THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 7, 1996 TAG: 9608070008
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: 35 lines
``The CDC and the NRA'' (editorial, July 20) clearly illustrates why cutting the funds for the Centers for Disease Control's thinly disguised gun-control propaganda is the right thing to do. From your demonization of the NRA (a totally unwarranted insult to every member of the organization, which represents upward of 3 million responsible, dues-paying individual gun owners) to your parroting of the gun-control lobby's flawed reasoning that firearms are a disease like cancer, your editorial shows your political orientation.
But the CDC's political actions are more insidious in that they are cloaked in the legitimacy of medical research. The truth is that just about anything in the hands of humans - firearms, automobiles, medical care, the media - can do great harm as well as great good. For example, thousands of people die each year from medical accidents or infections they picked up in the hospital. Yet the CDC does not send out press releases on studies recognizing hospitals or doctors as a disease. The CDC does not do so presumably because hospitals and doctors also save lives, and it would be unfair to place them in the same category as cancer.
Firearms save lives and have other utilitarian uses, which is precisely the NRA's point.
It is estimated by independent researchers that firearms are used as often as 900,000 times a year by private citizens to defend lives and property, usually without a shot being fired. The CDC has ignored this research for the sake of its political agenda. Thus the CDC's biased research results in assistance to the anti-constitutional gun-control campaign and should not be funded by tax dollars.
L. A. HANDFORD
Norfolk, July 26, 1996 by CNB