Maine Writer

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Saturday, April 06, 2013

Second Amendment Zealots in Denial About Guns in Their Senseless Mantra: "People Kill People" - but Ammunition Can be Controlled



Obviously, there's no infringement on the Second Amendment, the right for Americans to own arsenals of deadly firearms, if more controls were to be enforced over the sale of ammunition.  

Americans tax and regulate drugs, alcohol and tobacco, so ammunition can easily be subject to oversight. 

Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty, whose district includes Newtown, Connecticut, (Sandy Hook Elementary innocents shootings) talked with Rachel Maddow about the newly passed gun reform laws in Connecticut after Maddow exposed the nonsensical natures of National Rifle Association (NRA) arguments for high capacity ammunition magazines.  For some reason, the NRA seems to believe the ammunition used to kill people with assault weapons are irrelevant to gun control.  But, if Americans controlled ammunition sales, the gun obsessed Second Amendment zealots could own all the guns they desire without affecting our Constitutional right to bear arms.

Without ammunition, Adam Lanza, 20, couldn't possibly have committed the mass murder of innocents, on December 14, 2012, when he  fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the village of Sandy Hook in Newtown Connecticut.  Before driving to the school, Lanza had shot and killed his mother Nancy at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived, Lanza committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. The shootings prompted renewed debate about gun control in the United States, and a proposal for new legislation banning the sale and manufacture of certain types of semi-automatic firearms used to kill people and ammunition clips with more than ten rounds of ammunition.

Esty said Lanza would have killed fewer people if his ammunition clip required reloading after 10 rounds were fired.  She said 11 students escaped his deadly rampage while he changed clips after his first one emptied.  It's a tragic commentary on the news of this deadly event to reflect on how many fewer deaths would have occurred if Lanza had taken a smaller ammunition clip with him on December 14th, last year.  Instead, we should talk about how every death at Sandy Hook could have been prevented by prohibiting the sale of any assault weapons, along with the ammunition used to senselessly kill so many people.  

Nevertheless, even in the face of facts about how guns kill people, the NRA continues to deny the cause and effect.  Instead, the NRA is complicit in the preventable deaths of innocent people while spewing lies about "people who kill", rather than blame the weapons and the ammunition.  Regardless of how mentally ill or angry a person might be, and in spite of how motivated a deranged person can become to mass murder innocent people, the fact is, gun violence deaths would not happen if firearms were absent and ammunition wasn't available to the killers.

Unfortunately, the Second Amendment arguments are too daunting to solve.  But ammunition can be controlled.  Like alcohol, tobacco and controlled substances, we can make a difference by limiting access to the preventable cause of death of so many people.  We can control, tax and restrict the sale of ammunition.  

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