To the Editor:

Last week, in this paper, gun shop owner, Scott Gray, wrote a letter about gun laws and how our politicians write do-nothing laws that only affect law abiding citizens. He did a wonderful job of explaining it in plain language and I agree with him 100%.

I would like to add some additional concerns from my point of view.

First of all, guns don’t kill people; people kill people. If you put a gun and a box of ammo on a table the gun will not get up and load itself, nor will it get up all by itself and shoot somebody. This will not ever happen! It has to be picked up by a person and used.

A gun is a tool just like a screwdriver or a crescent wrench.

 When I went to high school in 1949-50, some of the kids came to school with rifles in the back windows of their pickup trucks. Nobody ever got shot. Why not? The guns were there, but no one shot anyone else. It has to be something in the mindsets or environments of today’s kids.

The Hollywood Elite seem to be 99% in favor of gun control yet they are responsible for the majority of shoot-em up, violent, gun-centered movies and video games that glorify violent means to solve problems. Where could kids have possibly gotten their ideas about killing people?

Politicians jump on the bandwagon every time somebody gets shot in an effort to use the tragedy to get more gun control laws passed. Laws only affect law-abiding people, not criminals who commit the crimes and are clearly not deterred by law. Most politicians aren’t interested in your health if you get shot; they only want to enact more laws to control the people/population.

The Second Amendment is a valid right of the people and needs to be protected the same as the other nine amendments.

 The Liberal Left doesn’t want you to have a gun for your own protection but it does want you to pay for the government and police to have guns to protect them. This is a little lopsided, don’t you think? Here in New York State we have two senators, Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand, who have done very little for the average citizen yet support every gun law in New York. I have personally phoned and written to Gillibrand about 25-30 times and have yet to get any kind of answer. She clearly doesn’t care what I think. And Schumer obviously works only for Schumer, not his constituents.

New York State, along with probably most other states, has closed the state operated mental hospitals and psychiatric facilities and released vulnerable and unstable people onto the streets, without care, treatment, or supervision. Now what happens? Most of the criminal shootings are committed by people with mental problems. Again, it’s not the guns at fault; it’s the people.

With any luck, after the next presidential election there will be a lot of politicians now in office who will find themselves without a job. Without any available mental hospitals they will have nowhere to go for the treatment they obviously need.

 The Liberal Left also wants to defund the police so nobody is working to stop them when they commit crime.

Liberal prosecutors are also not doing their jobs when they accept plea deals and let people out of jails and prisons when they need to be left there in the interest of the safety of others. The problem is not the guns, it’s the people who use them and the decisions of the police and prosecutors.

 The Second Amendment wasn’t put in the Constitution to provide for duck hunting. It was put there to protect the people from their own government. Right now it seems we may need this protection more than ever. 

Don’t ever give up any of your rights in exchange for the government’s offer of a little protection or you will lose both.

William Bartlett
Ogdensburg