Dear Editor,
The man who shot Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others was tackled while reloading his gun, having spent 33 rounds. Giffords’ husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, who has reviewed the criminal records, said a 9-year-old girl was shot sometime after bullet No. 12 and added, “If Jared Loughner didn’t have access to a high-capacity magazine, there would be less people dead.” This is why we should ban high-capacity magazines.
In a Jan. 30 editorial the Great Bend Tribune stated that, the framers (of the Constitution) believed the right to bear arms was the primary right by which all other rights could be protected. The editorial also points out that the Revolutionary war was British citizens (colonists) fighting against the British government because of the tyranny of the British government. It ends with the question, How can we be certain we will never be faced with that situation again?
The editorial bolsters the notion that the reason we own guns is to fight the government by attributing the following quote to Thomas Jefferson. “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
According to www.monticello.org and other fact-checking sites, Jefferson never said this. The earliest known use of this fabrication was in a 1989 newspaper column arguing that the reason we own guns is to fight the government.
But the government is not 18th century British Redcoats or some ideological Them. It is our local police, our state patrol and our military personnel. In other words, it is the family down the street whose kids play with our grandkids at the local pool. It is the family two pews up on the left at church. It is the young men who were schoolmates with our kids and risked their lives in Afghanistan. When their duty to serve brings them to our door, we own guns to fight the government means that we shoot them to death. Thats reality.
We can, and do, loop endlessly through philosophical arguments. We selectively cull words from two centuries ago to justify our arguments. As it turns out, we even make up some of them. We see a distasteful tax or regulation and create an illusion that we own guns to fight the government. We create an intractable debate about guns, pour our emotions into it and try to claim we must have high-capacity magazines even when we can describe no reason to have them.
We should ban high-capacity magazines. “If Jared Loughner didn’t have access to a high-capacity magazine, there would be less people dead.”
John Sturn
Ellinwood