Foxx falls short on gun solutions
Regarding Rep. Virginia Foxx’s Feb. 2 commentary, “Protect the 2nd Amendment”:

Virginia, as our Republican representative in Congress, would you please do us all a big favor: Instead of bickering with the president about “gun control,” please come up with some ideas that will stop the killing. Stop trying to make it sound as though the president is trying to do something against the Constitution.
Your party has spent volumes of verbiage accusing the president of not being a leader, and yet now you are all over him for being just that. Of course, if you think it is OK that more than a quarter million citizens of this country have been killed by gun violence since 2001, one has to ask whether you should be granted a gun permit.
In that same time period, about 6,500 patriotic American soldiers whom you helped send to war have been killed. That is war, with cannons, land mines, rockets and all other kinds of killing devices. Many of those people were in the legal militia of the states they represented so bravely. They are known as the National Guard. If people really need to have weapons of mass destruction, they can join. We will even pay for the guns, ammo and training.
There has to be a way for people who should not have guns to be stopped from having them before, not after, they create mass carnage. To infringe on the rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, but mostly life) of all people so that some people can claim the “privilege” of punching 30 holes in a piece of paper in 10 seconds, or go “spray and pray” hunting to the peril of all good hunters, is not what the musket warriors of 1776 could have envisioned.
— Donald C. Tracy

Salisbury