Published: August 18, 2006 01:34 pm      

Sneak attack on gun owners

One-buy-per-month proposal misfires

They’re at it again. Gun-control advocates and their friends in state government are once again trying to nibble away at your right to own firearms. But you’ve got to hand it to them, as they’re quite crafty.

This latest proposal, which is merely a retread of Gov. Ed Rendell’s 2002 campaign proposal to restrict firearm ownership, would limit handgun purchases to one per month.

It all sounds relatively mild. After all, who would want to purchase more than one handgun per month?

Certainly, the anti-gun crowd would lead us to believe, only criminals would.

This all emanates from a recent spike in gun violence in some of the more populated areas of the state, meaning Philadelphia, where our governor was once mayor and district attorney.

Anti-gun zealots contend that middlemen are buying guns and then selling them to criminals. Their solution: Limit handgun sales.

But the anti-gun advocates, who, if they were honest, would admit that this is just one more step on the road to complete confiscation, are forgetting one very salient point. And that is the very reason why gun rights are so important.

The Founding Fathers didn’t give us the right of gun ownership so that we could hunt, target practice or collect antique firearms. If those things were the reason for the Second Amendment, then a limit to one gun per month would be fine.

The reason the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment was summed up nicely by Thomas Jefferson, who said: “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

He said that at a time when government was much smaller and less intrusive than it is today.

Now, with government at every level getting more powerful, it’s kind of scary that people in state government, such as Rendell and his anti-gun friends, want to restrict our right to own firearms.

Could it be that they want to remove from the people the ability to choose that “last resort” that Jefferson thought so important?