Letter to the editor: Any tool can be used in horrific crime

Regarding the letter “Thoughts and prayers not enough to stop school shootings” (April 4, TribLIVE): The Founding Fathers did not give citizens the right to bear arms. The rights in the Bill of Rights are not given to us by government. Those rights are endowed to us by our creator, and are inherently part of us outside of government.

The Second Amendment ensures the government cannot interfere with our right to bear arms. That includes modern weapons; the founders, being brilliant, understood that technology changes. You are using a computer to type your opinion after all, not a quill and ink.

The fledgling U.S. had just finished fighting a war against the world’s largest empire. The possession of arms is not about hunting or even self-defense; it’s about having parity with governments that may become tyrannical, even our own.

The writer goes on to challenge Republicans’ commitment to life, questioning where our empathy lays. She then uses a straw-man argument to compare Republicans to Nazis because we want to ban and burn books. (We don’t; we just don’t want children exposed to prurient ideas in preschool and elementary school.) I might remind her that it was also the Nazis who banned and confiscated guns prior to World War II.

This country was built on fierce, independent ideals. When a horrific crime is committed ,we should deal with the criminal and underlying motivation. Any tool can be used.

Thomas Jefferson often quoted the following phrase: “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.”

John Eliyas

Trafford