Guns, rights and violence

Re “ ‘Prayers’ just won’t do,” Opinion, Feb. 16

To the reactionaries who no doubt will froth at the mouth over Tim Rutten’s sensible call for the political will to curb the availability of guns, I say this: Where is the societal benefit of gun ownership? Other rights elucidated by the Bill of Rights have clear merits. Where’s the public good in bearing arms? Self-protection? Maybe, but you’re more likely to be shot with your own gun than kill an intruder. Being allowed to feel like Walker, Texas Ranger? Um, no. The 2nd Amendment actively harms American society. That’s the difference between the gun lobby’s pet cause and the rest of the Constitution, and why gun ownership needs to be made illegal except in very special circumstances.

Tim Vandehey

Ventura

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Gun-control fundamentalist Rutten conceals 2nd Amendment scholarship that contravenes his argument. Liberal and conservative scholarship questioned why the phrase “the people” in the 2nd Amendment should be read any differently from the same expression in the other Bill of Rights amendments. Thus the rights, including gun ownership, are all given to “the people” individually, which a recent court decision on a District of Columbia law affirms.

Samuel F. Rindge

South Pasadena

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Rutten cries that “we are a nation held hostage by the pandemic of gun violence” and says it’s “idiocy” for law-abiding citizens to be allowed to carry guns. The real idiocy is not in allowing the public to protect itself but in restrictive firearms policies that have proved to be ineffective. Urban liberals like Rutten and his sidekicks in the elite media always blame President Bush, Republicans, the National Rifle Assn. and Middle America, but never those pulling the trigger. The truth is that gun control makes crazy liberals who advocate totalitarianism feel powerful.

Pat Murphy

Pacific Palisades

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Thank you, Tim Rutten, for saying what needs to be said about the epidemic of gun violence and the stranglehold that the NRA has on politicians. We’ve found ways to make it more difficult for people to make methamphetamine, to destroy buildings with graffiti or to blow up a plane, and law-abiding people put up with those hurdles for the public good. And yet the gun lobby will block all efforts to make it difficult to buy a gun at a gun show. “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is the NRA mantra. But guns make it so much easier for unbalanced, troubled and angry people to “solve” their problems.

Rhonda Mayer

Chatsworth

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Rutten’s call for politicians to favor gun restrictions will probably fall on deaf ears -- at least for the moment.

If the Supreme Court decides that gun ownership is an individual right rather than a collective one, the entire framework of laws and regulations that controls carrying a weapon will reverse. The need for a permit to carry a gun will evaporate; governments do not “permit” rights. Likewise, freedom will be guaranteed to own that weapon in any public or quasi-public area. Airlines, nightclub owners, governments and schools will be hard-pressed to claim that the Constitution does not apply to them. After a few years of the melee that is likely to ensue, calling for a more balanced approach will no longer fall on deaf ears.

Stefen Malone

West Hollywood