I read a recent letter to the editor asking for more gun control — again.

Where do I begin? Do too many people die in the U.S. from being at the wrong end of a firearm? Yes, no argument about that. Does every law-abiding citizen want to remove guns from the hands of murderers and criminals? Another yes.

Here is where our problem lies. How can we get guns out of murderers’ and criminals’ hands? Congress passing more laws won’t make that happen. Murderers and criminals don’t obey the laws, hence the descriptions murderers and criminals. I believe the District of Columbia and Chicago have some of the strictest gun-control laws in our nation and yet have very high rates of gun-related violence.

Gun control isn’t really about the gun; it takes a person to load the ammunition into that firearm and pull the trigger. So our gun-violence problem is really about the people using guns to commit these crimes. If there were no guns in the world, I suspect that these same murderers and criminals would find another weapon to use. Knives, swords, explosives, bow and arrows are all very deadly and have been used in the past to commit violence. How about that car that many of us drive peacefully down the road? A motor vehicle could be a very deadly weapon. Getting rid of all guns will only give violence a new descriptive phrase.

Inanimate objects are not to blame for our problems. We don’t have a gun problem, we have a people/criminal problem.

Personally for me, the gun control debate is getting old. We can regulate all we want, but it still won’t stop a criminal from being a criminal.

In the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave we do have this little thing called the Second Amendment, which reads “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

To end my rant, we need to change people, not outlaw inanimate objects and our freedoms.

 

John Berglund

Albert Lea