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The Other Side of the Coin - A SPORTSMAN'S VIEW OF GUN CONTROL 
ee Se EE UN CUNT ROL 
Editor's Note: This article is in reply to an article on gun control by 
Mr. Mikva in March 1968 Audubon Bulletin. 
When the Honorable Abner Mikva presented his side of the: gun control question 
he evidently considered the opinions and recommendations of the more than 
5,000 of his constituents who voiced strong objections to his proposals as 
having no value. Possible because such were at odds with the "establishment." 
His reference to public opinion surveys, in the light of recent developments 

of differences between the pollsters, should by now, cast some doubts as to 
the accuracy of such polls or surveys. It would seem they are, and can be, 
tailored to satisfy the interests of those who finance them. "Whose bread 
I eat, his song I sing." applys here too. 
Representative Mikva's classification of the "vested interest and wild west 
boys" as well as hunters, sportsmen and gun collectors, and his statement that 
the campaigns against his and other anti-gun laws were financed by those who 
profit from the sale of firearms, needs some comment. 
It is a matter of common knowledge that monies for legal counsel and some 
mail campaigns were out of pocket contributions gun owners and collectors. 
Compared to the high powered advertising campaigns put on to brain wash the 
public to the supposed need for such legislation, these were peanuts. It has 
been my personal opinion that these anti-gun advertisements were financed in 
a large part by taxpayers dollars from so called contingency funds of certain 
public officials. 
The majority of the members of the Illinois Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, 
with which I identify, recognized some control was needed to keep firearms from 
the mentally retarded, the criminal, the adjudged juvenile delinquent, those 
who had been patients of mental hospitals in the immediate past five years 
and drug addicts. This criterion was set up as proposed legislation and is 
now the law of the State. Under this law, before anyone can own or purchase 
a firearm or ammunition, he must present a Firearms Owners Identification Card, 
issued, after careful screening, by the Department of Public Safety. We sub- 
mit this act meets the demands most often called for. We also contend that 
Strict enforcement of existing Firearms Regulations would preclude the need 
for any additional legislation, State or National. 
|The question of gun control as presented by the news media is strictly a one 
Sided presentation. All editorial content and published comments were notice- 
ably slanted to favor their attitude on the question. The opposing views 
were not aired. This is bourne out by the many thousands of letters submitted 
to the press, of which relatively few, if any reached the printed page. It is 
the feeling of many of us on the other side of the question that the publishers 
are, in most instances, determined to use their power to get their misguided 
policies enacted into the law of the land. 
When it comes to being misled, the one-sided presentations of the "fors" is 
Suspect. Take the statement that since 1900, 800,000 people have been killed 
by privately owned gun. The fact that this figure was manufactured to pro- 
Mote an extremist anti-gun book has been confirmed by a highly placed Federal 
official. J. Edgar Hoover stated in reference to this statistic, “This Bureau 
(F.B.I.) does not have any reliable figures or estimates on the total number 
of Americans killed by firearms since 1900. We began compiling data on this 
Subject in 1961 ---"*, 

