Date: Sat, 2 Sep 1995 21:30:08 -0400 To: firearms-alert@shell.portal.com From: tcasey@clark.net (Tim M. Casey) Subject: ALERT: Rodale Press Rodale Press, the publishers of Prevention, Men's Health, Backpacker, and other magazines, says all firearms in your home should be locked, unloaded, and ammo locked and kept separately. Of course this would render you helpless in an attack in your own home. "Prevention's Guide: Personal Safety, your guide to crime & accident prevention" can be found in your local grocery store thus serving as a vehicle to move millions of otherwise unconvinced citizens towards more gun control. Anti-gun forces has stated that laws requiring mandatory locked and unloaded firearms in the home are a good idea. Firearms are useless unless owners can get to them quickly. Prevention magazine states: "If guns are kept in the house, they're stored unloaded in a locked cabinet and the bullets are stored in a separate locked area. (Most safety experts agree that it's even better to have no guns in the house at all.)" Page 12. Rodale Press. In the section "9 Ways to Safeguard Your Kids" they irrationally advise: "If the parents [in the homes where your child plays] refuse to assure you that they have no guns or will always keep them locked up, insist that their kids come to your house instead." Page 20. Rodale Press. Interestingly, 23 year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, Detective JJ Bittenbinder, seems to have been a major contributor of the ideas in the guide. He is mentioned in several articles and appears on the inside cover. (His Audio and Videotapes as well as products "endorsed" by him are for sale in the Buyer's Guide section.) Listed at the end of this alert are the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the editors, publishers, advertising office, and some of the companies advertised in the guide. Tell them that you will not patronize any products listed in the guide because the guide fails to inform the reader that citizens defend themselves with guns everyday in their home. Leaving them locked and unloaded will defeat this purpose. Leaving them locked and unloaded will result in MORE deaths. Here are some facts you can use from Neil Schulman's new book, SELF CONTROL Not Gun Control (copied here for informational purposes - and convenience purposes. :) The following is an excerpt from J. Neil Schulman's book SELF CONTROL Not Gun Control, to be published Nov. 30, 1995 by Synapse--Centurion. Reproduction in computer file and message bases is permitted for informational purposes only. Copyright (c) 1995 by J. Neil Schulman. All other rights reserved. Gary Kleck, Ph.D., professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University, is considered the dean of criminologists on firearms issues by his colleagues in the American Society of Criminology, who in 1993 awarded Kleck its coveted Hindelang Award for his book _Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America_ (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991). Kleck's unimpeachable liberal credentials--he's a registered Democrat and a member of Common Cause and Amnesty International, as examples--precludes any possibility of pro-conservative or pro- NRA bias. He takes no funding from any partisan in the gun- control debate. In _Point Blank_, Kleck had already analyzed a dozen studies conducted by other researchers, and had concluded that American gun owners used their firearms at least one million times each year in defense against criminals. But Kleck wasn't satisfied with the research methods used in some of these studies, so in Spring, 1993 he and his colleague Marc Gertz, Ph.D., conducted a National Self-Defense Survey of 4,978 households. I interviewed Kleck about the not-yet-published results of this survey for the September 19, 1993 _Orange County Register_; it's also included in _Stopping Power_. What Kleck's National Self-Defense Survey discovered is that even excluding all uses of firearms by police, military, or security personnel, an American gun owner uses a privately owned firearm 2.45 million times each year in an actual defense against a criminal. About 1.9 million of these defenses use handguns, the rest some other firearm--a shotgun or a rifle. In _Stopping Power_, I boil down the results of my interview with Kleck as follows: * Every 13 seconds, an American gun owner uses her or his firearm in defense against a criminal. If you're only counting handguns, it's every 16 seconds. Compare this to the "once every two minutes" that the much-ballyhood Death Clock in New York City's Times Square clicked off an incident of "gun violence." * Women use handguns 416 times each day in defense against rapists, which is a dozen times more often than rapists use a gun in the course of a rape. Handguns are used 1145 times a day against robbers. Handguns are used 1510 times a day in defense against criminal assaults. * A gun kept in the home for protection is 216 times as likely to be used in a defense against a criminal than it is to cause the death of an innocent victim in that household--the well-publicized Seattle study's 43-1 ratio of dead householders to dead burglars notwithstanding. Advertising Sales Office Rodale Press, Inc. 733 Third Ave., New York, NY 10017 (212) 573-0317 Editorial Offices Rodale Press, Inc. 33 E. Minor St. Emmaus, PA 18098 (610) 967-5171 J.I. Rodale, Founder Ardath Rodale, Chairman of the Board Robert Teufel, President of Rodale Press John Griffin, President of Rodale Press Magazine Division Each can be contacted at the Editorial Office address, number Some advertisers and distributors. (Note that most numbers are for the distributors not the actual company number. When calling be polite and ask for the company phone number): "Tough Target Products" --these are Bittenbinder's Red Lion Enterprises (800) 588-6844 The Saftey Zone -- distributor/catalog Hanover, PA 17333-0019 (800) 999-3030 Perfectly Safe -- distributor/catalog 7245 Whipple Ave., NW North Canton, OH 44720 (800) 837-KIDS MLM Machine and Metal Products (203) 734-8201 Kryptonite Corporation sold through Martha's Vineyard Trading Co. (800) 821-6286 "The Club" (800) 527-3345 Century Products (800) 837-4044 Sav-A-Life Industries (800) 654-3337 Blue Ridge (800) 222-9056 Real Goods (800) 762-7325 Mace Security International (800) 255-2634 Zelco Industries (800) 431-2486 Master Lock (414) 444-2800 Sterling Hardware (800) 367-5726 Tim Casey, tcasey@clark.net, http://www.clark.net/pub/tcasey "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." --Thomas Jefferson