The address by Rep Tom McClintock to the United States Congress, published by Sierra Sun Times evoked some long time memories. I said to myself:

“Where have I heard this before?”

And then, going back fifty, sixty, no seventy plus years, the sound of the ravings of a mad fascist from Europe returned, broadcast over a blaring radio under a dreary sky on a cold wartime day in the year 1942. The war in the Pacific had just started. A religious group was under fire from that madman, inciting millions of his countrymen and women to turn against innocent people simply because of their beliefs.

And Six Million Jews died as a result.

Have we so soon forgotten? Allow me to remind Messrs. McClintock and Trump as well as all their followers that more than twenty million Europeans were slaughtered in that holocaust, plus some thirty million in the Pacific region, all non-combatants of every color, ethnicity and faith.

And the world said “Never Again”.

Today we are faced with the same blame game: a religion is under fire by those anointed to represent us in Congress, inciting well-meaning people into condemnation of a specific race and religion however wrong it could be.

Let us instead place blame where it is deserved: those who invoke the words of a Constitutional Amendment written almost 250 years ago, at a time when weapons of mass destruction did not exist. When guns such as an AK-47 or an AR-15 or for that matter, explosives of any description were not a gleam in the eye nor even an idea.

We must take control of the distribution of weapons intended for use only in battlefields, by people trained in their destructive capability, certainly not in the hands of those whose mental capacity is in question or those misled unfortunates to whom the words of demagogues beholden to the manufacturers of such weapons are taken seriously.

Guns have no redeeming qualities. They are manufactured to kill, and kill they will continue to do unless we the people put a stop to it.

Lucille Apcar
Mariposa, California