You get into a drunken rage and whack your roommate over the head with a vase – chances are they’ll be getting up the next morning (with a splitting headache). You get into a drunken rage and pick up a gun, your roommate won’t be getting up the next morning. Or the morning after.

Anti-gun lobbyists contend that guns kill people. Oppositionists and people like Joseph Daniel Ura (“Guns don’t kill people,” Sept. 2, p. 4) might argue that guns don’t kill people – people kill people. The problem is that both of these statements are inaccurate. The simple fact is that people with guns kill people.

Ura said the reason for harboring firearms is, in the event of an oppressive regime takeover, we will be able to defend ourselves, and this too is the underlying genius behind the constitutional right to bear arms.

Pray tell, of what aid will these constitutional rights be if we kill each other off? Shall we harbor firearms out of the distant fear of tyrannical regimes? Or should we discard them out of the very real violent deaths surrounding us everyday? The choice seems ridiculously clear.

I will agree with Ura that violence involving guns is an expansion of other problems in our society and that we need to take a closer look at society and ourselves. Yet, such problems include the type of thinking that perpetuates the philosophy that our battles must necessarily be fought with guns and not ideas.

Perhaps there will come a time when the people of this nation will have to rise up to defend themselves from an oppressive government. With the situation as it is, should such a need ever arise, I only hope that we will have a people left to defend.

-Mazna Hussain
sophomore