As founders knew, America needs guns

Ron Moers, Henderson

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 | 2:03 a.m.

Brian Till’s Saturday column (“In search of the source of America’s gun obsession”) is laden with absurdities in his futile attempt to make the point that America’s “framers” did not have the present gun climate in mind. I disagree.

Mr. Till begins by using FBI statistics to bolster his claim that there are too many guns out there. Perhaps, perhaps not. There was no FBI in Thomas Jefferson’s day to count guns. There was no one around to tax or regulate guns.

You know what? We not only survived those days, we became a great nation. And when our forefathers issued a call to arms because the Redcoats were coming, citizens grabbed their “assault weapons” of the day — swords, flintlocks, cap and ball, whatever — and rode to the challenge.

I agree with Mr. Till that the framers weren’t thinking of assault rifles in the same exact context in which you and I think of them. But to men in the 1700s, the weapons on hand were “assault rifles.”

But I’m confident that the kind of weapons society had in 1776 was not the issue. The real issue was that weapons were needed to keep that society free. The founders knew that!

Today, the Redcoats are replaced by a world of untold enemies, all with the same intention ... to kill Americans. Who knows when, and against whom, we will have to “grab our guns and ride in defense of our country.”

Unfortunately, every so often someone like Mr. Till comes along to question the Constitution in some Don Quixote effort to dilute the original grand design the Founding Fathers had for this country. I hope there will always be men of sound judgment around to remind the Brian Tills of the world that America enjoys its great freedoms because of the weapons we have, weapons that not only protect us personally, but also defend our way of life.