PLATFORM : Peace, Not Guns

We’re hearing these days that the way to restore equilibrium to our violent society is to put guns into the hands of good guys and send then out into the streets as auxiliary police officers.

I’m not certain that the law-abiding citizens in any American big city want to return to a social climate that smacks of the boom towns of the Old West, when gunfire often ended disputes between good and bad guys. If we arm more citizens, we can expect the level of death from guns to escalate far beyond the 30,000 tragedies that already occur in this country yearly.

Equilibrium will not come with guns. We need to deputize John and Jane Public, not as gunslingers, but as people who will--with their very souls--abhor the violence sickening our society.

We need to return to a national belief in the sanctity of life, with families who care about each other, with neighborhoods where the term neighbor has a real and positive meaning and with schools focusing on education. We need to ensure meaningful lives and employment for those most disaffected, that our children are loved and that the attention to spurious violence so glorified in the media is reduced.

If the American people choose to accomplish something, it will happen, be it a man on the moon or a domestically made car equal to the foreign competition. We need the right catalyst to pull us together and the national purpose to make peace in our streets a reality.