Letter to the Editor: Cooked goose

November 7, 2004
Toledo Blade

No shot in the dark

As a conservative Ohio Buckeye, I'm happy to say that John Kerry may have shot our goose, but we cooked his!

Jim Kimble
Holland

Click on the "Read More..." link below for another letter, describing how the Bush administration is achieving success at prosecuting gun crimes, and how worthless Kerryites' proposals would be.

November 6, 2004
Columbus Dispatch

Criminals aren’t going to register guns

I think Rowland Nethaway’s recent Forum column on how we in the United States should treat guns in relation to the Second Amendment is unbelievable ("Second amendment askew in gun debate"). Nethaway, a writer from Texas, obviously bought into the liberals’ political plan of, "Let’s register the guns first then ban them and throw the law-abiding citizens in jail if they don’t turn them in."

His plan is to register all guns and then vigorously prosecute all gun crimes — after all, guns are like cars and we register them. What a dupe. That has been the liberal line for decades.

Guns aren’t like cars, and what price to register them, and then what? His solution is to prosecute and severely punish all those who use guns wrongly. The problem is that the criminals won’t register their guns. Most of them, as felons, can’t legally possess them in the first place. That just leaves the decent citizens who have never been a problem.

The federal government and most states, including Ohio, already have mandatory sentences for use of guns in crimes. The problem has been that prosecutors routinely bargain these mandatory sentences away.

The federal government under the Bush administration is holding criminals accountable for use of guns in crimes, unlike the Clinton administration, which rarely enforced the mandatory sentences but was big on passing gun-control laws.

England, Canada and Australia had gun registration first, then banned guns for law-abiding citizens. These countries unfortunately have no Second Amendment protection and no written Bill of Rights to protect their citizens.

Maybe our Founding Fathers realized that flaw and corrected it in our Constitution. And these countries, after recently banning guns, are now experiencing the largest crime waves in the history of their democracies, while we in this country are experiencing the lowest crime rates in decades. Go figure, Nethaway. Maybe he needs to work on solving the drug problem next with his skill at simplistic solutions.

Robert A. Sicuro
Columbus