Your rights

The U.S. Supreme Court recently voted a second time to overturn a ban on handguns.

This time it was a 28-year-old-ban in Chicago.

The justices got it right and yet, the Chicago Sun-Times remains in denial. They recently printed an editorial voicing favor for placing restrictions on the ownership of pistols and firearms. They want a limit on the number of guns a person can own, forced training with purchases and required liability insurance.

They also urge Congress to ignore the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings to “redouble efforts to control guns.”

They seemed to miss the points of their own editorial.

They illustrated how Chicago has one of the strictest gun bans in the nation. It simply violates the Second Amendment right of citizens to bear arms. The Supreme Court said so — twice.

Even with an outright ban on handguns, the Chicago Sun-Times states the city suffered 54 shootings in a single weekend.

The newspaper stated Chicago’s murder rate has dropped since the ban started in 1982, but so have similar-sized cities with less-restrictive gun laws.

They simply wrote that the ban “wasn’t working anyway.”

What the Chicago ban and the similar ban in Washington, D.C., — struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008 — did, was limit the amount of self- defense that citizens were allowed to use to protect their lives and those of their loved ones.

Criminals do not care if the city has a ban on pistols. They probably enjoy the fear the sight of a handgun generates among people who are not allowed to own one. It makes the crooks feel safer, more powerful.

But when a person decides to endanger you or your loved one, you have the right to defend yourself on an equal level. Our founding fathers knew it and wrote it into the Constitution.

Guns are inanimate objects, just like cars. It takes a person to make an unwise decision to use one as a weapon to intimidate, hurt or kill someone.

Laws only affect the law-abiding. To ban personal weapons intended for self-defense is to put people at risk.

In Grant County, many people have guns and use them for hunting, competitive skeet shooting and target practice, without hurting anyone. We also have morons who use them to intimidate, hurt and kill others.

It would be a shame if a city, run by people afraid of guns, wanted to give the morons an edge by disarming the rest of the public. It won’t make it safer. It just gives the criminals better weapons than the rest of us.

— Editorial board