I don’t care what the Second Amendment says: We are not responsible enough as a society to possess the means with which we can kill each other so randomly and so quickly. The Second Amendment was written more than 200 years ago, at a time when its authors were fighting Native Americans and the British. Now, I routinely see Native American commercials on TV, and the Brits have been on our side for at least the last 100 years.
The Centers for Disease Control, which track gunshot deaths in this country, show that we annually kill 30,000 a year with guns. How many of those deaths are children? What is wrong with us that we do absolutely nothing about this?
Amazingly, the National Rifle Association folks will once again tell us that the way to prevent this is that we should all be armed! And I can assure you that I’ll get death threats for writing this letter from some in the same group. Who among us believes that we should all be armed to protect ourselves from events like this? Preposterous. A great American philosopher once said, “Keep doin’ what ya been doin’, and you’ll keep getting what ya got.” That was Yogi Berra.
—Retired Lt. Col. of the Marine Corps Richard Westmoreland, Edmond
