Letter to the Editor
With another school shooting and, once again, students killed in class rooms, the gun control fight wages on. Advocates of the Second Amendment simply point to the ‘The right to bear arms’ guaranteed in the Constitution. To this I agree, but only from the point that the founding fathers intent was that we should bear arms to prevent a militia or an invading power from coming in to supersede our young Republic. Likewise, I agree with those that defend the First Amendment “Freedom of Speech,” but as we all have heard, you can’t yell fire in a theater, so shouldn’t we revise the Second Amendment, too?
I have two points. First, people are the problem with guns, not guns. Set a gun on a table loaded for one hundred years and it never discharges until a human picks it up. I offer no solution on fixing that one. America will always have crazies. Maybe the death penalty, rather than life in prison, may be a deterrent to those that have this sick mind. But registering before you buy a gun is a joke. If you want a gun, any gun, you can buy a gun. You can buy a gun at almost any age, in almost any town in America, on any day and at any price.
Secondly, but to me most important, to control the guns, why not began controlling the ammo? Yes, ammo can be made at home, but control gun powder and the other components. Might be a start. Controlling ammo may be the key.
Through these recent mass killings, I have realized that the NRA has lots of power. That scares me as much as guns. No one, certainly not a politician, will try challenge them or even work with them to develop a compromise or a safer path. Recently, Senator ( Marco) Rubio folded on live television when a student asked him if he would stop taking money from the NRA after the recent Florida school. He couldn’t get out a simple ‘YES.’ My take is that the NRA must contribute a lot to elections.
So with that said, what’s next? I’ll stay armed, and we will do nothing until the next mass killing and once again this will be a hot button for a few days and then is not addressed, which is our history of bearing arms. And with all the guns in this country today, gun control measures will not affect the population for at least one hundred years. Gene Kostreba