Here's the full text of letter.....they don't archive this newspaper's letters:
I see the gun lovers are trying to convince us their misinterpretation of the Second Amendment is the law of the land. This often misunderstood and generally incomprehensible amendment has nothing to do with private gun ownership -- for or against. In 1787, that was never a question: It was taken for granted. Much of the nation was frontier, most of it farmland. Both frontiersmen and farmers needed and used guns to defend their property from human and wild enemies. The Second Amendment was about how the new nation was to defend itself from external and internal enemies. It addressed the question of standing armies versus militia and came down solidly in favor of militia. To the new nation's leaders, standing armies represented the tyranny of the English king and Parliament, while conveniently forgetting that those same standing armies were key to the defeat of the French in the French and Indian War. Even the winning of independence came more from standing armies than militia. Nonetheless, the amendment's framers were vigorous proponents of militia, an army made up of citizens in local formations of their own, supplying their own weapons and always on call to defend the nation, whether from local Amerindian attacks or European invaders.
The Second Amendment is now in constant breach. There is no more organized militia and there is a huge standing army. Events of the past 200 years have proven that reliance on militia was badly placed; I doubt there is any serious call to eliminate the standing army and replace it. The Second Amendment should be eliminated, not misinterpreted. The nation's founders created unique political documents in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but they represented what seemed right to men living in the 1780s. They could not see a United States of today's size and population. They could not anticipate the enormous technical advances of the next 200 years when (compared with) technological change over the previous 1,000 years. The smoothbore and rifled single-shot muzzle-loaded muskets using black powder with a maximum killing range of 250 yards cannot be compared with the weapons of today. So, how does anyone seriously propose that they would be able to frame laws to encompass what is available today and what shall become available in the next 100 years?
