Control automatic weapons

The Second Amendment of the Constitution addresses the right to bear arms. I have little problem with that. Guns are useful to hunt food or protect one’s family from danger. But when the writers of the Constitution were alive, there were no automatic rifles, no machine guns. They did not even exist on a drawing board.

No one who lived then could conceive of a young man buying multiple guns, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Nor would they have waited to hold such a person accountable to civil authority until after he had already committed mass murder. Am I the only one to imagine that 50 men could conspire to each buy that much, to start a civil war or terrorist plot?

Police, military and publicly organized, disciplined militia conceivably might have reason to own such weapons. But common sense and the daily news media show that free market sale and ownership of automatic weapons are not controlled by licensing alone, no matter what the National Rifle Association claims.

Automatic weapons have no purpose except to kill multiple human beings. Private ownership and trade should be outlawed.

Keith Dahlberg

Kellogg