Ed Barbeau had a recent view on misinformation on guns. He missed some that I would like to add corrections to. When the Founding Fathers were considering the Second Amendment, they were using muskets that after one shot required ramming in the powder, wadding and a ball to fire again. We now are able to get hold of war weapons that can fire over a hundred rounds a minute. The police chief of Newtown stated that if he had arrived on the scene of the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School equipped the way he is for duty, he would be among the dead. One little 6-year-old girl had been riddled with eleven bullets in her tiny body. Why would a citizen, hunter or hobbyist need a weapon designed to kill people?

Barbeau says that the military has no use for semi-automatic rifles. There are lots of clever fellows that can, with a few alterations, turn a semi- into a fully automatic machine gun in minutes. He also warns those who don’t have a gun handy when someone breaks into their home to pray after calling 911. A very respected study by Linda Dahlberg in The American Journal of Epidemiology in 2004 shows if you have a gun in your home, you or a family member is seventeen times more likely to be wounded or killed than a stranger.

One final point. The head of the NRA professed to be a defender of the Second Amendment for citizens. He is highly paid by gun manufacturers whose only mission is to sell guns. There are 300 million guns in the U.S. now. Why, oh why, do we need more?

Lee Garl

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