Innocent schoolchildren have rights too

Dear Editor:

Yeah, I know, I know, the Second Amendment to our Constitution gives American citizens the right to bear arms. How could I not know it when it’s being shouted from the rooftops all the time by some folks who will never be part of a well-regulated militia?

But when, I wonder, did that amendment and its rights take precedence over all other rights, like the right of children to go to school without being shot at?

Maybe I’m just too old to keep up with things that make no sense to me. Like what are all those super-precious things some folks have in their homes that they need super weapons to protect, and are willing to give up their own lives or someone else’s life over?

I grew up during the Depression. My dad was a hunter and we depended a lot on the game he shot for our food. But as far as I know, neither he nor his hunting buddies wanted or needed powerful weapons that are designed to fight wars with. And nobody had handguns.

My husband Walt, who died 15 years ago, was a hunter too, and he owned shotguns and rifles but had no use for handguns. He said the only real purpose for them was to kill people. He didn’t want his son to have them either; he said they’d just get him into trouble.

It wasn’t that he didn’t know about guns and the need to have them in some areas. After all, if someone spends nine years of his life in the military like he did, you are bound to learn a thing or two about weapons.

I also learned some things about guns and the threat they can be to life when someone was threatening to kill me and my children. Get a gun, I was told, and kill the would-be killer before he kills you. But that would have been hard to do, given that he was the father of my children. How would they have dealt with the knowledge their mommy had killed their daddy? Plus, I’d probably have been sent to prison for life and then they’d have no parents at all. So I had to find something else I could do.

What I did was rely on the help and services of those who are hired to protect us. Even though it wasn’t made available right away, because no one could believe that a nice guy like him would do a thing like that.

Finally he was sent to a prison for the criminally insane. Two years later, when I wanted to leave that town, I had to go before a judge to get permission to take the children out of state. The judge who was appointed to hear my case was the one who had presided over my divorce and a couple of the hearings that were held when my ex was making his threats.

With tears in his eyes he begged my forgiveness for what I’d been put through and he asked if I wanted to see the reports that had come back from the prison psychiatrists, in which they’d said that if my ex hadn’t been stopped he would have tried to kill us all. But I said I didn’t need to see them because I’d lived them, and I didn’t want any reminders.

The families of those little kids who got killed in Newtown don’t need any reminders either. There aren’t enough good guys with guns in the world to take out the bad guys with guns, when authorities who could disarm some of them look the other way, and value their jobs and their political positions over the lives of innocent little children.

M.E. Johnson

Eckert

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