To the Editor:

I miss Martin Luther King. His enlightened reason and fervent advocating for equal rights is sorely missed. Unfortunate that a man with a gun chose to end his life.

Make no mistake about it, there have always been people who selfishly and self-centeredly would have us believe their rights should be paid for by other people’s blood and or expense.

In the case of those schoolchildren from Newtown, in no way, shape or form can any person not bereft of moral attributes or rational logic conclude their deaths were the cost of liberty and its equal protection thereof, let alone gun ownership.

In the application of our naturally inherent or inalienable civil rights, the only person who bears the cost is the person duly engaged in such application. No one else bears any direct burden. However, there is a cost of liberty: eternal vigilance. This requires informed knowledge more than just personal opinion.

The latest Supreme Court decision regarding private ownership of guns can be found at www.supremecourt.gov/-opinions/09pdf/08-1521.pdf. While reaffirming the right to private ownership of guns for self defense, the justices also re-affirmed our government’s interest in regulating such application:

“It is important to keep in mind that Heller, while striking down a law that prohibited the possession of handguns in the home, recognized the that the right to keep and bear arms is not ‘a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever, and for any purpose …’ We made it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as ‘prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,’ ‘laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms …’  We repeat those assurances here. Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, incorporation (by the 14th Amendment) does not imperil every law regulating firearms.”

While our founders were forced to modify their own liberal embrace of the deistic notion of naturally inherent rights and the equal protection thereof, they gave to their posterity the means to correct their error. 

No other country has accomplished such a radical embrace of liberal principles. None. Nor has any other country so entrusted their citizens to make their own decisions while reserving their right to remedy once harm has been done, like, gee, I don’t know, a self-closing garage door that kills a child.

 Just as we the people require proper licensing and or restrictions for our vehicles, so too should we for our guns. Every gun should have a traceable title. Even the ones I own.

Chuck Zimmerman

Waynesville