A Puzzling Question

Here is part of an op-ed in yesterday’s South Bend Tribune, partly in response to the movement to openly carry weapons into restaurants in stores and fight against any and all gun restrictions.

Future historians will be puzzled why what was once one of the most technologically advanced, enlightened societies in history aspired to ascend to such a high level of everyday wariness.

They will marvel at how virtually unlimited access to and display of firearms was pushed upon a reluctant majority by a relatively tiny group of particularly vocal and politically organized zealots.

They will find it particularly ironic that the unlimited-guns advocates so effectively used the concept of "freedom" to justify their cause.

As the future historians will see -- as anyone who lived in one of those other places or times when guns were truly an essential part of daily life could have told us -- no one is less free than a man, woman or child who must live in constant fear of death.