Firearm Design and Firearm Violence-Reply

Abstract

In Reply. —I agree with Mr Feldman's point that a reactive, uninformed gun control policy may have unintended negative consequences. I disagree with his contention (not a surprising one, coming as it does from an industry representative) that we should therefore abandon the product-oriented approach. Mr Feldman sets up a straw man by arguing that any attention given to firearms per se ignores the user he cites. I am not aware that anyone, whatever their position on firearms policy may be, suggests that these human factors should be ignored: I certainly do not. Rather, we have largely ignored any possible effect on firearm violence that is attributable to firearms themselves—a head-in-the-sand approach that we have forsworn in recent decades, with highly beneficial results, in the case of both motor vehicles and cigarettes. Consider, as just 1 example, the hundreds of thousands of inexpensive handguns produced each year by the southern California