wedge issues Gun Control

A very brief summary of my thoughts on gun control can be found in a letter-to-the-editor I wrote in 1993. I've posted this letter on my main website snowbizz.com. It happens to be one of the most frequently visited pages on that site. 

I view guns in much the same way I view cars - as machines requiring some regulation. 

When the first cars wobbled creakily over the dirt roads of America, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, there was no need to regulate them. They scared horses and got stuck in the mud. That was about it. Cars today are ten times faster, twenty times heavier, and a hundred times more powerful. They crowd our city streets and rural roads. They are driven by people on the edge of senility and by ditzy, inexperienced teenagers too busy talking to their friends to watch the road. No one would seriously suggest that there is a constitutional right to privacy and/or freedom from regulation where cars are concerned. 

Some people do, however, make this claim for guns based on the Second Amendment, a provision of the Constitution which, ironically, was written with the nation's security in mind. It was designed to give a huge rural nation a mechanism to call its dispersed people to arms in the event of war through local militias such as those formed during the Indian Wars and the Revolution.  There were no gun clubs in 1800.

When the Second Amendment was passed very few people had working guns. They required a year's earnings to buy and fired only one shot at a time. The guns people owned were barely fit for hunting or for local militias. There was no mafia. There were no organized drug cartels. People didn't carry concealed weapons. City folks could live their entire life without ever seeing a handgun. 

The biggest loophole I see in the gun laws is the freedom to buy and sell anything without any regulation at gun shows. Take care of this, and make sure people don't convert their semi-automatics into machine guns and that would address most of the need to regulate firearms in America.

Email Harry: harrywelty

Go to Harry's primary website:   www.snowbizz.com 

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This Web page is prepared and paid for by Harry Welty, Welty Volunteer Committee, PO Box 3613, Duluth, MN  55803