The United States Constitution
addresses the right to bear arms. I don't have much problem with
that. Guns are useful to hunt food or protect one's family from
danger. But when the writers of the Constitution were alive, there
were no automatic rifles, no machine guns. They did not even exist on
a drawing board.
No one who lived then could conceive of
a young man buying multiple guns, and tens of thousands of rounds of
ammunition. Nor would they have waited to hold such a person
accountable to civil authority until after he has already committed
mass murder. Am I the only one to imagine that fifty men could
conspire to each buy that much, to start a civil war or terrorist
plot?
Police, military, and publicly
organized disciplined militia conceivably might have reason to own
such weapons. But common sense and the daily news media show that
free market sale and ownership of semi-automatic weapons are not
controlled by licensing alone, no matter what the NRA claims. Private
ownership of bombs, antiaircraft guns, howitzers, armed tanks, are
all forbidden. Even the cannon in my home town's veterans park had to
be neutered before the army released it.
Weapons similar to the AR-15 have no
use other than to kill multiple human beings rapidly. Individual
trade, sale, or possession should be a felony. How many more school
children have to die to get this idea across ?
No comments:
Post a Comment