England experienced the same sharp rise in gun-crimes that we did. Scotland Yard investigated and found that guns and ammunition brought home by returning servicemen were finding their way into the hands of professional criminals. And they were also accounting for many crimes of opportunity by the servicemen themselves.
It was a distressing situation that caused great concern to the government, until the Home Secretary hit on an ingenious idea. He set aside one week in 1946 which he declared to be Gun Amnesty Week, and urged his countrymen to bring firearms of every description (excluding shotguns) to a central place in each city and village where they would be received by police with no questions asked. The response was overwhelming. Nearly 19,000 pistols, 209,000 rounds of ammunition and 352 machine guns came pouring in.
Gun Surrender Week
Thereafter, the Home Secretary made Gun Amnesty Week an annual event. In 1947, an additional 4,000 pistols were surrendered, and since then, approximately 2,500 pistols and 100,000 rounds of ammunition have been turned in to the police every year.
That's precisely what we need in the United States, and I propose that in honor of Veteran's Day, which falls on November 11, we designate the week of November 7, 1955, as Gun Surrender Week. Let's get these killers out of the closets and bureau drawers where they have been tempting our children and ourselves.
(Naturally, I am not talking about firearms belonging to members of the armed forces, the National Guard, organized police establishments, duly licensed private guards and watchmen or members of registered and approved gun clubs. Nor am I referring to shotguns and rifles.)
In my work as a consultant to police forces around the country, I often discuss home and store possession of pistols with various police chiefs. "When will people realize," they will say to me, "that they need experience and training in the use, handling and cleaning of small arms? The householder is a greater menace to his own safety and that of his family than he could ever be to an intruder in seeking to defend his home."
The fact is that police experience has shown over and over again that the man who awakens in the dead of night with a prowler in the house, takes more than a gun in his hand when he goes looking for the intruder in the dark. He takes his own life in his hands because the prowler stops moving and waits for him to give away his position. His tactics are bad, his senses are still dulled b sleep, and in the dark he can't see to shoot. Where then is the foundation for his belief that the pistol helps to guard his home?
19 Holdups
And what good can a concealed pistol do for the average storekeeper who usually has much less facility with his weapon than the holdup man?
Don't forget the storekeeper is at the terrible disadvantage of being the one who has to make a move for his weapon - invariably the holdup man has the drop on him.
There is a liquor-store proprietor in the Bronx who has been held up 19 times in 21 years. He has always had a loaded six-shooter under the counter. He has never thwarted a holdup but he has succeeded, on several occasions, in getting himself shot.
On the other hand, only a few weeks ago a New York jewelry store proprietor was interviewed a few minutes after his store had been stuck up.
On the floor lay the robber, near death, his gun a few feet away from him. The storekeeper kept no gun on the premises, but he did have a couple of cleverly hidden buttons which he pushed, alerting a protective company which, in turn, flashed word to the police.
Within two minutes after the thug had entered the store, a squad car was on the scene and a brave cop, who was trained in the use of his gun, beat the robber to the shot.
"In my opinion," the storekeeper said, "it is a silly thing to keep a pistol. I have been in business a long time, and I've never kept a gun. Catching criminals is what the police are for. It is my job to alert them, if I can."
Crusade Against Guns
I certainly agree with this veteran shopkeeper. Why don't we all concentrate on seeing how much we can achieve on a voluntary basis. It is to be hoped that government officials, federal, state and local, will get behind Gun Surrender Week. Perhaps veterans and civic organizations will put their shoulders behind it. It could be the first giant step toward a citizens' crusade against crime.
The End
