Letters:Fear leads to confusion over Second Amendment

Editor,

Given the content of your opinion page recently, there obviously continues to be a great deal of confusion with regard to the Second Amendment. Nearly all of that confusion is quite intentional, arising from fear spawned in a bed of ignorance by those who seek to disarm Americans entirely.

Perhaps a linguistically equivalent phrasing of the amendment, without the mention of "arms" will be illustrative: "An efficiently run library system, being necessary to the intellectual well-being of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed." I doubt that anyone reading the above would deny the author's intent that neither the individual right to keep and read books nor the collective right of a group of individuals to come together to build a library should be curtailed by the government.

And so it is with the Second Amendment. In spite of years of falsified propaganda, those who seek to disarm the American people can no longer appeal to factual argument in claims of reducing crime, because all the facts, all the studies, all the anecdotal evidence is clear: A populace of armed individuals reduces crime rates.

There is no question that the founders of this republic intended the Second Amendment to ensure that the people had the means to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." And it is precisely that fact that encourages those would-be tyrants to attempt to disarm us. Throughout history, the God-given liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights, chiefly those rights described in the First and Second Amendments, are the first to be attacked by tyrants. And that is what this argument is really all about.

John Bauer

UNM staff