F TROOP BACK TO NORMAL :

Gun Show Fantasies (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, 6/04/02, NY Times)

[G]un shows are incredibly common--there are 4,500 of them a year in the United States--and constitute one loophole in the war on terrorism that the Bush administration refuses to plug. [...]

Of course this isn't primarily an issue of international terrorism, but rather an urgent public health crisis: guns kill one American every 20 minutes. Even since Sept. 10, six times as many Americans have died from guns as from international terrorism.

Thankfully Nicholas Kristof has returned to more typical NY Times form; his most recent columns had been so sensible I feared becoming a fan.

Have you ever wondered about the way liberal columnists and activists view the lethality of guns as something that should trump their constitutional protection, but where the lethality of homosexuality (40,000 new AIDs infections per year) and of abortion (well over one million per year) are concerned suddenly our "civil rights"--though they're nowhere to be found in the written text of the Constitution--are paramount?

I'm perfectly willing to accept rational limitations on constitutionally enumerated civil rights, if the Kristofs of the world are similarly willing to accept limitations on the "rights" they fabricated.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 4, 2002 1:04 PM