
The  'Sporting Purpose'  Issue  in  Gun-Control  Policy

Preston K. Covey
Director,  Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics
Carnegie Mellon University

Presented at the Second International Symposium on Leisure & Ethics
Denver, CO,   April 11, 1994


        In the context of gun-control policy, what does 'sporting
purpose' mean?  Unfortunately, the term is uniquitous but nowhere
defined; its meaning must be divined from the legislative and
enforcement debates. While the history of this notion in
20th-century gun control is itself very interesting, let's just take
the most recent example: on February 28, 1994, the ATF reclassified
certain 12-gauge shotguns as 'destructive devices' on the basis of
the following statutory provision (Section 5845(f)(2), Chapter 53,
Title 26) of the United States Code:

'[D]estructive device' means . . . any type of weapon . . . which
will . . . expel a projectile . . ., the barrel or barrels of which
have a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter, except a shotgun
. . . which the Secretary or his delegate finds is generally
recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes . . . .

The archtypal 'destructive device' this legislation meant originally
to control was on the order of a grenade launcher or artillery
piece.  But the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun, at .60 caliber,
happens to be over half an inch in diameter.  Hence, the explicit
exemption for shotguns. However, this exemption leaves a
discretionary loophole: it is limited to shotguns which the
Secretary or his delegate finds is generally recognized as
particularly suitable for sporting purposes.  This provision
evidently gives the Secretary of the Treasury (who oversees the ATF)
the authority to add certain 'non-sporting' firearms to the bin of
banned weapons.

        The express criterion for exemption is 'sporting purpose.'
But what precisely is the standard for this privileged exemption?
While the Secretary's discretionary judgment may legally be
sufficient, the standard for guiding his appraisal of 'suitability
for sporting purposes' is whether a gun is generally recognized  as
such.  But by what standard do we judge general recognition?  This
standard is nowhere defined.  But the operative standard comes to
this: the two most popular sporting purposes, hunting and target
shooting, are evidently taken to satisfy the requirement.

        Unfortunately, this statutory language governing
'destructive devices' reflects the sum total specification of the
'sporting purpose' standard available in federal law, as an internal
ATF memorandum on the recent shotgun reclassification attests:

This ruling represents a small step in imposing rational controls
over the non-sporting assault-type weapons addressed in the
Feinstein bill. With the exception of these large bore shotguns,
there is currently no sporting purpose test in existing federal law
governing the types of firearms that can be manufactured and sold
commercially.  [But] Feinstein's bill would ban . . . these shotguns
as well as a host of other rifles and handguns that also provide
tremendous firepower, while serving no legitimate sporting purpose.
(Tartaro, 1994, emphasis mine.)

In short, the ATF has the authority to ban only large bore shotguns;
a ban on rifles and handguns which serve 'no legitimate sporting
purpose' must be effected by new legislation, such as the Feinstein
bill.  New legislation must now either beg the question of what
constitutes 'legitimate' sporting purpose or else clearly define a
standard (which, of course, it does not do).  But we see here a clue
to the ulterior purpose of the de facto 'sporting purpose' standard:
to ban firearms that 'provide tremendous firepower, while serving no
legitimate sporting purpose.'  The targeted firearms are advisedly
combat weapons that are currently legal to own.  One combat weapon
ban, the Schumer bill (HR 3527), is entitled (in part) the
'Recreational Firearms Protection Act.' By what principle of
'legitimacy' or 'recreational' utility are firearms nominated for
such patronizing protection by our government? To paraphrase Uncle
Remus, 'The tar baby, he don't say nuthin.'  The tacit hypothesis
here is this:

        If combat firearms serve no 'legitimate' sporting purpose,
        they may or should be banned.

        I pose two problems for the 'sporting purpose' hypothesis:
(I) The hypothesis presupposes without argument that it is a proper
function of government to prescribe 'legitimate' leisure; such
unprincipled and therefore arbitrary authority is politically
pernicious, a threat to all socially harmless leisure, not to say
morally controversial but harmless leisure.  Hunting, as a so-called
'blood sport,' is morally controversial in many quarters of our
society, but its tools as such are implicitly protected under the
prevailing 'sporting purpose' standard. With an essentially
undefined and therefore arbitrary standard of 'legitimate sporting
purpose,' just how long will the equally deadly tools of the
recreational hunter or target shooter stay the ban?  Be that as it
may, (II) the assumption of this hypothesis is in any case
demonstrably false -- namely, the assumption that combat firearms
serve no 'legitimate' sporting purpose.

	Problem I

        The 'sporting purpose' hypothesis presupposes that
government has the authority to judge what counts as 'legitimate'
leisure or sport and the power to curtail leisure activities which
it deems illegitimate.  The 'Recreational Firearms Protection Act'
(reminiscent of the 'Firearms Owners Protection Act'?) decidedly
does not protect all forms of firearms recreation, such as
collecting and recreating with combat firearms.

        This arrogation of authority is tantamount to legislating
ethics in the discretionary realm of leisure, where our modes of
creating meaningful lives are presumably innocent until proven
guilty of actionable harm to others or to society.  This arrogation
of authority is pernicious because it offers no principled rationale
or limitations and thereby threatens the freedom of moral choice at
the heart of all leisure pursuits, not just those involving
firearms. . We must distinguish here between two categorically
different grounds for coercive limitations on liberty -- either for
outlawing an activity itself (like gambling) or for outlawing the
means for pursuing an activity (like child pornography or hard
drugs).  Two categorically different grounds for limiting liberty
are:  (1) moral disapproval and (2) demonstrable social harm.  They
are hardly on a par.

        Of these, in our system of criminal justice, demonstrable
social harm is presumably a necessary condition for criminalization:
by this standard, not even all uncontroversial  moral wrongs are
proscribed by criminal law:  for example, many forms of lying or
promise-breaking are, at best, grounds for civil tort action.  The
burden of proof, then, is either to demonstrate serious harm,
irrespective of moral disapproval, or else to produce a principled
rationale for why certain activities which are morally controversial
but not in themselves harmful should be criminalized.  Moral
disapproval by itself is no basis for criminalization, absent some
further discriminatory principle that answers the perennial
questions for legislating morality: What or whose standard of moral
approbrium shall prevail and be enforced by law in morally
controversial cases?  And by what rationale or principle?

        One principle for prohibiting activities that may be morally
controversial but that in themselves are not harmful turns on the
distinction between distributive and aggregative harms.
Distributively harmful activity is such that serious harm or social
cost attaches to each and every individual instance of the activity
in itself.  An example is murder, each act of which is harmful.
Aggregatively  harmful activity is such that harm does not accrue to
each and every individual enjoyment of the activity in itself;
rather, because some  people's activity is harmful, serious social
harm results in the aggregate.  An example is the use of motor
vehicles, which some people drive recklessly.

        As a case in point, the civilian ownership of firearms is
 aggregatively rather than distributively  harmful: merely owning a
 firearm produces no harm in itself; but a small minority who abuse
 firearms generate serious aggregative harm: the annual size of the
 offending minority happens to be small indeed -- for example, less
 than 1/100th of one percent of the law-abiding gun-owning public
 turns homicidal 1 -- although the harm they do is grievous.  A
 prominent social philosopher puts the consequent political dilemma
 in perspective:

If the state prohibits [responsible and law-abiding] persons from
possessing handguns [say, or firearms 'not generally recognized as
particularly suitable to sporting purposes'], it must tell them, in
effect, that they cannot do something which is harmless, because
others cannot be trusted to do the same thing without causing
grievous harm. (Feinberg, 1984, p. 194).

        On this view, the justification for gun bans (which
disenfranchise a vast majority in order to try to affect a miniscule
minority) must show at least two things:  that the harms outweigh
the benefits and that the prohibition in question will in fact
redress the balance of harm over benefit.  Both are problematic,
particularly the latter: showing that disarming the law-abiding
majority will in any wise affect the criminal minority (Polsby,
1993). But this is one proper function of government, balancing
individual and social benefits and harms for the protection of the
commonweal.  If it is also a proper function of government to judge
the 'legitimacy' of leisure on moralistic grounds, absent a showing
of harm, the standard of 'legitmacy' must be specified; in the case
of 'legitimate' sporting purpose, the standard remains unspecified
and, thus, unprincipled and arbitrary.

        The invocation of 'sporting purpose' is also problematic
because it presupposses without argument that 'sporting purpose'
should carry special privileged weight in the balancing of harms and
benefits.  I argue, on the contrary, that the weightiest interest in
the balance scale of benefits is not the recreational value of
firearms, but rather their value for the protection of innocent life
against criminal threat.

        The protective value of firearms is distributive and has
two dimensions:  One is their defensive utility, the metric for
which is the actuarial rate at which armed civilians successfully
defend against criminal threats -- most recently estimated at two
million cases a year (Kleck, 1993).  The other is the
incommensurable residual value of this option in self-defense
itself, regardless of the actuarial utility of having a gun or ever
having to use it.  This residual value includes our claim-right to
be allowed effective means of self-defense (namely, firearms), which
is directly derivative from our paramount right to self-preservation.

        Actuarially, a firearm happens to be one's best option in
the gravest extreme 2 when, by the universal standard of justifiable
homicide, an innocent person is in imminent and otherwise
unavoidable danger of death or grave bodily harm.  Removing this
option imposes a severe limitation on the exercise of our
uncontroversial right to self-defense.

        Also included in the residual value of firearms for
protection is our putative obligation to defend innocent life in the
gravest extreme: many hold that this is not only a right but a moral
and civic duty.  In his article 'A Nation of Cowards' (1993),
Jeffrey Snyder put the matter forcefully:

Although difficult for modern man to fathom, it was once widely
believed that life was a gift from God, that not to defend that life
when offered violence was to hold God's gift in contempt, to be a
coward and to breach one's duty to one's community.

        In addition to the distributive protective value of
firearms, there are two aggregative benefits of armed citizens, a
social value and a political value.  Their social value consists in
their role in the reduction of criminal violence or social disorder
by either deterrence or interdiction.  Their political value
consists in their role as a defense or deterrent against government
violation of the social compact.  These functions may be arguable,
but they must be fairly accounted and weighed in the balance scales
on their merits, not summarily ignored.

        Now, the protective, social and political values of civilian
firearms are all predicated on their utility for combat.  Pace the
more radical pacifists, combat is not inherently bad:  combat can be
defensive as well as aggressive and combat is justifiable, and
arguably obligatory, in defense of innocent life.  There is a
utopian conceipt that civil society must eschew the justifiable use
of deadly force (or deadly weapons) in the hopes of thereby
banishing violence; but a utopian mandate to eschew the moral right,
nevermind the moral obligation, to defend innocent life belies the
very value of human life itself.  In his classic essay 'Utopia and
Violence,' Karl Popper put the matter plainly:

. . . we must not allow the distinction between attack and defence
to become blurred.  We must insist upon this distinction, and
support and develop social institutions . . . whose function it is
to discriminate between aggression and resistance to aggression.
(Popper, 1965)

As for delegating the obligation for the defense of innocent life to
others, such as the police,  Jeffrey Snyder poses another moral
challenge:

How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to
protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself?
(Snyder, 1993)

. . . while we wait for laws to restrain men, we will be condemned
to wonder why criminals have no respect for our lives, when we
ourselves do not value our lives enough to assume the responsibility
to defend them (Snyder, 1994).

These are serious moral issues to weigh in the balance scales before
dismissing combat firearms for serving 'no legitmate sporting
purpose.' Indeed, morally compelling (nevermind 'legitimate')
interests in defensive combat place top priority on precisely those
firearms that are 'generally recognized as particularly suitable'
for combat -- not merely sporting -- purposes. Invocation of
'sporting purpose' as a basis for special treatment belies this
priority.

        The prevailing notion of 'sporting purpose' in the
gun-control debate is problematic in three respects: (1) because it
assumes without argument that the government of a pluralistic
society may legislate 'legitimate' leisure absent demonstrable
social harm, (2) because the privileging of 'sporting purpose'
firearms ignores the preeminent protective, social and political
values of combat firearms and (3) because it is gratuitous if not
disingenuous for the following reason: if 'sporting purpose' or
recreational value were the only interest in the balance scale to
counterweigh the aggregative harms of civilian-owned firearms, gun
bans would hardly be as controversial as they are today.  Suppose,
unrealistically (Polsby, 1994), that all combat firearms were
effectively removed from both civilian and criminals hands.  Hunting
and sanitized target firearms would then become the tools of choice
of criminal violence:  How long would their 'sporting purpose' stay
their banishment?  The inexorable logic of selective gun bans is
that they must evolve into total bans: in the end, 'sporting
purpose' would be revealed to be the gratuitous and question-begging
ploy it has been from the beginning.

	Problem II	 

        Consider again the tacit hypothesis behind the prevailing
notion of 'sporting purpose': If combat firearms serve no
'legitimate' sporting purpose, they may or should be banned.  I
argue by counter-example that the assumption of this hypothesis
(that combat firearms serve no legitimate sporting purpose) is
false. While I make a case for 'legitimate' sporting uses of combat
firearms, I do not hereby beg any questions about gun control.  My
argument here is simply that 'sporting purpose' is quite beside the
point in gun-control policy if only because combat firearms do in
fact enjoy 'legitimate' sporting uses.

        The assumption that firearms can be neatly and categorically
segregated by purpose and, hence, that firearms 'generally
recognized as particularly suitable' for combat can serve no
legitimate sporting purpose is based on a no-brainer fallacy:

Some guns are useful only for assault, warfare, murder or mayhem --
like the so-called 'assault weapons' (which are properly called
'combat' firearms).

Law-abiding civilians have no legitimate interest in assault,
warfare, murder, or mayhem.

Therefore, law-abiding civilians have no legitimate interest in
combat firearms.

        The first premise and conclusion above are flatly false.
Law-abiding civilians have a legitimate interest in combat for their
own self-defense.  Therefore, law-abiding civilians have a
legitimate interest in combat firearms -- and, most certainly, in
training therewith.  This legitimate interest in firearms training
for defensive purposes naturally gives rise to both legitimate and
even socially useful sporting purposes for combat weapons, which I
will call 'combat weaponcraft,' my own sport of choice.

        Firstly: combat weaponcraft is a sport in any common sense
of the term 'sport' in which fishing, hunting, or target shooting
are sports.

        In fact, target shooting is itself but a variant of combat
weaponcraft. Indeed, historically, in America and Europe, today's
sanitized forms of target shooting -- as 'pure' sport -- are
abstracted from the discipline of combat weaponcraft.  Historically,
in origin, target shooting was a practical sport with a clear social
mission, promoting marksmanship and combat training;  it served to
ensure that the civilian population was 'well regulated' in combat
weaponcraft to perform their civic duties in maintaining the social
order and serving the common defense.  According to one leading
historian of small arms:

The concept of target shooting as a pure sport does not begin to
emerge until after the First World War; indeed, Britain held aloof
from the early development of international shooting competition
because it was considered too abstracted from the military function
of marksmanship.

It was the goal of universal civilian training in marksmanship which
also inspired the subsequent smallbore shooting movement.  The .22
rifle, portrayed recently in the press as the archtypal 'purely
sporting' firearm, was seen in urban Edwardian Britain as the prime
tool of military training.  At the same time, NRA service rifle
marksmanship was directed by Lord Roberts towards the modern concept
of 'combat shooting':  rapid and snap shooting on moving and
disappearing targets. (Munday, 1988)

        Harking to these historical roots, and by contrast with more
'pure' forms of target shooting, the regimens of combat weaponcraft
include a vast variety of stress-inducing tactical drills and
dynamic scenarios that test one's tactial judgment and moral
decisionmaking as well as safety and marksmanship under duress.
Competition is both against the clock and rigorous standards of
qualification as well as against other competitors.

        While there are hundreds of local, regional, national and
international competitions, one can compete solo against the
rigorous performance standards calibrated for survival 'in the
gravest extreme.'  These rigors include the observance of ethical
and legal standards for the judicious use of deadly force.  Also of
the highest priority are firearms safety standards, which are
religiously observed: the same rules of safety apply on the firing
range and in a threat situation; there is no 'double standard' for
safety.  Consequently, the practitioners of this sport are amongst
the most reliable and conscientious in safety discipline.

  The denial of so-called sporting purpose (or recreational uses)
for firearms advisedly designed for combat purposes is simply
dogmatic, based on an ignorantly narrow definition of the shooting
sports as being limited to either hunting or so-called target
shooting.  There are harmless, responsible and socially useful
sporting uses (a myriad of organized civilian competitions) for
every manner of firearm, including military small arms, combat
weaponry and even machineguns. This is a matter of sociological
fact, not political doctrine.  There are organized competitions
after the manner of the highly stylized International Practical
Shooting Confederation (IPSC), the Camp Perry matches which
prominently feature military longarms, various national and regional
civilian machinegun matches, the Steel Challenge and Bianchi Cup
matches, the Second Chance and Three Gun combat shooting
competitions, and the annual National Tactical Invitational
organized by the civilian American Tactical Shooting Association,
which represents the state-of-the-art in tactical firearms training
scenarios for civilians and law enforcement.  Amongst the many and
varied competitions in combat weaponcraft, the epitome of this
practical sport is the National Tactical Invitational Match. The NTI
is attended by both law enforcement professionals and civilians,
including leading police firearms instructors who are themselves
private citizens, but it is organized by private citizens -- an
example of private enterprise with a socially responsible mission
par excellence.

        Secondly:  The sport of combat weaponcraft is eminently and
morally legitimate on the following forthright grounds: those of us
who engage in it do so safely and responsibly; we hold society and
innocent others harmless thereby and continually improve ourselves
in skill, judgment and responsibility.  If there are other criteria
of 'legitimacy,' I should like to know what they are.  Certainly,
general popularity, absent actionable harm, is no more a requirement
of legitimate sport or recreation than it is of religion or speech.
The safety record of practitioners of any of the variety of combat
weaponcraft itself is impeccable.

        Thirdly:  in addition, combat weaponcraft is a sport with a
social mission and social utility: it serves as a
technology-transfer mechanism by advancing the state-of-the-art of
threat-management and defensive firearms training for both law
enforcement and civilians.  Civilian re-enactment societies and
groups employing licensed Class 3 weapons (including fully automatic
firearms and machineguns) serve as mock adversaries in training
exercises for units of our armed forces.

        Like most innovations in firearms training outside the
military, the combat shooting arts have been pioneered by private
citizens.  Unlike the Olympic sporting events that were abstracted
from age-old military experience (the marathon, biathlon, javelin,
etc.), the practical shooting sports are devised to refine and
inform modern technique 'where the rubber meets the road' -- with
state-of-the-art combat weapons.  Its techniques and technology are
evolved through open competition, then applied, tested and refined
through professional training and practical experience.  The
symbiotic feed loop is like that among research universities,
industry, and government.

        Many of the best ideas in combat training and technology
evolve from the innovations of civilian practitioners.  In my own
case, one-handed mastery of combat weaponry proves informative to
officer-survival training:  necessity is the proverbial mother of
invention, and my contributions to police survival training increase
my satisfaction in my sport of choice.  So I turn my recreation to a
practical social purpose, by training police officers in combat
weaponcraft as well as in the law and ethics of deadly force that
properly delimit its use.  Most of my colleagues do likewise, by
sharing their knowledge and skills with others, either law
enforcement or fellow citizens or both, thereby helping to ensure a
safer and more responsible shooting public.

        Finally, I must speak to the morally controversial nature of
 my sport, since some consider gun ownership itself, nevermind
 combat weaponcraft, 'demented and bloodthirsty'  (see the
 discussion of moralistic objections to civilian gun ownership in
 Kates, 1991).
	
        To quote Gerald Fain from his essay, 'Moral Leisure' (1991),
'Leisure . . . is the opportunity to choose how one 'ought
live.'' Spending one's discretionary time in the refinement of any
of the combat or martial arts is such a choice.  Combat weaponcraft
is morally controversial in the important sense in which all moral
choices are open to question and demand an accounting when moral
sensibilities collide.  I can only sketch the moral dimensions of my
sport here; this stands as an account, not a proper defense against
those who are radically and ignorantly at odds with the gun culture
or who regard it as 'simply beastly'  (as quoted in Kates, 1991).
There, perhaps, n'er the twain shall meet.

        . . . now a virtuous life requires exertion, and does not
        consist of amusement.  (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103)

        The sport of combat weaponcraft is neither a leisurely
recreation nor a mere amusement, but rather an avocation dedicated
to the disciplined development of both moral virtues and practical
skills in the service of an avowed moral obligation and social
mission. While we may defend innocent life on the basis of the most
fundamental of moral and legal rights, practitioners of combat
weaponcraft also avow a moral and civic obligation as well -- an
obligation, at the least, to our loved ones, an obligation to
prevent our spouses from being widowed or our children orphaned --
or worse.  Some take it further, as a civic or more altruistic
obligation to defend any threatened innocent life.  This is not a
vigilante ethic; it is neither more nor less than the lawful
defense of innocent life allows.  (For a proper definition of
vigilantism, see Kates, 1991).

        Contrary to stereotype, practitioners of my sport are not
training to shoot their way to glory in the Armed Citizen column of
American Rifleman magazine.  None but psychopaths and felons who
understand the realities of lethal encounters romanticize the
necessity of self-defense as an opportunity for glory.  Law-abiding
practitioners of combat weaponcraft live in no such fool's paradise.
The ethos that informs our sport is no less demanding than that of
any serious martial art, wherein power and responsibility are
commensurate: it requires soul-searching reflection on fearsome
realities and on the rigorous requirements for transmuting the
awesome responsibility for the judicious use of deadly force into
decisive fortitude, a disciplined mindset, morally discerning
judgment, well deliberated action, and the tactical skill to both
'do the right thing' and survive in the 'moment of truth,' in the
gravest extreme.   Karl Popper's point bears repeating:

        . . . we must not allow the distinction between attack and
        defence to become blurred.  We must insist upon this
        distinction, and support and develop social institutions . .
        whose function it is to discriminate between aggression
        and resistance to aggression.  (Popper, 1965)

The lawful avocation of combat weaponcraft is, above all, a social
institution that respects this distinction and defends this
cornerstone of civil society.

Notes

1.  The 1991 Chicago Police Department in-depth study of 20,264
homicides from 1965-91 found that 75% of criminal homicides are
committed by recidivists with prior records of criminal violence. On
this sample, assume that recidivists with prior records commit 75%
of our homicides; then, 25% of our annual gun homicides are
committed by previously law-abiding gun owners, such that less than
1/100th of 1% of the law-abiding gun-owning public turn homicidal
each year:  18,000 gun homicides x .25 = 4500 / 60 million lawful
gun owners = .000075 = .0075% = less than 75/10,000ths of 1% =
.75/100ths = less than 1/100ths of 1%. This estimation is comparable
to another measure of the miniscule number of irresponsible armed
citizens: since the new concealed carry law in Florida was enacted
in 1987,  less than 1/100th of 1% of the issued licenses have been
revoked for the commission of any crime involving a firearm (Snyder,
1993, p.49).  Another telling indicator of the relatively low
incidence of harm done by armed citizens is the following: only 2%
of civilian shootings involve an innocent person mistakenly
identified as a criminal, compared with an error rate of 11% for the
police, while at the same time armed citizens justifiably kill three
times the number of felons a year as do police  (Snyder, 1993, p.
50).

2.   According to Kleck (1991), resistors fare better than
non-resitors and gun-defenders fare best of all.  As stated by one
prominent critic of defensive firearms ownership, Arthur Kellerman:
'If you've got to resist, your chances of being hurt are less the
more lethal your weapon. If that were my wife, would I want her to
have a thirty-eight special in her hand?  Yeah.'   (Japegna, 1994)


References

Gerald S. Fain, 'Moral Leisure,' in Gerald S. Fain (Editor) Leisure
and Ethics: Reflections on the Philosophy of Leisure  (Reston VA:
American Alliance for Health, 1991).

Joel  Feinberg, Harm to Others, Volume I of The Moral Limits of the
Criminal Law  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Ann Japenga, 'Would I Be Safer with a Gun?'  Health   March/April
1994.

Don B. Kates, 'The Value of Civilian Handgun Ownership as a
Deterrent to Crime or a Defense Against Crime'  American Journal of
Criminal Law Winter 1991.

Gary Kleck, National Self-Defense Survey conducted February-April
1993 (yet unpublished).

Karl Popper, 'Utopia and Violence,' in Conjectures and Refutations:
The Growth of Scientific Knowledge  (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

Richard A.I. Munday, 'Civilian Possession of Military Firearms,' UK
Handgunner  January/February 1988.

Jeffrey S. Snyder, 'A Nation of Cowards,' The Public Interest Fall
1993;  'A License to Save Your Life?'  The Washington Times January
20, 1994.

Joseph P. Tartaro, 'Hindsight: Background on the Shotgun
Reclassification,' Gun Week  March 18, 1994.



