This is a response to David Titus's Jan. 13 column, "Ultimately, guns make a safer society," in which Mr. Titus lies, for the third time, about what I wrote in a column that appeared on Oct. 7. He continues to claim that I described deceptively a table of statistics published by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. He insists that the cause of death statistics were
divided into too many categories. Whether or not there are too many categories is a matter of opinion. It is, however, an undeniable fact that I described the table accurately. Mr. Titus also refuses to admit that there is a qualitative difference between a police officer being killed in a traffic accident and a police officer being deliberately gunned down. Now he says that our dispute is over a fringe issue, a statement with which I agree.

Mr. Titus says that registering guns and licensing and testing gun users are violations of the Second Amendment and impediments to the safety of citizens. He is wrong on the first count and paranoid on the second. I share his evident distrust of the Bush Administration, but registering guns and licensing and testing gun users are not the equivalent of gun confiscation. As for his paranoid delusions, if the Special Forces ever land in his back yard and he tries to fight them off with his hunting rifle, my money is on the Special Forces.

When Mr. Titus thinks of a gun, he thinks of the time that he held a gang of thugs at bay by showing them that he was armed with a hunting rifle. I think of an estranged husband shooting his wife as she brings their child to her day care center one sunny morning; of a drunk who has been thrown out of a bar and who returns with a gun to shoot the place up; of a terrified woman shooting her furious husband as he threatens to gut her with a kitchen knife; of an argument between two friends escalating into a fistfight and then a shooting; of a man ordering some neighborhood toughs off his stoop and being shot for his insolence; of a man shotgunning
a couple of petty thieves in the back as they run away from him; of a desperate teen taking a gun to school to stop the bullying; of a man shooting a late-night "intruder" who turns out to be his daughter, who, having snuck out to meet her unapproved boyfriend, picks the wrong moment to try to sneak back in.

I also think of the various times -- and there were more than a few of them -- when, if I had had a gun, I would have used it, with results that I prefer not to contemplate. It takes only an easy squeeze of the trigger to turn a previously innocent, law-abiding citizen into a criminal or a delinquent into a killer. We all want to keep guns out of the "wrong hands," but everyone's hands are "wrong" at one time or another. Nobody is always "innocent" and "law-abiding," not even David Titus.

Mr. Titus is the second person to suggest publicly that I read "More Guns, Less Crime," a book by John R. Lott, Jr. As it happens, I have read portions of the book. Mr. Lott's material is interesting, sometimes even impressive; but I am not persuaded that his conclusions are correct. Nor am I persuaded that Mr. Titus's interpretation of various federal laws and his characterization of ballistic fingerprinting are correct; I keep in mind the fact that Mr. Titus lies a lot. I shall, however, keep reading and listening and, I hope, learning.

Edward Waxman
Springettsbury Township
Ed17406@gmail.com