I have spent a good deal of this week thinking about Saturday's massacre in the Orlando nightclub and about the San Bernardino, Calif., killings in December of last year and about the murders of the school children and teachers of Newtown, Conn., in December of 2012. The same question keeps coming back to me
Why should any private citizen find it necessary to own an assault rifle that can fire off dozens of shots per minute? Why? Because the Second Amendment says so? The framers of that amendment lived in a time when there were no police forces and an assault rifle was beyond anyone's imagination. To protect one's home? A gun like that in the hands of a frightened homeowner would be more of a danger than a safeguard. For hunting? An animal taken down by one of those guns would not be edible
Where is the logic, let alone the morality, of any private citizen's ownership of an assault rifle? I don't get it. I just don't get it. As a pro-life Catholic, I am appalled that such a weapon is available to anyone other than a highly trained, active member of the military or of a police force