The tragic shooting involving Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several others has once again touched off the argument over the right to own guns.
The founding fathers gave us the right to own firearms for a number of good reasons. Foremost among them is to protect ourselves from bodily harm from our fellow citizens -- the criminals.
The police cannot legally do much to protect you from bodily threats. What they can do is investigate the crime and draw a yellow line around your corpse.
It is also to protect us from our own government, should it be toppled. Notice that dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Castro went to great lengths to disarm their citizens before launching their reigns of terror against defenseless citizens.
Notice that in Israel all of the citizens are encouraged to carry weapons. In Switzerland every able-bodied man is required to own a weapon with ammunition. The people in Switzerland enjoy a very low level of violent crime.
It should also be noted that wherever anti-gun ownership is introduced the incidence of violent crime goes up in the jurisdiction involved.
One statistic that is not tabulated is the number of crimes that don’t occur when the bad guys are discouraged by the barndishing of a gun in their face. The founding fathers knew what they were doing when they inserted the second amendment. Any attempts to remove it should be vigorously discouraged