Thoughts about gun access

A few miscellaneous musings by an old man about guns.

Guns are tools just like saws, screwdrivers and hammers are tools. When my wife was very young, there were times when the meat on the dinner table was small game that her brothers had shot. When I was in grade school, my family lived at the end of a gravel road on a hilltop in northeastern Kentucky. Dad kept a rifle and shotgun handy because you never knew what might crawl out of the wood line.

From personal experience I know that AK-47s and M-16s/AR-15s are very good force multipliers if you want to injure a human being. A person who could not cut another individual's skin with a knife can use a pistol or one of these rifles to great effect.

Firing a weapon under stress is difficult. Based on available studies by entities such as the Rand Corp., trained police officers miss the majority of their shots. This raises the issue of what gets hit by the bullets that miss their targets.

It seems rather sad to me that people argue that civilian access to military grade weapons is necessary in order to preserve the right of rebellion against the government.

First, something is very wrong if our country gets to the point of armed rebellion. Secondly, how well did armed revolts work for the Whiskey Rebellion or the Confederacy?

Finally, why are we fearful of our elected government? We need a thorough discussion of this issue.

JOHN PIEPHO, Cape Girardeau