Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting where 26 innocent people were massacred there has been a lot of emotion and debate about what steps to take to prevent such a massacre from happening again. As I'm sure you know: the biggest debate subject has been on regulating firearms sales, as well as banning firearms with certain characteristics. Before you make your final decision: know that myself and everyone who has put their name on this petition will oppose any further regulation or ban on firearms, ammunition, and all relevant parts to both. There are many sound reasons as to why we will oppose any new bans or regulations:

You can ban any object, but not evil. No matter how extensive, or strict, any weapons ban is you cannot ban evil, nor people intent on committing acts of evil. Connecticut already has among the strictest gun laws in this nation, but that didn't stop the assailant from doing what he did at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Another school shooting, at Columbine High School in 1999, happened five years after a nationwide assault weapons ban was signed into law. Again you can't ban people who commit evil acts. Now yes, gun crime itself may go down in wake of a ban, but many other forms of crime will rise to the point of seeming to skyrocket. Great Britain and Australia both have very strict regulations on weapons (not just firearms but knives; even kitchen knives), yet I know I would not step foot in any of their major areas of populace because of other forms of crime that currently happen there, and have happened there. As an example much closer to our home: Chicago has been recently ranked as a city with the most murders and one of the world's most dangerous cities, yet the entire county in addition to the city has the strictest gun laws in the nation. Guns clearly aren't the problem when they've been put out of reach of the very citizens who wouldn't commit crimes with them in the first place. Remember: millions of Americans own firearms and ammunition for those firearms, yet they didn't commit any crimes with those guns. If gun-owning Americans really were as violent as a number of you believe then they would've killed each other, and the rest of us, to extinction a long time ago. Areas where firearms aren't regulated or banned are all over the United States, and in every one of those places the crime rate is low. This also holds true internationally. Switzerland has the highest ratio of military-issue firearms to people in the world (yes, not even the USA has as high a ratio) yet their crime rate nationally is among the world's lowest. I can, and perhaps a good number of those of us who signed this petition can attest to that fact personally.

Another reason why we oppose any new bans and/or regulations is that the number one way to stop acts of violence as seen in Sandy Hook, Aurora, Columbine, Tucson, and other places where shootings have happened is to react with immediate and equal force. If this wasn't the true then why is it many of you politicians are escorted practically anywhere you go with armed guards (Secret Service personnel, law enforcement personnel, etc.) who are armed with loaded firearms that have select-fire capability (going from semi-automatic to fully automatic) in addition to other features that are over-regulated, as well as high-capacity magazines? Are you here to serve us, or rule over us? If you are escorted by armed personnel by your own request, and/or you carry a firearm (yet oppose people like me keeping and bearing firearms) then I can guarantee you that myself and everyone else who has put their name on this petition will see you as trying to rule over us, rather than serving us. As I'm sure you know that concept is anything but constitutional. We elect all of you to serve us, the people of the United States of America.

We oppose any further weapons bans and/or regulations also because we are well-versed in history. Every single instance where and when weapons have been banned from a nation's populace has led to genocide. In the last century alone about 170 million innocent people were killed at the hands of government workers. Such government workers did their dirty work in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, various countries in Africa, and countless others around the world; all in one century. The government for every one of those countries passed and enforced heavy regulations or outright weapons bans on the people they targeted. Yet, their reasoning was the same as everyone here calling for more firearms regulations and/or bans. With so many examples of evil being committed due to firearms being banned from the general populace we have every reason to believe a similar outcome will happen here.

Our 2nd Amendment in the US Constitution isn't about only hunting, shooting competitively, protecting our freedoms from tyrannical government officials/workers, or protecting ourselves from criminals who would otherwise have done harm to us; our 2nd Amendment applies to all of the above, and then some. James Madison and other Founding Fathers worded our Constitution and Bill of Rights the way they did on purpose.

Some of you may argue that the 2nd Amendment only applies to militia personnel. Our nation has many classes of militia, and all of those classes, as George Washington has stated, "ought to be armed." There is the National Guard; there is the Naval Militia. There is also the unorganized militia, which applies to most gun owners as well as military veterans and former law enforcement who currently keep and bear arms. Anyone who owns a firearm or multiple firearms is part of the militia somehow and some way. There are many forms of legislation that prove this.

I plead with you: any more bans/regulations will be only more trouble than they're worth!

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