Dear grieving families of Newtown:
I just finished watching the 60 Minutes piece on "The Promise of Newtown" and felt compelled to write – first to offer my deepest sympathy to each of you for your unimaginable loss, and second, to acknowledge and thank you for your heartfelt efforts on behalf of all children and families that may benefit from your efforts and avoid the type of tragedy that you have experienced, which I assume is your over-arching goal in organizing to push for new gun control laws. I am also writing to tell you why I question, and to a certain extent, disagree with the the forum and means you chose to advance your agenda, and why I generally oppose the forces advancing a gun control agenda.
As a preface, there are a couple of things I’d like you to know about me. I have very intimate personal experience with the horrific loss of a loved one, though not as a parent, but rather as a sibling when I was very young. I have never been a member of any right to bear arms organization, such as the NRA, although I am now seriously considering same. I am a trial lawyer and have represented a family that lost a child to a firearm accident
My concern with the forum, 60 Minutes, is that they do have a gun control agenda, explicit or otherwise. As pointed out in the piece by Scott Pelley, nationally, support for more gun control legislation is waning. On one of the Sunday talk shows somebody was lamenting the fact that Obama should have done more while the horror of Sandy Hook was fresh in people’s minds. This attitude fits squarely into the logical fallacy of the “bandwagon effect;” take advantage of the crisis while it is foremost in people’s mind; it’s part of the let no crisis to go waste attitude. It is a dangerous way to run a democracy. 60 Minutes’ agenda was to revive the flagging support for gun control legislation. You were all used to accomplish that goal. The piece was compelling, and heart rending. How could anyone but a beast not support the goals of the Sandy Hook Promise? Argumentum ad populum.
I do support tightening up background checks and criminalizing straw man purchases. Those are practical straight-forward measures. But gun control does not lend itself to a facile answers. The slippery slope is no fallacy. There are forces that have an insatiable appetite for government control over the lives of people from cradle to grave. There are plenty of politicians that would just as soon remove the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights.
Generally, all of you appear to be thoughtful, considerate, sincere and measured in your goals and agenda. But there are also millions of law abiding Americans who deeply believe that the Second Amendment is the line in the symbolic sand separating a government of the people, by the people and for the people from tyranny. Central planners and their collectivists allies do not share this belief.
Again, please accept my deepest and most profound sympathy for your losses.
James S. Rummonds
California