Dear Editor,
There are several issues that are extremely hot and heavy at this moment in the USA and one of the hottest seems to be the wish by so many to confiscate firearms from everyone except law enforcement officers.
The average number of school children who have died per year due to shootings in schools is 9 to 10 per year over the last 25 years.
In the USA, the 1991 violent crime rate was 758/100,000 people. In 2016 it was 397/100,000 people. The murder rate in 1991 was 9.8/100,000 and in 2016 was 5.3/100,000. Each of these has decreased by more than 45% in 25 years. The point is: Violent crime is NOT increasing as more and more people are in possession of firearms.
Every mass shooting since 1991, except for one, has been in an area where firearms were not permitted.
If we don’t learn from history, history will repeat itself. One of the first things Hitler did in Europe was to make sure that only the government agents and entities had firearms. There were 6 million Jews who had no firearms in their possession just before they were taken for “a shower”. There were tens of millions of others killed who also were not permitted to have a firearm.
Switzerland requires that all households have an “assault rifle” and they have one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world. Mexico has some of the most restrictive laws regarding firearm ownership and they have tens of thousands of people killed in the last few years by wrongful and illegal use of firearms.
It is quite clear to many of us that more laws and more restrictions do not deter criminals or crazy people. It has always been true that: “We cannot legislate morality.”
If we value our freedoms, such as freedom of religion and of speech, we need to also value our right to be protected from tyranny within our government, as the First Amendment is dependent upon the presence of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment does not state that firearms are allowed if there is a need, the Second Amendment lets us know that firearm ownership is a right. There are those in the USA today running for public office that would like to have the Second Amendment repealed
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As a retired pediatrician, father, grandfather and great grandfather, I am adamant about steps to protect and safeguard our children. However, it seems quite unreasonable to send our precious children to places where there is no protection against that one crazy person out of thousands of people. The best way to be safe is to have someone around with a firearm and hopefully a firearm as competent as the one being used by that one crazy person—even the infamous “assault rifle”.
And, we have seen the results over and over, even recently, that “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”
Cris McBride, MD
The preceding is a letter Dr. McBride recently sent to his local paper in Arizona regarding the call for more gun control laws. This originally appeared at drgo.us and is reprinted here with permission.