Second Amendment

Based upon the thinking of our Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment, shouldn't we restrict weapons to muzzle-loading rifles? ARTHUR LEVIN Los Angeles

This week, a 5-year-old Kentucky boy was playing with the mini-rifle he had gotten as a gift and ended up shooting and killing his 2-year-old sister. Apparently, even kindergartners have a right to keep and bear arms that shall not be infringed. For many people, it was a revelation that there are companies that manufacture guns specifically for children. The boy in question had a Crickett rifle, a smaller version of an adult weapon designed specifically for little trigger fingers.

By printing the letter of Michael Clark in your March 1 issue, you again spread the oft-repeated myth of the gun lovers that the Second Amendment to the Constitution allows individuals to keep all of the guns they want. As a teacher for over 30 years, I urged my students to study the entire Constitution, not just a selected portion of a sentence. The gun lovers regularly quote the second half of the Second Amendment, while ignoring the ruling first half, as well as ignoring the historical background and the court rulings on the amendment.

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It is disheartening for those of us who believe that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is just as important as the First to be forced to defend it every time there's a murder or fatal accident with a firearm. I refer to the "plea" for handgun control by Rod and Lois Briggs (Letters, Sept. 2). The Briggs' reading of the Second Amendment is that the people are allowed to have firearms only to support militias. James Madison, however, saw the state militias as a way to give the people's right to keep and bear arms maximum effect.

This week, a 5-year-old Kentucky boy was playing with the mini-rifle he had gotten as a gift and ended up shooting and killing his 2-year-old sister. Apparently, even kindergartners have a right to keep and bear arms that shall not be infringed. For many people, it was a revelation that there are companies that manufacture guns specifically for children. The boy in question had a Crickett rifle, a smaller version of an adult weapon designed specifically for little trigger fingers.

In response to your editorial "Guns, a History Lesson," Aug. 17: Are you sure that the Second Amendment gives a "state militia, not an individual" the right to keep and bear arms? Really? I thought the Bill of Rights was for citizens. Since when does the state need a constitutional amendment to possess weapons? The Second Amendment states, notwithstanding the conditional clause, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Does the conditional clause mean that those of us who keep arms have half a right to do so?

The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." As we no longer find it necessary to have a militia, wouldn't "the right to keep and bear arms" be unnecessary? The pro-gun lobbyists should quote the entire Second Amendment, not part of it. MORRIS S. CHESLIN Hollywood

Wambaugh concedes that maybe we are too free as a nation, that we may have to curtail our freedoms to a certain extent. At present, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is abused to the point that this area is a battlefield. We need to leave the military assault weapons to the military and exercise the Second Amendment rights in a reasonable manner. GARY N. DARBY Glendale

This is not an argument regarding the merits of gun control laws. Second Amendment states (1791): "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." As often happens in law, a simple English sentence may have legal significance which determines the application of the words. The Second Amendment was, as was the rest of the first 10 amendments (the Bill of Rights), insisted upon by some of the states for their own protection from the federal government.

Gun owners truly have nothing to worry about. There are no federal commandos coming to break down their doors and take away their guns. Sure, there is an outside chance that a universal gun registration system will be approved by Congress, but anything more, including -- and especially -- an assault weapons ban, will be scuttled by the House Republican caucus, if not by Democrats trying to win reelection in gun-friendly red states. And yet, given the rhetoric of the National Rifle Assn.

It is not too much of a stretch to say the National Rifle Assn. profits from mass killings like the slaughter at the theater in Aurora, Colo., and the killings at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. The NRA is, after all, a fundraising machine that runs on fear and a sense of crisis, even when the fear is false and the crisis manufactured. A former Republican lawmaker has made public a four-page fundraising letter from the NRA's executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, that was sent out to gun enthusiasts just three days after a young man styling himself as the Joker turned a showing of the new Batman movie into a bloody massacre.

James Holmes, the alleged shooter in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre, was lucky to be living in the U.S.A. People who want to kill people find guns are very handy and, thanks to America's gun lobby, they can buy them easily in this country, along with all the ammunition needed to get the job done. If the alleged gunman had been living in Norway, a place with much stricter gun regulations, he would have had to work harder to amass an arsenal. Still, there is the inconvenient fact for liberals that Norway's tougher laws did not deter right-wing racist Anders Breivik from gunning down 69 young people at a leftist youth camp last summer.

Flush with anticipation, four students from the nation's oldest women's college peered into the display case last week at Smith & Wesson's Sports Shooting Center and considered which handgun each would select for target practice. The .22, said Christie Caywood, because it fits so nicely in her hand. April Sparks swiftly chose the .357 over the .38, then opted for the .22. Student government president Erica Stock suggested they could all try different caliber weapons -- and then switch off.

In a step that experts believe opens gun control laws to legal attack, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is changing the federal government's long-standing interpretation of the 2nd Amendment to assert that it covers individual gun-ownership rights. A series of courts and most presidential administrations in recent times have stuck by a more narrow interpretation of the language, holding that it grants only a collective right to bear arms to militias.

They lock the gate to Canada at 5 p.m. But in this woodsy corner of northeastern Washington, no one really seems to mind the wait until it reopens promptly at 9 the next morning. In an emergency, there's a border crossing open until midnight about 10 miles to the west. "This part of the country is still kind of backward. I like it that way.

Their counterdemonstration in support of gun rights will be smaller than the Million Mom March. But the gun-owning women who make up the Second Amendment Sisters feel just as passionately about their cause. "The anti-gun factions constantly say that if it saves one life, it's worth it," said Debra Collins, who once used a 12-gauge shotgun to defend herself from an attack by her ex-husband at 4 o'clock in the morning. "Well, my firearm saved one life--mine."

Like many another old-timer, Leon Uris looks at America and doesn't like what he sees. Gun manufacturers peddling ever more lethal weaponry under the cover of the Second Amendment. Media grown hysterical and trivial. Racial sores left to fester. The nation's "social agenda" abandoned in favor of corporate greed. A general falling-off of virtue, so that the heroic Marines of World War II he wrote about in his first novel, "Battle Cry," are grotesquely parodied by right-wing militiamen.