Re: Nobody needs automatic weapons, Feb. 22.
This discussion, which is raging in the U.S. and sometimes in Canada, needs an examination of the reason some Americans and Canadians cling to the "right" to own personal weapons of any kind. This right has entered the realm of religion, not based on reason but on the blind acceptance kind of faith.
For example, the Christian right in America has transferred its undying faith in Christ to undying faith in the alt-right, anti-gun-control, Donald Trump etc. Even Billy Graham's son, Franklin, and many other fundamentalist preachers have done the flip. To gun addicts the right to own guns of any kind is equated to personal freedom from government control. It is symbolic, not practical. They have no need for guns, but to them guns represent personal freedom.
The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was never meant to give people the right to own a gun to hold up the local 7-11 store or mass-shoot a school full of children. Before and during the American Revolution, the British government forbade the colonists from having arms, so they were at a decided disadvantage until they acquired them by other means.
One idea was that a citizen should be allowed arms to rise up against a tyrannical foreign government (foreign in the sense that the colonists were separated by an ocean from their British government which was treating them like a foreign, conquered country). Once the colonies became their own country, they did not need to be armed against their own government.
A second purpose was that citizens had a duty to join together against a hostile and truly foreign government (for example, Canada which was still British and/or Mexico which was Spanish). The founding fathers were suspicious of a standing army, no doubt because of the colonists' experience with an ever-present British army. They preferred armed militias of citizens that could be called upon to defend the new country. The Second Amendment was always meant to protect against foreign powers. When armed forces became professional and therefore armed, there was now no need for armed citizens.
A third major idea which came from the American Bill of Rights was that a citizen has the right to be armed in order to protect his/her home and family. This is the sticky point that plagues arguments against gun control. However if nobody is armed, then one can defend one's home with good locks and a baseball bat. Other countries manage this dilemma because they haven't enshrined gun ownership next to the Ten Commandments and that is the problem with any kind of dogma. It becomes a religion and can't be changed by common sense.
If the founding fathers could have seen what is going on today they would never have written the Second Amendment or they would have made sure to couch it in language which would have prevented today's dilemma.
But all this is ignored by the American arms complex which provides the funding and propaganda to continue the feverish defense of personal gun ownership.
Donald A. Fraser
Prince George
