It drives me crazy when I hear people say that guns don't kill people. They put this out there as if to negate the fact that these mass murderers, like the one in Newton, Connecticut this past week, are in fact using guns to do their killing. These recent events once again bring to light the need for comprehensive gun control legislation in the United States.
While the right to bear arms may be protected in the U.S. Constitution, it has very little to do with protecting the rights of the individual to possess and use death machines on an unsuspecting public. However, that is not to say that guns do not have any place in our society.
I grew up in a hunting household. Therefore, I know firsthand that whether someone personally believes in the sport of hunting or not is irrelevant to the fact that this is an American right. The vast majority of hunters will never use a gun to do anything but kill game. However, I don't think that legislation in our country ever need impede on the rights of these individuals. The type of legislation I'm talking about is in regards to multi-clip, multi-round assault weapons.
Let's face it, no hunter needs more than a few rounds to participate in their sport. A rifle holds several shots, a shotgun two and a pistol six. One does not need any more rounds than this to go hunting and if they do they should immediately return to a hunter safety course or the closest shooting range for practice. Yet, the Republicans in Congress, who remain in the pocket of the National Rifle Association, have allowed the assault weapon ban, which limited magazine capacity to ten, to expire in 2004 and have prevented it's reenactment since.
While the NRA has continued to donate heavily to the GOP, many innocent people have died in the United States directly because of these assault-type weapons. There is no person in this country that needs access to a gun that shoots a hundred bullets without needing to be reloaded unless they work for law enforcement.
Let's not even start this crap about how bad people will do these bad things regardless. While that may be true, their ability to kill as many people in the blink of an eye as happened in Newton will be greatly reduced if we put a strong assault weapon ban back in place.
Newton, Aurora, Columbine and the list goes one. Instead of getting our backs up about our individual rights, we ought to take a step back in United States to think about how many lives could have been saved had we cared more about the safety of our people than the lobbying dollars of the gun industry.
