Commentary
Cars cause more harm than firearms do To the editor: Mr. Dan Whisenhunt’s commentary on gun control [Reporter Newspapers, Jan 11-24] is summed up in one quote... “A right to life without feeling the need to arm myself everywhere I go deserves equal consideration.” In other words, Mr. Whisenhunt feels scared because Americans can own firearms and he really wants to feel safe. In his mind (and other squeamish progressives and weak-willed liberals), his emotions trump my right to one of the basic tenets of natural law, the right to self-defense. But what is even worse, is that it is a selective and highly irrational emotion on his part. If his concern for his health and wellbeing were accurately placed, he would demand that cars be pulled from the road and banned forever, as far more deaths, injuries and overall misery is caused by auto accidents. His chances of becoming one of those traffic statistics is far greater than ever even seeing a private citizen with a gun in public, much less ever being hit by a stray or intentional bullet. If he used a little more logic and a great deal less emotion, he might just cry himself to sleep every night worrying about two tons of steel whizzing by his pretty little head hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day. But he doesn’t, because he feels OK about it. The comparatively high likelihood of death or dismemberment by driving (which is not a protected constitutional right) is fine, but lawful gun ownership by lawful citizens (which just happens to be the Second Amendment to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights) is cause for hysteria, hand-wringing and bed wetting. It just doesn’t ring true... because it isn’t. This is a political dogma, not a safety issue, plain and simple. Ill-informed
l ette rS to tHe e Ditor E-mail letters to editor@reporternewspapers.net
anti-gun advocates want us to ignore the vast experience of history about oppressive governments and tyrannical rulers. Instead, people like this want to pretend that an all-powerful government is going to take care of their every need by day, coddle them asleep at night and benevolently nurture them from cradle to grave. But human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years of recorded history and the cliche is still true that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The Second Amendment was written to give armed citizens the power to not only defend themselves, but to keep a power-hungry government from oppressing them and to physically and forceably resist that entity if necessary. And it is true that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Ask the Poles, Jews and eastern Europeans during WWII, ask the Russians during Stalin’s purges, ask the Chinese during Mao’s rule, ask Cambodians about Pol Pot, ask the black man during the repressive Jim Crow era and ask every other disarmed people throughout history. The disastrous results were always the same when a government succeeded in removing firearms from the hands of the ordinary citizen. So please, I am unmoved by Mr. Whisenhunt’s need to feel good. I’d rather live with him being irrationally uncomfortable than for all of us losing our freedoms and liberties because we were too weak to defend them. Price R. Potter
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