The Second Amendment: 'A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.'
Recently,
I have read a lot of references to the protection that guns provide Americans
in their homes.
America
has twenty times the amount of gun violence of other industrialized nations. If
you look at the actual data, all this gun ownership in America does is increase
our rates of gun violence.
Statistics
show that having a gun in the home actually raises the chances that someone in
that home will be killed by gun violence 3-fold, and the numbers are even worse
for women. (NEJM 10/93).
The
second amendment was written at a time when the U.S. had no standing army and
muskets were the norm. In today’s environment of assault rifles, extended
clips, and hand-guns, the idea that there should be free-access to these
‘weapons of mass destruction’ is ridiculous.
If people
are so vehement about protecting their civil liberties, perhaps they should be
less accepting of the erosion of our civil rights encompassed in the ironically-named
Patriot Act (and it’s extensions) or the use of drones to target and kill U.S.
citizens.
I applaud
the Maryland Senate for passing gun legislation that will reasonably:
•
Require buyers to provide
fingerprints, complete safety training, obtain a license, and undergo
background checks before purchasing guns;
•
Restrict purchases of military style
semi automatic weapons and limit the capacity of ammunition magazines to 10
rounds;
•
Give state police the authority to
suspend and revokes the license of gun dealers who sell guns to criminals or
otherwise violate Maryland law;
•
Prevent individuals who suffer from
mental illness and are a danger to themselves or others from having access to
firearms.
It is disappointing to say the
least, that two of our local delegates don’t support such common-sense rules
for gun ownership.
Kent Ozkum
Emmitsburg
