With our rights come responsibility

Trembling amid the toxic muck and mire of ignorance, fear, insecurity, intolerance, hate and rage, our society is again left searching the remnants of our collective, anguished national soul after yet another mass shooting; another hate crime.

Our problems certainly run deeper than guns and the regulation thereof, although sanity suggests that policy is clearly overdue on this front. Unfortunately, the tired excuse that we aren't going to be able to take up gun control legislation “because Congress lacks the votes” rings hollow.

What Congress lacks is not votes, but rather the courage of individuals to face a national problem by confronting the oversized influence of the National Rifle Association lobby and exposing this insidious hydra and its various agents for their role in cultivating insecurity to promote a fearful culture of irresponsibility, disrespect and arrogance based on an extreme and grossly distorted conception of the Second Amendment and the “well-regulated militia” clause.

On behalf of all who understand that the very foundation of our civil society rests on the principle that the individual exercise of rights inherently entails responsibility, I extend my deepest sympathies to the Sikh community.

Matthew Schaeffer

Wellman