GUNS: The enemy is mental illness

By what sophistry of reason do gun control advocates argue that the mental illness of a few should eliminate fundamental freedoms for all? By their argument, no one should ever be treated as an adult. Instead, infantilized residents would endure a perpetual adolescence, guided and cared for by their betters; a self-selected elite of social engineers.

Exchanging our God-given and inalienable right to self-defense for the illusion of safety cannot ever produce a Utopia. Human life is never safe, and anyone who tells you different is peddling totalitarianism.

Our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms has never been about hunting or sports. The price of our freedom is the eternal vigilance of each of us, everyday citizens, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Our Founders, who took up arms against a government that they deemed to be tyrannical, understood that only an armed citizenry could resist the tendency of all governments to accrue ever more power.

We should never succumb to the seductive lie that our rights as free people are the root cause of society’s problems. On the contrary, it is our individual freedom that has made the American Republic thrive like no other society in world history.

We need to re-institutionalize the mentally ill, placing them in humane care away from society while they are incapable of inhabiting it responsibly. We must reverse the unworkable trends from the past 50 years of mental health reform and begin to prioritize protecting society from the criminally insane.

RALPH K. GINORIO

Coeur d’Alene