Interpreting 2nd Amendment: Restricting Gun Ownership

The volley of self-serving and anachronistic letters aimed at The Times by those with a firearms fetish (Sept. 23) proves that where there’s smoke there’s ire.

When the Second Amendment was written 200 years ago, our newborn nation lacked the military and constabulary clout it has today at its disposal. So its authors had to look to male adult citizens and their muskets to secure a “free State.”

This necessity back then was the mother of the “minutemen,” and the invention of the inviolable right “to keep and bear arms.”

But today, how many gun owners are ready, willing and able to serve as do-or-die combatants in a “well-regulated militia”? And, what with the wide-open trade in lethal weapons that plagues our society today, will their access to any gun of their choice be unrestricted and unregulated?

Every day’s news from Beirut shows what the bloody results of that can be, as one well-armed militia blasts away at another.

Once in our history, owning a gun was an expedient; today it is a deadly indulgence.

And given our nation’s love affair with guns, the question is how we’ve grown to the size we are without growing up in the process.

ED MITCHELL

Los Angeles