No common sense in gun control idea

I just finished reading Burt Constable's column, "Supreme Court needs to take the safety off common sense" and I'm still waiting to hear the "common sense" part of his plan.

How does raising taxes on guns and ammo have any effect on crime? Criminals don't buy their guns from Cabela's or GAT. They buy their guns illegally and don't pay taxes on them. Higher taxes are just one more way for the government to suck the money out of our middle class wallets.

If you want a common sense law to achieve better gun control, how about this one - if you use a gun to commit a crime, you go to jail for life; no parole, no plea bargain, no exceptions for underage offenders, no second or third or fourth chances.

Would you like some more common sense? If you and the other, as you put it, "liberals who advocate gun-control laws" spent as much time, money and effort trying to get the criminals off the streets as you do trying to take the guns away from law-abiding citizens, maybe those same law-abiding citizens would feel safe enough to not feel a need to own a gun for self-defense.

Up until the Supreme Court struck down the Washington, D.C., gun laws, they were the toughest gun control laws of any city in the United States. Washington also had, and still has, the highest homicide rate of any

city in the United States - almost four times higher than the national average. So tell me again how gun control laws help?

True common sense tells us that gun control laws, or any laws for that matter, only work on people who actually obey the law.

Ed Emerson

East Dundee