March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

After reading Gun-owners-of-Maine’s full-page political advertisement on Page 8 of the Bangor Daily News Feb. 28, I promptly wrote our federal senators and representatives assuring them I remain a proponent of reasonable control over the bearing of concealable weapons and assault weapons.

I added that I would not have the government strongly restrict the owning of rifles and shotguns (a most unlikely legislative move anyway), but that licensing the ownership of them seemed to me as practical, rational and sensible as the licensing of car drivers.

In this advertisement, the gun owners quoted numerous eminent statesmen of the 18th and early 19th centuries to support their position, but ignored the fact that political and military conditions have changed radically since those days. Their quotation from Justice Rehnquist is, I suspect, taken out of context. It starts, I note, in the middle of a sentence, thereby possibly warping, or even reversing its implications. In a similar way, the National Rifle Association endlessly repeats the last half of the Second Amendment, but never the first and qualifying phrase, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” No one is asking the nation to disarm the National Guard and military reserves or to eliminate them.

The feverish concern of the well-intended gun owners of Maine strikes me as just a mite paranoiac. Ted Holmes Winterport


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like