Opinion/Letter to the Editor

Assault rifles like the AR-15 and AK 47 have a standard magazine capacity of 30 rounds; aftermarket high-capacity magazines as much as 100. A Glock 17 semiautomatic handgun with an extended magazine floor plate has a capacity of 19 rounds (33 with the optional high-capacity magazine). The only factor limiting a semiautomatic’s rate of fire is how fast you can repeatedly pull the trigger. In one of three mass shootings we suffered last week alone, on Sunday a domestic terrorist armed with an AR-15 opened fire in Dayton, Ohio; he was shot and killed by law enforcement within 30 seconds. In those 30 seconds, he shot 36 people. All of the weapons used in last week’s massacres were legally obtained. It’s long past time to drop the pretense that this butchery has anything even remotely to do with maintaining a “well regulated militia”.
The 2nd Amendment is complete and utter nonsense; a worse-than-useless anachronism dating from a time when we were a confederation of states, there was no standing army, and the standard infantry weapon was a muzzle-loading smooth-bore .72 cal. flintlock musket that could be fired 4 times a minute with a range of 50 to 75 yards. We’re now a nuclear-armed republic with the largest military in the world and an empire that spans the globe; the one and only raison d’être of the 2nd Amendment; to maintain “a well-regulated militia”, has been completely moot for over 100 years.

More Americans have been shot to death domestically since 1968 than in all of America’s wars combined; any attempt to justify such carnage based upon a legislative fossil which should’ve been repealed when high-button shoes and buggy whips went out of fashion is nothing short of obscene. The 2nd Amendment wasn’t brought down the slopes of Mount Sinai by Moses, inscribed on tablets of stone; we wrote it, and we can erase it. We’ve amended the Constitution 27 times; it’s well past time to do it again; get over our infantile ‘wild west’ mentality, repeal the 2nd Amendment, and start regulating ownership of lethal weapons just like every other civilized nation on Earth.

Emmet Bondurant

Hayesville, NC