Angry teens want to limit our rights

‘OUR CHILDREN are dying’, the Albuquerque Journal’s front-page headline Sunday, March 25, referring to Saturday’s anti-gun protests. True, but they aren’t dying from school shootings; the furor over school shootings is out of all proportion to the actual numbers.

Since January 2010, there have been 129 fatalities that occurred during shootings on high school or college campuses, not counting the shooter if he was killed or others were killed off campus, or almost 16 per year on average. Sixteen too many to be sure, but compare that with the hundreds of times as many who die from teenaged automobile accidents — 3,599 people killed in teenage driving accidents in 2016 alone. Why no protests against teenage driving?

The protests made much of students fearing for their lives when they go to school, but their chances of being killed in a campus shooting are minute compared with other risks they routinely face. Their drive to the school is far more dangerous.

Of course students traumatized by the murder of their classmates are very sympathetic subjects, but there is nothing deserving sympathy about the rabid attacks many of the protesters are launching against anyone who does not agree that so-called gun control will solve the problem. Political leaders who courageously still support the Second Amendment are being denounced as murderers.

Especially vicious are the attacks on the National Rifle Association. I have never belonged to the NRA, but it is overwhelmingly composed of decent people who no more want to see kids killed than the protesters do. Indeed, the NRA has done more to promote gun safety education than all the left-wing opponents of the right to bear arms together.

One gun-control demand is that no one under the age of 21 has the wisdom needed to safely buy and possess a firearm. Perhaps so, but if that is true, do masses of angry teenage demonstrators have the wisdom to dictate policies compromising basic constitutional rights? DAVID C. WILLIAMS Albuquerque