Guns, Gun Laws, and Liberty......

Posted on 02-19-2009

ONE OF US

By Sen. HL Richardson [ret]

We Gun owners have a great friend in Larry Reed. Besides being a personal friend of mine, he’s a fine economist, scholar, and articulate friend of the Second Amendment. You will find his article on gun ownership well worth reading and worth passing on to others.

Lawrence W. Reed was president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan, at the time this essay was written. After 20 years in that capacity, he assumed the duties of president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in September 2008. Founded in 1946, FEE is the nation’s oldest free market think tank. It’s magazine, The Freeman, details about its summer seminars for college and high school students, and, many other educational resources are available on its Web site, www.fee.org . Reed, who has visited 69 countries on 6 continents, is an economist and author of more than 1,000 newspaper and journal articles in the U.S. and abroad.

Guns, Gun Laws, and Liberty

By Lawrence W. Reed • August 2000

Lawrence Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy www.mackinac.org , a free-market research and educational organization in Midland, Michigan, and chairman of FEE’s Board of Trustees.

The heart of virtually every citizen of America went out to the family of little Kayla Rolland after a classmate took her life with a .32 caliber revolver on February 29 in Mt. Morris, Michigan. As with the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado last year, we all feel pained and distraught about such senseless violence, and we wonder what has gone wrong and what can be done to prevent any recurrences. In the wake of these tragedies, legislators in every state are taking up the issue of gun control.

The challenge is to express appropriate grief and concern about these things without allowing hyped emotions, rhetorical window-dressing, or futile “quick fixes” to rule the day. Political jockeying to prove who is most outraged by violence must not overwhelm facts, logic, and experience.

Read Article: The Freeman on line