Copyright©2001
The Hanover Review, Inc.

Editorial: Arm Thyself

Guns Save Lives
by M. Ryan Clark
Some gun control advocates begrudgingly concede that the Second Amendment does protect citizens’ right to own guns, but nearly all feel that “reasonable” restrictions on this right ought to be enforced. In More Guns, Less Crime, John Lott, a scholar at Yale Law School, confronts the notion that gun control laws prevent crime. His conclusions are straightforward: concealed weapons laws reduce crime, often dramatically. Further, whereas previous studies on gun control were often limited to specific areas or short periods of time, Lott’s is the largest, most comprehensive survey of gun use and crime ever conducted. His data set consists of 54,000 observations taken over eighteen years—a period that includes the enactment of tougher sentencing laws, gun control legislation, and the recent decline in crime.

Misfiring on Gun Numbers
by Jaime Sneider
A 13-year-old boy entered his school cafeteria on July 17, 2000 and discharged one bullet into the air. No one was injured. This seemingly trivial piece of news was nonetheless published in many major newspapers, including the New York Times and the Seattle Times, and exploited by numerous gun control advocates such as Handgun Control, Inc., who catalogue news stories in which guns are used with malicious intent. Exactly one week later—although one would never know from listening to Sarah Brady or the junior senator from New York, who both capitalize on gun deaths and inflated statistics—the Centers For Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics released its latest data, which reveal that youth gun deaths decreased by 10 percent.

A War on Guns?
by Ryan Gorsche
Once, Tom Diaz was a card-carrying NRA member and a self-proclaimed gun nut. Now an agent for the Violence Policy Center, he went behind the veil in his book, Making a Killing, to prove that the firearms industry has been infesting America with a vicious “health hazard.” Diaz identifies the threat and demands that the government reform and regulate the industry for the nation’s very survival. Unfortunately for Diaz, his attempt to prove malfeasance on the part of gun manufacturers falls short of a credible case for expanded regulation of gun ownership, providing only the tired dogma and newspeak of gun control zealots.

Lock and Lowbrow
by Philip Leaman
Ted Nugent’s ambiguously intentioned book, God, Guns, and Rock and Roll, has one underlying theme: “I am extreme, look at me, pay attention to me, my career is not over—really, I promise it’s not.” Nugent’s double-spaced, bold-printed hunting brag sheet really is the paragon of amateurism. One can imagine Nugent’s Barbie Doll wife, Shemane, attentively crouching on a deerskin couch while her husband paces about the room with a “smile stretched ear to ear,” spitting out “bad-ass” truisms for her to transcribe. Nugent’s self-assured piety is of the worst kind; one of those individuals so dead sure he has the all right answers that he has the audacity to piss and moan for pages upon pages about everything from his drugged-out colleagues to the biased media. Envisioning himself as a patriotic, gun-toting libertarian superhero, Nugent’s book argues by anecdote—tawdry tales of Nugent’s personal life that are somehow supposed to be irrefutable evidence for whatever arguments he poses.

Pete Gamble '98, Pro-Gunner
by J. Lawrence Scholer
Many of New Hampshire’s residents still live by the words “Live Free or Die”—the state’s official motto—but slowly they are seeing their freedoms slip away. New Hampshire and Vermont gun owners are fortunate to live in states where the right to bear arms remains relatively unregulated. Yet, many citizens worry that their Second Amendment rights may soon become a thing of the past, mostly due to federal intervention. “Most pro-gun people feel that we really don’t actually have much left. They feel the government has gone hog wild, taking away our guns while itself unwilling to prosecute violent criminals,” says Pete Gamble ’98, a resident of Cornish, New Hampshire since 1992.

A Smith & Wesson Beats Four Aces by Michael Pryor
Reflections on the Dartmouth Murders by Jeffrey Hart
The Last Word by John Kalb

A Very Rare and Valuable Thing by Stella Baer
How About "The Big Orange"?

Making a "Statement"

by Gordon Haff

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” —Theodore Roosevelt