Gun question broadens

America has about 250 million people, and about 250 million guns -roughly one for every person, including the aged, babies, prisonersand pacifists. Yet that is not enough, according to some friends ofthe National Rifle Association; we need even more.

America also has more deaths by guns in a single week than allof Western Europe has in a year. Yet gun lovers want us to believethere is no connection between our surplus of guns and our surfeit ofdeaths by the gun.

Gun numbers, we are told, do not matter - except when there aretoo few of them to guarantee our safety. How could the number ofguns matter when it is people who kill, not their weapons?Only in the surreal world of gun lobbyists could a person likeTanya Metaksa, the dragon lady of the NRA, actually liken her causeto that of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Come again? What is thepoint of this comparison? She answers: "It's not the kind of caryou're driving, but the person behind the wheel." But MothersAgainst Drunk Driving has nothing against cars. It is alcohol theyare blaming for deaths when people indulge in it before getting intothe cars.The true parallel to Mothers Against Drunk Driving would beSarah Brady's crusade, which might be called Wives Against CrazedGunmen.It is quite true that people kill, that the weapon itself isinnocent. We do not "execute" the weapon (as the ancient Greeks usedto do). But the people who kill are gun-crazy. They think guns areessential to their manhood, liberty, self-expression andself-determination. This has little, anymore, to do with hunting.One does not usually hunt with a handgun or an assault weapon.Other countries have no problem seeing the correlation betweenour gun mania (resulting in high gun ownership) and our gun deaths.They are trying to prevent the invasion of the American madness.That is why Britain recently banned all guns but .22-caliber ones.That is why the United Nations has set up a panel to study ways ofreducing "the excessive and destabilizing accumulation and transferof small arms" from country to country. The NRA is shocked by theseefforts. Metaksa has summoned Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) to intensifyhis hostility on all things the United Nations is up to.Her lobby gave money to activists trying to prevent the banningof guns in Australia and New Zealand. We complain about Chinesemoney being spent in our elections, but NRA money spent to influenceforeign governments' domestic legislation seems to be all right.Now, to show just how concerned it is, the NRA is setting up aninternational lobby. According to a report by Katharine Seelye, thiswill be called the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting.Sport is not at issue. Metaksa herself indirectly admits that whenshe says the international body will stand shoulder-to-shoulder withthe NRA "to defend the Second Amendment."There are only three things wrong with that:All those other countries are not subject to the U.S. Constitution,including our Second Amendment.The Second Amendment authorizes the government's militia; it hasnothing to do with hunting.Even if it had to do with hunting, the flow of handguns and assaultweapons would be outside its purview.Guns matter more than victims to gun worshippers, and the NRAwill not rest until all the world is killing itself with guns at thesame massive rate we Americans have achieved. Guns do not kill. Gunnuts do.Garry Wills is adjunct professor of history at NorthwesternUniversity and winner of numerous awards, including the PulitzerPrize.