846 ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

to that extent. It was intended to hold the line on taxes. I don't know
what 31 cents raises — I think it's about f300, 000 a penny — so you
can figure out that $10 million that would have been available to the
City, had it held the line on property taxes, went down the drain.

(Gun Control Legislation)

Q. Governor, there have been members of the Legislature who have
commented on the death of Senator Kennedy that they will introduce
strict gun control legislation at the next session of the Legislature —
which would affect not only hand guns but rifles and shotguns as well.
Will your administration support such a gun control measure?

A. Well, I have had quite a lot of experience with gun control laws,
being one of the pioneers in Baltimore County for hand gun control
and having appointed a commission headed by former Adjutant Gen-
eral Reckord to do this work. Now one of the things that I think is
regrettable — there is always an attempt in the emotion of a situation
to overgeneralize and say since Senator Kennedy's untimely death
was caused by a pistol, therefore pistols are bad. Now I think that
if you trace — as I listened on television yesterday — the custody of
the weapon, it becomes immediately obvious that this gun would have
been obtained by this assassin no matter how many gun laws we
have. This is not a statement by me that we shouldn't have gun laws,
but 1 think it's sort of fuzzy thinking to now say that because of
Senator Kennedy's death gun laws would have cured this. This is
not true. They wouldn't have cured it. This was a gun that had been
purchased a long time ago and passed from hand to hand illegally, and
no amount of registration would have prevented its passage. When
you get into rifles and that type of weapon — again I think we do
need the kind of controls that will do the job, but we cannot look to
the controls to cure the violence and the lawlessness. The only thing
that you can have is a registration law at the most, and a law banning
sales without permits at the least. And as I have pointed out, there are
some people who can throw knives with deadly accuracy, and there
are some people who know how to make a homemade bomb, and there
are some people — an African tribe — that shoot little darts through
a blow gun very accurately. There are all sorts of ways to kill people.
I do think that sometimes in our resentment against this violence we
deliver our opposition too strongly and too thoughtlessly in one di-
rection. I think that gun regulation is needed, but not the overall
banning of rifles, hand guns and every type of mechanical weapon
that's characterized as a gun, without a careful review.