[A letter not so unlike other letters to the editor written on the subject of gun control. If there were more people who could write 500 intelligent and articulate words on any issue or subject concerning our rights and our liberty, we would live in a much different—a far, far better world.]
Dear Editor,
The Constitution says the People have the right to bear arms; it does not say the People have the right to bear tactical assault weapons. The administrators of government have a sworn obligation to serve and protect. I do understand how much the notion of service to the People from government administrators has been undermined since JFK pronounced that we should longer expect government to serve the People but instead should ask ourselves how we could serve the power elite–this notion of service has also been undermined in the minds of those who cry out for gun reform. When the idea of how to serve the People has lost its focus, how to protect them will also suffer a decline in determination.
This decadence in the idea of service, corrupted even among those who say we need to have more dedication to serving people, is a large part of what we have today in government when government fails to redress gun violence, and this is equally true from alleged progressives or liberals in America as it is among our conservatives, either in government or other social forums. We do not have to attack the Bill of Rights, but respect the Constitution with sanity, rationality, intelligence, higher literacy, and a historical consciousness our pedagogic norms currently disallow.
There is nothing un-Constitutional about background checks, about auto-matic weapons being off the table. However, we also do not want to take out the Second Amendment. It is integral in a way that many cannot admit, or have no rhetorical acumen to assert articulately. (This is a failure of our general decline in literacy, and it is seriously hampering how we talk about guns in America.) President Obama is correct in his assertion that it is unthinkable that a person who could be on a no-fly list here in the United States could walk into a store and buy an assault weapon and go home with it that day–I am asking, why at all–assault weapons?
Yours,
Citizen Concerned
The Falling Leaf Review 