EDITORIAL
O'Gara, James
TAMING OUR VIOLENCE President Gerald Ford is right when he says, within six hours of having been shot at, that we must not allow the fear of sudden death to keep the President from the people....
...They are time-wasting political junkets designed to generate the illusion that he is a grass-roots leader...
...Nevertheless, a President who travels periodically and freely mingles with crowds (where they can see he is flesh and bone, short or tall) is safer for a democracy than one sealed in a bullet-proof plastic bubble on wheels or intoning "I am the President" from the flickering glow of a TV tube...
...We must recognize that the radical disarming of our society to a moral issue in some ways as critical as racial justice, abortion or the war-one that calls for the militant commitment of all American churches in the press, the pulpits and on Capitol Hill...
...They are capitalizing on the public's need to believe that our long national love affair with weapons is not even a flirtation but an isolated and unprecedented one-night spree by a boy or girl who long ago left home...
...A more recent poll in the New York Daily News shows that over 81 percent of New Yorkers favor laws requiring registration of guns, outlawing cheap handguns and mandatory prison terms for crimes committed with firearms...
...A 1973 survey by the National Opinion Research Center shows that three quarters of the respondents at least favor requiring: a person to obtain a police permit before buying a gun...
...but they merely demonstrate that Hooverism is alive and still talking...
...Thus the popular sentiment for taming American violence is there if the leadership can tap, educate and move it to action...
...In fact, almost 64 percent of gun owners favor some sort of control...
...Or, in another sense, perhaps it is too close to home, to every American's distorted idea of what it takes to be secure.be secure...
...Mich...
...Indeed, to radically alter any citizen's public behavior-whether the President's or the ghetto grandmother's who wants to walk her dog after dark-through fear of violence is to turn over on freedom to the thugs and flee, rather than confront, a political and social crisis...
...Last month the United States Catholic Conference, while allowing rifles to sportsmen, called for the eventual elimination of handguns from our society, A spokesman for the American Jewish Committee told us they were in favor of gun control in principle but that it had not been one of their priorities...
...In 1967 the National Council of Churches issued a detailed, though too moderate for 1975, statement calling for firearms control off the federal, state and local levels...
...Religious leaders can begin by informing Representative John Conyers (D...
...To our shared regret, in spite of the official statements, except for the Quakers and the Church of the Brethren, this issue has never been a priority of any American churches...
...An analysis of the study in The Nation [9/20] also indicates that the hard-core opponents of control-those who draw beads on pro-control candidates and publications-are a very small (38 in a survey of 15,000) group of affluent white Protestants...
...Ironically, although there is overwhelming political opposition to gun control-through the arms manufacturers and the million-member National Rifle Associations-there is broad public support for control...
...The truth is that if President Ford, John and Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Even and the ghetto grandmother could not move safely among their fellow citizens, it is because we have allowed our nation to become an armed society...
...Through a side mythology, the alleged "right" to have a gun is considered as sacred as religion, sex, family or freedom, and the price of this myth is the soaring number of assassinations, muggings and family quarrels ending in homicides...
...that they will preach, testify and work for his bill outlawing the private ownership of pistols with a zeal once mus-tered only* for narrowly "religious" causes...
...President Ford is wrong when he calls his travels "dialogues...
...Perhaps it is, in one sense, too remote-seemingly too far from the emotional and financial issues of abortion, birth control and parochial schools that have traditionally dominated our attention...
...But the politicians who now blame the Secret Service for not screening all the "nuts" out of city crowds miss the point behind our latest tryst with violence...
Vol. 102 • October 1975 • No. 15
