Where there are more guns available, there will be more gun violence.

Dear Editors,

Our children are being used as sacrificial lambs to the altar of the Second Amendment absolutist’s cult. Gun rights are seldom used for self-protection and mainly used for mass destruction, especially with assault rifles.

AR-15s, the civilian equivalent of the M16 military weapon, are semi-automatic and can hold up to 100 rounds of bullets that shatter the target. Because there were nearly 400,000 assault weapons in the hands of American citizens, a law was passed to ban them in 1994. A decade later that law expired and today there are nearly 20 million AR-15s in the hands of civilians. The sole purpose of these weapons is mass killings. These are often used in school massacres. Surely, they can be banned without affecting normal gun rights.

 It is claimed by the ARA that the only defense against the bad guy with the gun is a good guy with a gun.  As the Uvalde massacre clearly proved, good guys with guns waited outside, despite numerous calls for help from children who were being slaughtered by an eighteen-year-old.  At age 18 you cannot legally buy a beer, but you can buy an assault rifle.  One can easily change this age requirement to a higher level, to buy a gun.

To compare an eighteen-year-old, like the killer in Uvalde to an eighteen-year-old soldier, is totally inappropriate.  A soldier is vetted in many ways by the military.  Even after a gun is issued, it is kept in the armory and not for use at the soldier’s discretion.

It is also advocated by some gun right enthusiasts that we should arm our teachers, rabbis, priests, and grocery clerks.  If this reasoning is followed, every public place would end up being a fortress, where every intruder would be viewed with suspicion.

The biggest propaganda victory for the NRA has been its slogan that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.  Apply this to any other tool, you’ll realize how ridiculous this propaganda is.  For example, “Cameras don’t take pictures, people take pictures.”  Next time you want to take a picture of our beautiful Del Mar sunset, go click, click with your fingers without the camera and send the picture to the NRA supporters. 

Where there are more guns available, there will be more gun violence.

Maneck S. Wadia, PhD

Luneta Drive