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The "Price of Freedom"
Two decades and more than a half million lives later, and despite a complete lack of reliable evidence that the unfettered access to firearms holds any benefit for society, the gun lobby’s view hasn’t changed. The day in and day out toll that gun death and injury inflicts on America—children killed in drive-by shootings, angry husbands shooting their entire families, alienated youths opening fire on their classmates, disgruntled employees shooting up their former workplaces, or hate-filled individuals shooting innocent people because they belong to a particular racial or religious group—will never exceed the NRA's “price of freedom.”
"Arrest Made In Pregnant Woman Shooting," August 27, 2008, KDKA.com Martin Patterson,
47, of Ambridge, is accused of accidentally shooting 26-year-old Aliza
Musser on Interstate 79. She was shot while riding on the back of a
motorcycle… Police say Patterson was taking target practice at a nearby
gun range and a stray bullet from his gun hit Musser.
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During
the 1980s, NRA Executive Vice President Harlon Carter wrote a monthly
column for the NRA’s magazines titled “The Price of Freedom.” According
to Carter, the “price of freedom,” measured in gun death and injury,
could never be high enough to justify restrictions on the NRA’s self-perceived
“right” to buy and use all types of firearms. Wrote Carter, “Nowhere
is it said that we may not pay a high price for these rights. It is
popularly said that the right to protect one’s life, the right to keep
and bear arms, costs lives. This is said without an adequate measure
that more lives are saved by arms in good hands than are lost by arms
in evil hands….The paramount point to be made is that our `unalienable
rights’ may not be infringed by government merely because they suggest
difficulties or because they are socially or politically inconvenient
or even because they may at times be painful.” 