This article focuses on the possibility that the assassination of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy might harm the U.S. Army's civilian marksmanship program due to public revulsion to the weapon which was used in the murder. The Army oversees civilian marksmanship through its National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice, which is headed by Colonel John K. Lee. The board sets up instruction programs, organizes the annual National Rifle and Pistol Matches, and markets used guns to the public. It does all this through the National Rifle Association (NRA). The Army sells rifles at cost to civilians only if they are members of the NRA, and it gives instruction to gun clubs only if they are affiliated with the NRA.

A peculiar American disease has been isolated by medical scientists. The disease was first described in 1960 by Dr. J. V. Brown in the Western Journal of Surgery. An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association then drew wide medical attention to it. Commercial houses are now marketing products designed to cope with it. Statistics on incidence and morbidity are scanty, and the name of the disease is hazy. Some doctors call it “the fast draw syndrome”; others, “the Dodge City syndrome.” But whatever the name, it is with us. It is most prevalent, of course, among the numerous special gun clubs that have sprouted across the land in recent years. Members, taking a leaf out of days of yore and some scripts of today, draw guns from their holsters, quick as lightning, and fire away. Unlike their legendary heroes, they don’t shoot at one another but aim at balloons. Sometimes, though, they miss the balloon and hit themselves in the right foot...

The underdeveloped nations of the world can't terrorize each other in a nuclear arms race. Instead, they pant through a small arms sprint. While the great nations thunder missiles into space, the weak nations gobble up the rifles left behind. There are recent - sometimes dramatic - examples. Last March 4, the French freighter La Coubre exploded in Havana harbor, killing more than 75 seamen, dock workers and firefighters. It was carting 76 tons of Belgian grenades and ammunition to the army of Fidel Castro. Last year, the new African nation of Guinea asked the United States to sell arms to her 2,000-man army. When the United States refused, Guinea bought three shipments of rifles from Communist Czechoslovakia. Conditions are perfect for this dash for little arms: 1. A glut of small arms on the world market. 2. A host of military governments and revolutionaries hungrier for guns than bread. 3. Help from major powers in satisfying that hunger. There is no official estimate of the amount of small arms available on the world market during a year. But some light on the market's vitality is shed by news dispatches and government reports of transactions...

ON MARCH 4, the 4,309-ton French freighter La Coubre, carting seventy-six tons of Belgian grenades and ammunition to the army of Fidel Castro, exploded in Havana harbor, killing more than seventy-five seamen, dock workers and firefighters. The series of deadly blasts triggered a series of sensational questions that hit headlines in both the United States and Cuba. Had an American agent or anti-Castro Cuban slipped aboard and left a time bomb in the hold? Had a careless dock worker dropped a match into the munitions? Had a cargo net snapped, unleashing crates of grenades against the deck? Had a plane sneaked low across the harbor and tossed bombs into the freighter? Other questions, tinged with less excitement, were also evoked. But, too theoretical, old and uncomfortable, they made few headlines. They are questions which have arisen time after time, applied to incident after incident, in the last decade. Their most cogent expression came from Colombian liberal Eduardo Santos in 1955. “Against whom are we Latin Americans arming ourselves?” he cried out before a Columbia University forum...