To the editor:

President Barack Obama and the Democrats are shamelessly exploiting the Newtown massacre in order to advance their anti-gun agenda. But none of their proposed gun laws would have prevented the tragedy.

The ultimate goal of the liberal left is to disarm the American people. How? By first banning specific guns, ammo and magazines; then through licensing, registration, and finally confiscation.

Criminals don’t worry about gun laws. Whether the Sandy Hook elementary killer had 30- or 10-round clips didn’t matter. He knew he had enough time to do his premeditated killing.

So how can we protect our school kids?

• Enforce all 20,000 existing gun control laws. Today, we do not. Vice President Joe Biden said it’s “Too hard, too costly to do.”
• Ensure better background checks to prevent nutcases from obtaining guns. Somehow we must override the existing privacy laws to make this happen.
• Sharply increase school security with willing, well-trained/qualified armed security personnel and/or school administrators/teachers. We must face the growing reality of the real threat to our children and take strong actions to protect them. Banning certain types of guns/clips/ammo won’t cut it.

The liberals’ proposed “universal” background check would require such for all private sales or transfers of guns within families and amongst friends. You couldn’t give a gun to someone in your family without that level of government infringement on our Second Amendment rights.

Simply put, the liberal left wants to know who owns every gun in America, in preparation for eventual government action to confiscate them, with increased crime the result.

The problem is that the 1 percent of gun owners who are criminals would ignore any such gun restrictions. The law-abiding 99 percent of gun owners would become defenseless against these criminals. But far more importantly, they would be defenseless against tyranny in their own government. That’s why the Founders created the Second Amendment.

In fact, a gun control issue triggered the Revolutionary War. The colonists learned that the British were sending a large force across the Atlantic to confiscate all the firearms in Boston. The rest is history.

We became a nation of laws, starting with the Constitution, and at great individual sacrifice by our Founders. Let’s not allow our own government to ignore and violate our Constitution, which includes the Second Amendment’s guarantee of our right to keep and bear arms.

The assault weapons ban of the 1990s failed to have any meaningful effect on reducing crime, and it was later repealed by the Congress. This proved once again that gun bans do NOT work.

Ron Pyle
Suffolk