This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Paul H. Blackman, PhD
National Rifle Association of America Fairfax, Va

JAMA. 1996;276(13):1036.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—In July 1993, a Virginia law limited sales of handguns to 1 every 30 days unless police give permission for multiple sales. The law was enacted following active lobbying by Sarah Brady, and now, Brady's employees have evaluated the 30-day law and found it effective. There are several reasons to doubt their findings.¹

This report is based on tracing data, although such data are "not designed to collect statistics."² Most crime guns are not traced; most traced guns are not involved in violent crimes,³ and, as even this report acknowledges, traced guns may not be representative of recovered guns.¹ Guns that are traced are not randomly chosen and are not representative of guns used in crime.^2,3 For example, most cities now report a minority of crime guns to be semiautomatic pistols,⁴ but New York City recently indicated that at least 86% . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?