WILLIAM L. EMICK

Barbours

After a mass killer murdered 17 helpless individuals at a Florida school despite those “Gun Free” signs – and the local sheriff’s department and the FBI were unable to prevent the carnage from occurring – Florida’s intimidated Republican Gov. Rick Scott blamed the gun and signed a bill increasing the minimum age to purchase semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21.

If 18 to 21 year olds in the U.S. are restricted from purchasing or using those firearms for hunting, recreational use or protection, then they should refuse to volunteer for the military.

If they are too immature to possess semi-automatic rifles among civilians, then they could never be trusted with fully automatic firearms amongst fellow servicemen and women.

It was not until 1968 that a law was passed raising the age to purchase handguns to 21 and rifles to 18. All adults between the ages of 18 to 21 should register, vote, and remind their state and federal legislators that the Founding Fathers gave them a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment to protect their inalienable God-given rights to life, liberty, and property from criminals, Socialist elitists, rogue bureaucrats and public officials, and foreign adversaries.

According to statistics I have researched, in 2014 there were only 251 people murdered with rifles of all types, while 670 were beaten to death by fists and feet in the U.S.

In Pennsylvania, only eight were slain by those dangerous rifles, compared to 63 killed with knives, 15 by feet-fists, and 78 by other methods.

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership maintains a daily record of gun deaths in the U.S., and during 2017 it reported the following: 634 accidental gun deaths, 12,646 homicides, 16,688 suicides, and 2,398,021 times guns were used for self-defense.

During the same period there were 44,984 killed by automobiles, 36,848 by poisoning, 38,848 by falling, and 20,590 by suffocation.

Thomas Jefferson “preferred dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” and our 18 to 21 year old adults should never be required to relinquish their Constitutional gun rights for the offenders transgressions.