A bat, a brick, a shoe, a car, a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, a knife, a gun all inanimate objects that are present every day in the life of Americans. All have been used to kill a human.

Every listed item is harmless until used to harm someone. Every item is incapable of harm on its own. There are millions of each item across the country, yet it is an infinitesimally small number of persons that misuse these items to cause harm to others. Additionally, each of these items can be used to protect oneself from harm by irrational persons. Every person that encounters these items is responsible for how they are used.

Anti-gun politicians are proposing outlawing certain guns and designating magazine size to cure the problem of mass shootings. Those laws would affect millions of responsible, law-abiding citizens that use their firearms for sport and self-defense by turning them into criminals for owning what they have in their homes today.

Per the journal Criminology & Public Policy, at least 158 people committed indiscriminate mass shootings from 1976 to 2018. Among those perpetrators 97, or about 61%, “had been either diagnosed with a mental disorder or demonstrated signs of serious mental illness prior to the attack.”

In 2021, the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology published a study of people who committed a mass shooting from 1982 to 2019 and survived.

The study focused on the survivors, as opposed to those who died, because the ensuing legal proceedings revealed “the most reliable psychiatric information.”

Among the 35 mass shooters who survived, 80% had a psychiatric diagnosis. Recently, the Uvalde shooter, the Buffalo shooter, and the Tulsa shooter are known to have had mental issues.

With the information available on the mental stability of criminals that kill mass numbers of innocent persons, why is the response of the left to criminalize mass numbers of responsible, legal American gun owners? It’s not an effort to fix the problem. It is an effort to destroy the Constitution of the United States.

I personally don’t know how we deal with mental illness that prods one to kill masses of innocents. Surely, if there is a reasonable way, persons smarter than me have ideas that hopefully will minimize or prevent the mass murders we have today.

After every mass shooting and the election of leftist politicians that propose gun control measures, Americans rush to buy firearms and ammunition fearing they will not be able to exercise their free will later. The largest number of purchases are by persons who never owned a gun before.

We see this from the ramp up of manufacturing of firearms and ammunition and the skyrocketing values of those companies’ stocks along with massive increases in background checks at purchase. This tells me there are growing numbers of people that understand the left is moving to curtail the Second Amendment right of the people to self-protection as crime increases and policing is reduced.

Surely, more laws and gun confiscation are not the answer. The problem has to do with individuals who do not obey laws.

Individuals who go to gun-free zones where they are free to kill innocents until someone arrives too late or takes to long to defend the innocent.

No one wants to see innocents killed. We all have the innate right of self-preservation.

Nothing is gained by punishing a responsible gun owner that has not committed a crime.

A crime can be prevented by not curtailing the rights of Americans and utilizing the law to its maximum to remove criminals from society.

Daniel Reiff is a Warren resident.