I am a huge James Bond fan, the movies and the books.

Although two other authors picked up the series after Ian Fleming’s death, I like Fleming’s work the best. He paints the picture of a 1950’s Cold War agent doing without all the techno-wizardry that Q brought in the movies. You can see Bond’s character develop from Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale all the way through The Man With the Golden Gun, his last.

Although I like Pierce Brosnan’s portrayal of Bond in the movies, I always felt that Timothy Dalton portrayed the character more like the “book” Bond. In one scene in “The Living Daylights”, the Russian he is trying to get information from activates an alarm to summon his bodyguard. Dalton pistol-whips the Russian, strips a woman down to her underwear, and stands her in front of the door for the bodyguard to be surprised by when he bursts in. When the bodyguard hesitates, Bond knocks him unconscious. Cold and ruthless, just like Ian Fleming portrayed him. Roger Moore was my least favorite, I consider him the “playboy” Bond. Since George Lazenby was only in one film, I don’t even count him in the mix.

That said, you can now see why I have followed with interest the disheartening news that a new Bond was being selected. It is reported that Daniel Craig will be the sixth actor in the Broccoli-produced series. The movie will be “Casino Royale”, previously given a comic treatment by David Niven, but never done as originally written — a drama. It will be interesting to see the direction taken by the actor and producers in this film. I promise one thing — if they film the scene near the end of the book where Bond is tortured by “Le Chiffre”, every man in the theater will leave in a cold sweat.

One thing does surprise me, though. Mr. Craig is on record as not liking guns. This is London by the UK’s Evening Standard reports:

The actor will wield 007’s famous Walther PPK in the movie Casino Royale.

But he revealed in OK! magazine: “I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around, people will shoot each other.

“That’s a simple fact. I’ve seen a bullet wound and it was a mess. It was on a shoot and it scared me. Bullets have a nasty habit of finding their target and that’s what’s scary about them.”

Let me wait a couple of minutes for you to absorb that…

“As long as [handguns] are around people will shoot each other?”

“Bullets have a nasty habit of finding their target and that’s what’s scary about them?”

Say WHAT??? If he feels this way, he should team up with Clinton’s disgraced former Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, to produce a “safer gun, safer bullets”.

I’ve got two serious handguns, a snub-nosed .38 caliber that I carry (you’d better believe I’m licensed!), and a 4″ barrel .357 Magnum that I keep bedside (the longer barrel gives me the accuracy needed so that I wouldn’t have to worry about a wounded intruder, I could just roll over and go back to sleep and take care of the mess in the morning). These are in addition to two “less serious” handguns inherited from my deceased grandfather and a sister-in-law (they probably don’t work, that’s why they’re “less serious”). And you know something? Not one of those guns has ever been used to shoot anybody. And none of them have just gotten up and shot somebody on their own.

Now don’t get me wrong. Given a bad set of circumstances, it could happen. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and there are certain scenarios in which I would end a life just about as quickly as I could form the thought. They mainly involve armed intruders in the middle of the night, someone in the process of harming my wife, or a Liberal who just doesn’t know when to shut up. OK, just kidding about the Liberal — I’d probably just pistol-whip that individual.

Here’s what the anti-gun crowd just doesn’t get — Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Take away all the guns, and people will be killed by knives. Confiscate the knives and people will use bludgeons.

I wanted to make sure I was right about this guns not killing people stuff, so I talked with my buddy Publius Rendezvous, who has a rifle and a shotgun, and he says the phenomenon is not limited to handguns — his guns have never killed a human being, either.

Not being one to single-source such a controversial topic, I checked the NRA’s web site (www.nra.org). They report that Washington D.C. enacted a virtual ban on handguns in 1976. Over the next 15 years, Washington D.C.’s homicide rate rose 200%, while the national rate rose only 12%.

Roughly paralleling that time frame, between 1977 and 1992 10 states adopted right-to-carry laws. A study by John R. Lott, Jr. (”More Guns, Less Crime”, The University of Chicago Press, 1998 — my third source) found that the implementation of these laws created:

• no change in suicide rates,
• a .5% rise in accidental firearm deaths,
• a 5% decline in rapes,
• a 7% decline in aggravated assaults,
• an 8% decline in murder

for those 10 states.

That’s good enough for me, Daniel Craig notwithstanding.

Man, I hope they never take away Bond’s gun! I just don’t think I could deal with that particular tough guy having his famous License to Kill exchanged for a License to Slap You Silly.