Second Amendment and Gun Control

Your twin editorials “The Book Burners” and “Chipping Away at Guns” (March 2) stand in worrisome contrast to one another. Our First Amendment rights are well defended in one, while the erosion of our Second Amendment rights are applauded in the other. Are some rights more “right” than others?

While it has become politically popular for Americans today to advocate disarming themselves by degrees, it remains unthinkable to limit in any way what we can read or believe. But for how long? What “caliber” of literature will be the first to go?

The process of erosion is the issue here, not guns or ideas.

Will we someday break up the TV networks because they have such a high capacity to spread dangerous ideas in a short amount of time? Could we ever find it practical to ban publication of some other “Satanic Verses” because it will mean that people will surely die if we do publish it?

Let the guns be regulated and licensed, just as radio stations are. Let’s do some background checks and see who is safe and who is not. But we must not allow a complete ban on anything while the means to successfully regulate it exist.

With very few exceptions, most of the bullets ever fired were done so on behalf of an idea, however good or bad. If the bullets are ever silenced, the ideas will still remain, and those who are so inclined will kill because of them. Will we then have no choice but to silence these ideas as well, one thought at a time?

DAN PEYTON

Pacific Palisades