Today's JG rant - gun control

The only thing dumber than Emily Mossoian penning a letter that implies that Thomas Jefferson might be okay with living “in a country where children are shot school” is the JG printing such rubbish. There are laws against murder.  Still it happens.  There are already between 22 and 30,000 laws controlling the sale, storage and use of firearms in America.  Still bad people do bad things with guns.  Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in America yet it is the nation’s murder/shooting capitol.

Leftist do not want to stop gun crime.  They want enough violence to pass more and more restrictive laws in effort to negate the Second Amendment.  Listen to the 2019 field of Democrat presidential hopefuls.  Not one supports the constitution as written with regard to the peoples’ right to keep and bear arms.  The only thing standing in the Democrat’s way of grabbing your gun is PDJT and a majority of strict constructionists on the Supreme Court.

If Democrats were serious about stopping gun violence they support the NRA’s call for minimum sentencing for criminals who use a gun.  They don’t.

If Democrats were serious about gun control they’d propose a Constitutional amendment that repeals and replaces the Second Amendment. 

It’s all a show.  It’s all a bunch of half-baked nonsense typical of the JG’s editorial page.

Sideshows only distract from gun violence horrors

Melissa Damerell (Letters, April 16) gave us quite a few quotes from our Founding Fathers about their beliefs about guns. Most of those quotes come from Thomas Jefferson, and one of them stood out to me so vividly that I spent several days ruminating over it.

Jefferson said, “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” If we put this quote in the context of America in 2019, what Jefferson and Damerell are saying is they would rather live in a country where children are shot at school and where people can legally purchase semiautomatic weapons that can kill scores of people in seconds (Las Vegas comes to mind) than live in a country with stricter gun laws. On average, 31,000 people die per year of gun violence in the United States. In 2018 alone, there were by some definitions 355 mass shootings.

To me, it seems that by quoting this line of Jefferson's, Damerell is saying she would rather live in a “dangerously free” country where students are traumatized by active-shooter drills and where tens of thousands of Americans die each year. This is the price of not having sensible gun laws, and Damerell seems willing to pay it. I am not willing to pay that price.

After 20 children younger than 7 were slaughtered in 2012 and our government did nothing to reform gun laws, our country failed us. Our government has shown us time and time again that it would rather receive money from gun lobbyists than protect its citizens. We are the only First World country with this problem, and our government remains unwilling to fix it.

Until we stop squabbling over whether Thomas Jefferson believed we should carry a firearm, nothing will change and people will continue to die senselessly. We registered, regulated and insured our cars after there were too many auto deaths. We need to do this for guns as well.

This is not the peaceful slavery Jefferson described; this is paying a small price for a safe and healthy country.

Emily Mossoian

Fort Wayne