HARRY HURLEY OPINION - EDITORIAL

This is an opinion - editorial about another news outlet’s opinion - editorial.

In a stunning commentary, The New Jersey Star-Ledger has called the Second Amendment to The United States Constitution a “curse" and complain in print that it makes it harder to pass gun-safety legislation.

Wrong. It doesn’t make it harder for the New Jersey state legislature to pass gun safety legislation. What it does is  make it hard to subvert a constitutionally provided right.

And, that’s a very good thing. To call the 2nd Amendment a “curse” is an outrageous and unserious comment. It’s also radical in nature.

The Star Ledger is highly critical of last year’s decision by The Supreme Court of The United States. In its decision, SCOTUS struck down a 100-year-old New Jersey state law that restricted the citizen’s right to carry a concealed handgun.

The SCOTUS decision had a nationwide impact, however, New Jersey had some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation in effect.

The Star Ledger editorial was also wrong in their comments that “where you have fewer guns and stricter laws, you a few were gun injuries and deaths, research has shown.”

We think that analysis is wrong. Every objective, dispassionate analysis indicates that the states with the strictest gun laws appear to have the most gun injuries and deaths.

Another key sentence in the Star Ledger editorial is also quite wrong. It states that “the core rationale is that we need guns for self-defense, but what we have is a public policy in which nearly 49,000 people a year are killed by guns in nearly 400,000,000 fire arms flood our streets more than one for every citizen.”

They believe that unambiguous Constitutional rights are a “fanatical interpretation of our Second Amendment” and that the United States has a “fetish with gun culture.”

The Star Ledger editorial celebrates the Canadian model, where there is no “Second Amendment.”

The editorial actually went so far as to say that the United States should be able to “regulate guns as we do cars, based on a public health approach.”

In Canada, they have the governmental authority to restrict gun ownership in any manner of their choosing.

Conversely, in The United States of America, the right to bear arms is a Constitutionally protected right and not a privilege.

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