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The first amendment guarantees free speech, but one is not allowed to yell "fire" in a crowded theater. I continue to be amazed that only the second amendment is not open to review of its meaning.
Earlier this week, Seth Rich, a young man who I named at his brit milah and watched grow in Omaha, was
murdered in Washington, DC. He was found relatively quickly because the DC police have a gunshot monitoring system in place. His was among the lives snuffed out because of a gun. The shooting of a man in Falcon Heights, MN was likely exacerbated by the fact he had a weapon with him. He had a license to carry the gun, but the presence of a fire arm changes the way a situation unfolds. In Dallas, also in a legal carry state, we know how having access to extreme armaments escalated the situation. In Syracuse, a
Father's Day celebration became a riot because of gun related violence.
There are hunters and people who use guns responsibly. They tell us they don't need assault weapons. People will be violent, it seems. Why do we allow people to be armed with machine guns?
A number of years ago [2008] the New England Journal of Medicine [full disclosure, my brother works for the Journal] noted that we should be looking at this issue as a
public health issue. If there was a preventable disease that killed and injured the number of people guns do, there would be an outcry to cure it.
Yet event after event, year after year, Congress continues to do nothing. I urge you to write your Representative [
http://www.house.gov/representatives/ ] and urge that the people, not lobbying groups, take precedence. I've written mine. For what it's worth, I am still waiting for a reply, even a robo-reply.
This is not a matter of politics, it's a matter of public health; it's a matter of society's survival. We cannot stand idly by.
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