Editor,

We had another shooting and all the anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment people are coming out of the woodwork.

I get tired of people who do not know history and the reasons for the Bill of Rights and what was required to get them passed.

Those who do not know anything about guns keep saying, “You don’t need an AR-15 assault or any automatic rifle to go hunting.”

What these ignorant people don’t realize or haven’t taken the time to learn is that the weapon used by the British during and after the Revolutionary War was the Brown and Bess musket.

While some of the American troops used them, many of the colonists used rifles made in the colonies. These were more accurate and reliable than the smooth bore B & B musket.

The civilians had in many cases better weapons than the military had.

In my mother’s home in Vermont, there was one of the rifles used in the Revolutionary War that had been in the family from that time.

The reason for the Second Amendment was not for hunting, not for self-protection, but for protection against the government if it overstepped the bounds of the Bill of Rights and became oppressive.

All you need to do is read some of the arguments from the period of the adoption of the first 10 amendments to understand this.

Guns are not the problem. The NRA is not the problem. It is the lack of moral teaching based on the 10 commandments and our biblical heritage that is the problem. In my high school, in the fall you could look in the trucks parked in the parking lot and find rifles and shotguns.

There were no school shootings. I even took a .38 Smith and Wesson police revolver to school to make a western-style holster for it in leather craft.

With the removal of Christian values and the value of human life as the result of Roe v. Wade that started in the 1960s the violence in schools has increased. It is not a gun issue, it is a human value problem.

In Switzerland, all citizens have a requirement to own firearms. They are not sporting rifles but military rifles. In many cases full automatic weapons.

There are few home robberies and shootings. Gun legislation will not have a positive effect, as all you have to do is to look at the cities that have the strictest gun laws, and they are the ones with the most gun violence.

And just for the record, those cities have been controlled by the Democrats for decades.

Yes I am a gun-toting, Bible-believing, deplorable, retired Navy and proud American.

Joseph Moreland

Oak Harbor

Editor’s note: Switzerland does not require citizens to own firearms, according to USA Today, Business Insider, the NRA website and Wikipedia. Ownership of fully automatic firearms is tightly controlled. Voters passed a referendum this year for tighter restrictions on semi-automatic weapons. FBI statistics show that the cities with the highest per capita number of gun-related crimes are Ocala, Fla., Detroit, St. Louis, Trenton and Baltimore.