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How about the right to be safe?

How about the right to be safe?

The NRA has spent millions on lobbying efforts to defeat, dilute or delay sensible gun legislation in order increase gun sales. More assault rifles, larger capacity ammo clips, concealed handguns, gun shows and ineffective background checks.

All so they can sell more weapons and make buckets of money for the manufacturers. Never mind that there’re 87 gun deaths a day in the U.S.

Now the NRA advocates teachers carry weapons to defend students in schools. They are no budgets for teachers now. Who will pay? How about the NRA? And let’s include theaters, playgrounds, churches, malls, political rallies — all locations of frequent gun deaths. But, of course they won’t. Nor should they because more guns will only create more deaths as statistics clearly demonstrate.

And, if you ask a gun fanatic how banning assault weapons would affect his Second Amendment rights, like Piers Morgan did when he interviewed Alex Jones recently on CNN, it’s all about the wackos “defending” themselves from the feds. I secretly want to see one of these gun fanatics actually try to stop a SWAT team from entering a building just to demonstrate how insane this idea really is (with rubber bullets only, please).

No one is advocating taking guns away. Hunters, target shooters and collectors have a constitutional right to have their guns. But, after Newtown and all the other mass shootings, can we enact realistic gun laws? Prohibit assault weapons, limit ammo clips to 7 rounds, close the gun show and Internet loophole and enact a federally funded background check to prevent the mentally ill, criminals and terrorists from easily acquiring weapons of mass destruction?

Don’t we have a right to be safe that is more important than stretching the Second Amendment into justifying the slaughter of innocent Americans?

Tom Minnerick

Elgin

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