Letter: Gun bans make us less safe

Posted 2/21/20

To the editor:

Two armed men wearing hoodies and masks broke into a Florida home and began viciously beating a man in front of his wife and 11-year-old daughter. His wife, eight months pregnant, …

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Letter: Gun bans make us less safe

Posted

Two armed men wearing hoodies and masks broke into a Florida home and began viciously beating a man in front of his wife and 11-year-old daughter. His wife, eight months pregnant, managed to retrieve an AR-15 rifle from their bedroom and shot one of the thugs, causing both to flee. The beating fractured the husband’s skull and he needed 20 stitches and three staples to close his wounds. (Washington Examiner, Nov. 4, 2019).

This is just one of hundreds of times every day — one study says thousands — that legally owned firearms are used by private citizens to protect themselves. 

Gun control advocates who want to take away your right to protect yourself with firearms never acknowledge that firearms are used far more often for self-defense than to commit a crime. 

Gun control extremists in this state — Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence, Mom’s Demand Action, Gov. Raimondo, Attorney General Neronha and others — are backing a bill in the legislature to ban AR-15s, the very firearm the woman used to stop thugs from beating her husband, perhaps to death. 

Gun controllers claim AR-style firearms are machine guns, are more lethal than most other rifles and are “weapons of war.” None of that is true, as 15 minutes on the internet reading credible studies and newspaper accounts will easily prove.

Banning AR-type firearms will deprive people of one of the most popular rifles for home defense. Rifles are used in less than 2 percent of all homicides, so banning them will do little to lower the murder rate. 

Laws banning these rifles in other states have failed totally. In Connecticut, for example, more than 80 percent of AR owners have refused to turn in or register them. Results have been similar in other states. 

What’s “common sense” — to use the gun control advocates’ favorite sales pitch — about enacting a law in Rhode Island that will do nothing to save lives?

It is not “common sense” to give up our constitutionally guaranteed right to protect our lives and the lives of those we love with a legally owned firearm in return for the provably false claim that banning them will make us safer. 

If you don’t choose to own a firearm, fine. But we shouldn’t let a small number of misguided gun control advocates — and politicians trolling for votes — take that choice away from one million Rhode Islanders.

E-mail or phone Gov. Raimondo (governor.ri.gov) and Attorney General Neronha (riag.ri.gov) to withdraw their pointless AR ban bill and tell your state senator and representative not to support the bill. Their names and contact information are available at sos.ri.gov.

D. Keith Silvia
Bristol

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Jim McGaw

A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.