Casey's arguments against gun control border on the ridiculous

Editor:

From reading the "Gun Control: A Nazi Legacy" column (Tuesday) , I've started to consider getting a firearm for my own protection. Perhaps I should get two, or three, just in case there are potential criminals around the corner, each armed with an assault weapon.

For protection at home, I thought a shotgun would be good. Maybe a missile launcher, in case I need to fight off an oppressive government too. Heck why stop there, I'll call the land I own my country. I cannot be a tyrant to myself, can I? For the ultimate protection, a nuclear weapon will be good. Few would want to start a nuclear war, but if the neighbor lets his dog into my yard once more...

Who else but armed civilians can stop a government out of control? Since many governments have used gun control as a precursor to genocide, and this government is advocating gun control, I should start stocking up soon.

But why have a government at all? We do not need the police or the military. We know how they have kept secrets from us, used some of us as guinea pigs or abused their powers. The criminals are going to get their guns anyway, gun control or not. We just need to have all the weapons that the police and military have. We could just use our taxes saved from paying the government to buy our own weapons. If someone cuts me off on the highway, I'll blow off their tires. If someone tries to rob me, well, he'll have to rob my Magnum first. If someone is dumping waste in to my drinking water, I'll dump them into a 6-feet-deep hole. I've always wanted to live in the "Wild, Wild West" period.

How many of those countless innocent lives could have been saved if the people who were sent to the ghetto had arms? How many Tutsis in Rwanda would be alive today if they had weapons to fight their rivals, the Hutus? And what a better world this will be, if the educated in Cambodia had had the arms to fight their government. If they had weapons, they could have overturned their government, and educated the soldiers that it was wrong to execute innocent civilians, even though their superiors told them to do so. Arms and weapons would have accelerated Ghandi's success in throwing out his country's oppressive colonists. A gun would have worked much better than starving himself, wouldn't it?

By Raphael Hon
Arizona Daily Wildcat
May 1, 1997