[Travis McGee]

This email was sent to me, concerning the quotes by the Founding Fathers which I have posted on the "Enemies Foreign and Domestic" website's home page. It sounds as if CJW hasn't read the book beyond the home page. She included the quotes in her email to me, but then doesn't address them, beyond, "I don't think the "foundering fathers" had AK-47 or automatic weapons on their minds when they gave American citizens the right to bare arms or when you quoted these individuals to sale your book."

This is the email I sent back to her at Berkeley:

C______:

You fall into some of the basic traps of those who think that preventing the private ownership of arms will lead to a safer society. For example, your point about muskets being so much safer is totally wrong. When you factor in the medical care available in the musket era, muskets were MORE dangerous than today's rifles. Any wound at all with a musket usually led to a death in screaming agony in minutes to days. At best, limbs were amputated, and more than half of the time, they died anyway, also in screaming agony with no anesthesia. Today, bullet wounds are usually patched up in the majority of cases, with modern surgery, antibiotics, and anesthetics. So your "muskets were kind and gentle" argument is totally incorrect.

Even in 1780, folks owned "blunderbusses" for shooting geese, and for stopping robbers, rioters, and mutineers. A blunderbuss could fire over 100 chunks of rusty iron in one shot, and could be reloaded rapidly via the wide muzzle. Yet no one worried about someone attacking a picnic or workplace with a blunderbuss. What changed, the deadliness of weaopons, or society? I think the latter.

As far as examples of societies where only the government owned modern weapons, and the people were disarmed, I give you Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, China etc. The Jews who were herded onto trucks and trains in Nazi Germany by a handful of police and soldiers were sent away easily ONLY after they had been disarmed, according to German law. In the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, Jews used a handful of hidden firearms to begin a rebellion, and used those weapons to win German weapons, and they held out against the force of the German army for months. If all of the German Jews had disobeyed German law and kept their firearms, and resisted at every step, the Nazi holocaust of the Jews could not have happened, based on the Warsaw experience.

I hope you look more deeply into this subject. I urge you to check out this site: "Self Defense is a Basic Human Right. http://www.a-human-right.com/introduction.html

Sincerely,

Matt Bracken

[45Auto]

Your reply is well-reasoned, well-written, based on historical fact, and logical to the core; therefore, I don't expect the illiterate who wrote to you to understand one word of it. Liberalism is a mental disorder and socialism is a disease - so much so that those who embrace them have no basis on which to grasp truth or reality - they "feel" a certain way, so, to them, that must be the only true reality. I know liberals who cling to the "belief" (much of it fueled by daily drug use) that, "If I thought of it, it must be true." Such people are rarely able to be rehabilitated - they are fit only to wear the chains of slavery (which they themselves have forged) unto the third generation.

[N. Theknow]

they gave American citizens the right to bare arms

Thank you Thomas Jefferson for passing an ammendment allowing me to wear golf shirts and women to wear tank tops, tube tops and halter tops.

[Myrddin]

I was enjoying my right to bare arms just yesterday. It was 68 degrees outside. Nice after a long, cold winter.

[Gritty]

I have had children and adult family members killed by guns.

Hmmmm.

One has to wonder just what kind of a family this woman comes from to have adult and child members of her family killed by guns. Maybe she lives in a crime and gang ridden urban area?

Or maybe she's making it all up....

[glock rocks]

Don't you think if American poor had a choice they would want just what you have, to provide for their families and enjoy the basics. Instead, we sale them guns to take their resources, we sale them war.

[El Gato]

Good Lord, what is someone who is no more literate than this letter indicates doing at UC Berkeley? Isn't there ONE major university in California that won't take these illiterates? She should be at a community college, in the remedial classes. Better yet, she should be back in fourth grade, maybe third. Blondina, my third grade teacher and my brother's fifth grade one, would never have put with a letter like that, and Mrs. Overton, my fourth grade teacher would have her student teacher all over that gal like white on rice. Sadly, Mrs. Overton and (I think) Blondina Schnider(sic) are no longer around. (Miss Schnider would fit right in an Opera wearing a brass brassier and a helmet with horns)

[archy]

I don't think the "foundering fathers" had AK-47 or automatic weapons on their minds when they gave American citizens the right to bare arms...

I don't think the "foundering fathers" had AK-47 or automatic weapons on their minds...

I don't think the "foundering fathers" had AK-47 or automatic weapons...

I don't think the "foundering fathers"...

I don't think...

It always helps to edit away the unnecessary verbiage.