
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, November 26, 1993                   TAG: 9404220007
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FEAR-MONGERS

THE GUN industry is taking a page out of the tobacco industry's play book: It is targeting women "consumers."

No, the National Rifle Association is not plugging dainty, slim revolvers with names like "Misty" and "Eve" and tiny flowers on their barrels. It is promising women greater "personal safety" from crime.

What a contemptuous crock.

Thankfully, at about the same time the NRA began test-marketing an ad campaign aimed at women in cities with soaring crime rates, the New England Journal of Medicine published research that should blow away the NRA's strategy.

Guns kept in the home for self-protection make their owners, women or men, more vulnerable - not less. Instead of giving them protection from intruders, the gun in the home triples the chances that the gun-keeper will be killed.

The research, conducted by Dr. Arthur L. Kellerman at Emory University in Atlanta, not only showed that people who keep guns face a higher risk of being shot by an "insider" - a friend, relative or lover. The large-scale investigation, of nearly 400 homicides in three states, also found no evidence that the gun is an effective defense against "outsiders" who break in.

Granted, the study did not, could not, measure the immeasurable: might-have-been fatalities that guns in the homes did deter. And it is true that police mostly don't prevent crimes, but respond to them.

So the gun industry will continue to tout handguns' self-defense value. It will continue to dispute all evidence that they are a health hazard - just as the tobacco industry continues to dispute mountains of evidence that cigarettes are a health hazard.

But women - even those who continue to smoke - know better. They should question the notion that the NRA's overriding interest is their personal safety.

The NRA's overriding interest is the proliferation of guns. By playing on women's fears, it hopes to promote more gun sales - which, of course, will give women and everybody else more to fear.

by CNB