In his op-ed “Repeal the 2nd Amendment? How about the First?” (Dec. 27), Paul Danish erroneously tries to equate my call to repeal the Second Amendment with censorship and then disingenuously suggests that if the Second Amendment is repealed then the First Amendment might as well be repealed. LOL. Mr. Danish, you and everyone else know that words don’t kill people, guns kill people. Paul Danish and the NRA keep getting it wrong; however, Bob Dylan got it right back in 1963, in his epic song “Masters of War,” when he sang:
You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.
The military industrial complex that Dylan so artfully protested against and today’s gun manufacturers and the NRA are one in the same. They all profit from selling fear and weapons as they merchandise death. Why should the United States continue to allow such easy access to semi-automatic rifles and handguns so that gun manufacturers can make a profit off death and cite the Second Amendment as justification to perpetuate this slaughter? Shamefully, gun sales went up after the Connecticut elementary school shooting atrocity because the NRA treated this latest shooting tragedy as just another gun marketing opportunity. The U.S. is ranked #1 in the world in private gun ownership with over 270,000,000 guns. The gun manufacturers, the NRA and pro-gun advocates like Mr. Danish allow the NRA to rely upon the Second Amendment in order to justify and continue to profit off the needless and tragic deaths of so many Americans.
It is past time to repeal the Second Amendment. This will certainly make the USA safer for our children, police and everyone else. But the NRA refuses to act in a reasonable manner, and it and people like Mr. Danish would rather arm teachers and turn our schools into armed camps, violate the privacy rights of mentally ill Americans, attack video games and “liberal” Hollywood than reasonable gun regulation; anything but restricting gun sales. The NRA’s answer to the atrocity in Connecticut of having teachers carry guns with armed security in every school in the USA is dangerous, ludicrous, prohibitively expensive and just impractical. By making obtuse arguments, the NRA and gun proponents like Paul Danish have demonstrated that they are unreasonable, refuse to compromise and that they cannot be reasoned with nor trusted to work in good faith toward a viable solution to tragedies like the slaughter of innocents in Connecticut. All the NRA cares about is selling more guns, it simply does not care about the lives of Americans and puts profits before people; consequently, the rest of America and the Obama administration must understand that the NRA is the enemy and that it is counterproductive to and diametrically opposed to a safer, saner America and any form of reasonable and necessary gun control. It is all or nothing with the NRA and pro-gun advocates like Mr. Danish, who will not stand for any gun regulation, versus the Obama administration and the rest of America, who realize that we must implement gun regulation to save lives.
They have had their way for too long and too many Americans have died because the NRA made it so easy for someone to pull a trigger, but we, the people, have to say enough and no more Sandy Hook atrocities and support the repeal of the Second Amendment.
Lafayette resident O’Connor is a former public defender in Florida and New Mexico.
