Editor:

Sixty years ago, when I was 14, I walked into a sporting goods store, set $8 on the counter, and walked out LEGALLY with a weapon of war, a British .303 Enfield rifle, in a bag.

I then boarded a bus and took it home. I don’t recall school shootings being a problem in those days.

What has changed? It does NOT seem to be easier availability of guns.

There is probably some room for negotiations on the properties of guns. If I were at a shooting range and someone stepped up to the line with a 100-shot magazine, I would wonder if he was a terrorist, or just a turkey.

On the other hand, if we asked Sen. (Chuck) Schumer or Michael Bloomberg what a reasonable magazine capacity should be, they would probably say 3 shots or less. NYC and San Francisco need to stay out of the conversation and let moderates do the talking.

My idea of reasonable? U.S. soldiers fought in Vietnam with 20-shot clips in their M16s. For the semi-auto AR15, that size should be sufficient.

Maybe the best way to ensure sanity in the size proposals would be to provide that the civilian clip size limit be no smaller than the largest clip in use by law enforcement. This would bring cops into the discussion as to what is reasonably necessary for defense, without being convenient for mass shootings. Same for sidearm limits.

For those who think that guns are unnecessary in modern society: Have you been following the news from Ukraine, where Russian soldiers are raping women and girls as a weapon of war? Shooting women, children and old people just for fun?

Do you think that having an American-style armed populace might lead to more dead Russians and fewer dead Ukrainians? Perhaps with more widespread gun ownership, we would not have seen the new soldiers practicing with wooden rifles?

Admiral Yamamoto, of Pearl Harbor fame, is said to have stated that he would never want to invade the U.S. mainland because “There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

 

Ken McDaniel

Rio Rancho