Innocents slaughtered

In viewing the scenes on television and in the newspapers from the horrific shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, I noticed something. There were images of grieving parents, law enforcement officers scurrying about, and shocked bystanders. What was regrettably missing was pictures of the mutilated bodies of the children who had been killed by the powerful weapons of their murderer. I can only imagine how terrified they were, how innocent and trusting they were that morning when they left home for school. The argument that there is nothing that can be done about these massacres of America’s children is a lie, and Second Amendment fanatics know it.

If you are opposed to blanket background checks and bans on assault rifles and ghost guns, you are complicit in the slaughter of these elementary school children and their teachers. I believe that it is true that 90 percent of gun owners are law-abiding, God-fearing individuals. Why, then, would they be opposed to background checks? Assault rifles are for armed combat and nothing else. I grew up hunting. If someone had showed up at a dove or deer hunt with a Thompson submachine gun or a Browning automatic rifle—the assault weapons of my day—they would have been laughed out of town.

America is a covenanted nation, its people bound together by the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution—“We the People” and “To form a more perfect Union.” And yet we are now a nation that cannot even protect its own children. If you are a believer, as I am, and go to church this weekend without feeling a sense of guilt and sin, you are going to the wrong church.

“They” are not going to come and take your guns. This is a democracy; nothing can be done without the permission of the people. There is no “we” and “they”; there is only “us.”

When you look at your young children and grandchildren, imagine them, just for a moment, going off to school to face the same fate that befell the Uvalde innocents.

RANDALL WOODS Fayetteville