The following was published in the January 2004 edition of the Shooting Sports Retailer
AARP Want Your Guns?
Bob Robb, Senior Field Editor
Turning 50 is traumatic for some, I guess. For me, when I reached the Big 50 last year it was only scary in that thanks to a messy divorce I lost my health insurance and was forced to shop on the open market. No sweat, I thought, I'll join AARP. Surely they have some sort of group medical insurance a member can piggyback on.
I was wrong on that one. But I thought perhaps I would research this powerful special interest group and see what their official position was on issues important to me. First and foremost was the issue of gun ownership. What I discovered surprised the heck out of me.
AARP wants to severely restrict the rights of its members to own guns.
Finding information about this on their web site is impossible. The only place you'll find any is in a book titled, "The Policy Book: AARP Public Policies 2003." In the chapter on personal and legal rights, this book states, in part, "Congress should eliminate gaps in and strengthen the Brady Act and other federal gun laws."
Holy buckets! So after playing phone tag with AARP headquarters to try and get a statement, I finally emailed them and asked for their official position on private gun ownership. Here, in part, is their response, from an employee who signed her name only as " Anissa, Member Service."
"Thank you for contacting AARP headquarters on the issue of state and federal gun policies. This is a difficult subject for people to discuss without misunderstanding. Even though you may not agree with AARP's objectives on this one issue, I hope you find our work toward prescription drug coverage in Medicare, for example, and many other important issues worthy of your continued support.
" At this time, the Board of Directors has recently restated AARP policy to reduce misunderstanding and better fit the current legal environment on this issue. We do continue to support careful measures to restrict the availability of handguns to certain populations. Yet, our policy does not preclude responsible citizens who are educated in gun safety from gun ownership.
"However, respected research continues to indicate that the use of firearms in assaults and robbery, particularly handguns, are directly linked to the high death rate from interpersonal violence in the USA compared with other industrialized countries. At a time when having enough resources to provide adequate healthcare for older Americans is a special concern for AARP, the medical costs of treating gunshot victims exceeds $1 billion a year.
"The prevalence of random violence featuring handguns in some neighborhoods has resulted in numbers of older people becoming virtual prisoners in their homes. Increasingly, families are suffering the loss of children and grandchildren who are the victims of violent crimes and senseless shootings. While registration requirements do not eliminate criminal or psychotic misuse of handguns, such requirements reduce the availability of guns, just as laws do not eliminate but do reduce the availability of illegal narcotics. Reduced availability to inappropriate users means lives saved.
"I want to emphasize that AARP policy does not preclude gun ownership for responsible citizens, just as no federal or state law precludes ownership for responsible citizens. Our policy now states: 'Congress should eliminate gaps in and strengthen enforcement of the Brady Act and other federal gun laws. States should enact legislation to eliminate gaps in and strengthen enforcement of federal and state gun laws, particularly with regard to possession by juveniles, convicted domestic abusers and those under domestic violence restraining orders."
"While you may disagree with the Board on this particular policy, we hope that many other issues, objectives, and services of AARP so beneficial to older Americans encourage you to remain or become a valued member of the association."
Wow. Talk about a misinterpretation of statistics to support a policy of restricted private gun ownership. No mention of the fact there are a bazillion laws already on the books written to keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons. No mention of the fact that in states where concealed carry laws occur, violent crime drops dramatically. (In fact, in states that have passed liberal carry laws, deaths and injuries from multiple-victim public shootings have fallen on average by 78% in the past half-decade.) Or the fact that a high percentage of juvenile gunshot victims are injured by inner-city gang-bangers, often in turf wars over drugs. Or readily available statistics from places like England, where handguns were banned in 1996, yet in the years since the ban, gun crimes have risen 40%. The country now has the distinction of leading the U.S. in robberies and aggravated assaults by a wide margin, and is rapidly catching up in murders and rapes. And how about Australia, where most guns were banned in 1996 and it actually became a crime to use a gun in self defense, but since then armed robberies have risen 51 %, unarmed robberies 37%, assaults 24%, and kidnap 43%?
If this bothers you, as it bothers me, I urge you to contact AARP with your opinions and concerns, especially if you are a member. They are easily reached at 1-800-424-3410,
www.aarp.org. When I cancelled my membership, they knew exactly how I felt.
SSR.
