Letter to the Editor: It's past time
BY Brice Bogle, Broken Arrow
Thursday, December 27, 2012
12/27/12 at 3:01 AM
Gun control - antithetical, they say, to the American way. The Second Amendment enshrined this belief held by the hallowed Founding Fathers.
So far as I know, this group of rich white men was not infallible, not even close. They compromised on slavery to get the Constitution ratified and it took more than 80 years and a terrible, bloody war to begin to fix their mistakes regarding slavery and equal rights extending to non-white, landed males. If they were around today and witnessed the number of mass murders with firearms, I believe they would support modification of the right to own weapons.
Who cares what they would think? They are not gods. And regardless of the painting making the rounds, Jesus Christ did not write the Constitution and present it to the country.
When the right to bear arms became a part of the Constitution, the arms consisted of muzzle-loading, single-round weapons, not AR15s.
It is past time to do something about the proliferation of firearms. The mass murder of anyone - much less of children - is not an acceptable trade-off.
Yes, culture and movies and video games might have a role to play, as does the under-funding of mental health care. But we cannot ignore the lethality of things anyone can own.
Sure, it takes a person and a gun to kill. But in China, where guns are illegal, on Dec. 14, another madman attacked children in a school, but lacking a gun, he stabbed 23. None died.
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