Americans should maintain freedoms

Your recent editorial "Citizens must sacrifice liberties for security" shows one major contagion 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 destroyed over Cleveland.

The right to keep and bear arms solves all of our terrorist problems, if practiced substantially by a moral and upright public. If the basketball coach at Columbine, the Fox News 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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MARTINS: comic

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Americans should maintain freedoms

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