Americans should exercise gun rights

Your recent editorial, "Citizens must sacrifice liberties for security," shows one of the major contagions that must be corrected in the current American concept of freedom. I heard on the news recently one of the first coherent suggestions by the punditry in the aftermath: that citizen passengers must take responsibility for the protection of the plane. And that, dear editorialists, is exactly right, and your opinion, on balance, is wrong.

We have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms. I want for you to imagine what would have not happened in the last week had there been four or five Indiana farm boys with Colt .45's on those planes. Quite simply we'd be talking about the Notre Dame game and reading 1.4 inches of Associated Press about some stupid, dead, pocket knife-wielding whackos that were killed over Cleveland.

The right to keep and bear arms solves all of our terrorist problem if practiced substantially by a moral and upright public. If the basketball coach at Columbine, the FoxNews commentator on the plane last week and one of the co-pilots were all packing heat we would have a couple of terrorists with a bunch of holes in them as opposed to a nation in confusion.

Emphatically: this is NOT a time to surrender freedoms. It is a time for more vigorous practice of them.

Andrew Longman

Purdue Staff

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