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Fred Bucheit
Howard
Andrew Napolitano writes (Express Sept. 16) about the Second Amendment while mentioning dozens of court cases where gun rights were upheld. But it is odd that he never once mentioned a right that all Americans have--the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is rather difficult to enjoy those rights when we have a bullet in us.
Napolitano never once mentions that UNALIENABLE right (not just an ordinary right) is taken from 300 American citizens -- hardworking, law-abiding, productive fathers and mothers and sons and daughters -- every day of the year. More American citizens have been killed by haters, hotheads and the mentally unbalanced with guns than all the American soldiers who fought in all the wars in our history. Napolitano ignores that brutal and disturbing fact. He goes on and on about the government's lack of fidelity to constitutional norms... but he completely ignores the UNALIENABLE right guaranteed by that constitution.
President Eisenhower put his finger on the problem: he gave the nation a dire warning about what he described as a threat to democratic government. He called it “the military-industrial complex, a formidable union of defense contractors and the armed forces.” We should have listened to him. The killing machine (gun) industry has bought, through the NRA wielding tens of millions of dollars during elections, this great threat to our democracy and the lives of our citizens. There is something fundamentally wrong with a nation that has 300 of its law-abiding citizens shot every day of the year.
The killing machine industry was aware that putting more guns into circulation would result in the arming of haters, hot-heads, criminals and the mentally unbalanced and this would in turn create fear, and more fear would cause the sale of more guns.
I was in Budapest recently and asked a desk clerk if it was safe to walk the streets of Budapest at night. He chuckled and said, "You are from the United States, right? More people are shot in a day in your country than are shot here in a year." That is what we have become as recognized by people in other countries.
A great conservative justice, Warren Burger, said this about the founding fathers: "The framers clearly intended to secure the right to bear arms essentially for military purposes." Burger was a Republican who was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon in 1969 and served for 17 years until 1986. In retirement in 1991, Burger said that the Second Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
We Americans are a thousand times more likely to be killed by an American terrorist with a gun than any foreign terrorist. Why do we send the most powerful military in the world after foreign terrorists and completely ignore our own terrorists carrying killing machines on the streets of America? School children and shoppers and workers and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters are shot every day as a result of this blind adherence to a single Amendment. Such is the influence of blood money. Surveys have shown for years that the majority of Americans oppose this American tragedy. But enough money spent in the right places can pervert the greatest Constitution ever written.
Oh, do you think Jesus would prefer the AR15 or the AK47?