Issue date: 3/17/05 Section: Editorial/Opinion

When you think of uses for guns, what comes to mind?

Hunting, protection and violence are the first three uses that come to my mind.

As of late, violence seems to be the overwhelming use for guns in our country.

In the past week alone, our nation has seen shootings in Georgia and Wisconsin and one has to ask themselves, what is going on?

While I am a full-fledged supporter of the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, I have a really hard time believing that our forefathers, when writing the Amendment, thought ordinary citizens would end up hiding behind it to own semi-automatic weapons.

The original reason these gentlemen added this amendment was because they believed citizens of the newly created United States of America deserved to defend themselves against an enemy, foreign or domestic.

Let's recall that at that point in time, we had just defeated the British Army and ended the tyranny on our soil by the government of Great Britain.

These founding fathers had in mind that each individual had the right to own their rifles or pistols, and, while they never specifically clarified what type of arms these are, I really cannot fathom that AK-47s and machine guns were what they had in mind.

In the past, people hunted for their food, and they continue to do so today as well as hunting for sport.

We see students and families hunt in the late months of autumn, carrying their rifles because it is their right to own them.

However, and please someone correct me if I'm wrong here, I've never known a hunter who needed to use a machine gun to bag a deer.

So, that raises the question of why are we allowing citizens to buy them?

Yes, it may be illegal, and yet we see events happening frequently where these assault weapons are being used.

As much as I do not believe in the government regulating what ordinary citizens can do, I do believe it needs to step in and regulate what guns are to be declared legal and which are to be banned from our soil.

The only thing that these weapons are used for is to hunt people!

I know as well as you that people will end up getting what they want, regardless of rules or regulations.

At the same time, if the government were to step in and crackdown on these deadly weapons, which have a sole purpose to instigate violence, I believe these criminals would have a more difficult time obtaining the guns. Thus, I feel we wouldn't have as many of these brutal murders that we do now.

Being a resident of Waukesha, which neighbors Brookfield, I am appalled by the atrocity that was unveiled last weekend.

We, as a collective society, need to begin to take steps to end the violence that is currently plaguing our nation.

Can we really look the other way and claim that regulating certain types of weapons is infringing on the rights of individuals?

I can't imagine any student or member in our society fighting to retain ownership of an Uzi.

We need to open our eyes and find the answer to getting rid of these guns.

Are we the hunters, or have we ourselves become the hunted?

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Werlein is a junior print journalism major and a copy editor of The Spectator.