Reader's View: Gun violence is robbing us of our freedoms

On April 13, a 16-year-old kid in Kansas City, out on an errand to pick up his younger siblings, made a mistake on the address and got shot in the head. Two days later, young people in a car in upstate New York realized they'd pulled into the wrong driveway and were turning to leave when they were shot at, killing a young woman of 20 years. On April 18, in Texas, two teenage cheerleaders were shot, leaving one in critical condition, after they mistakenly opened the wrong car door. And on April 18, a 6-year-old girl and her father were shot in North Carolina after their basketball rolled into the wrong yard.

Were these the results of good guys with guns bravely protecting their property rights against children — unarmed and non-threatening children — who mistakenly wandered into their lines of fire? School shootings, theater shootings, church shootings are all rationalized by Second Amendment advocates as being the result of mental health problems rather than the result of our nation's unfettered gun culture. But the examples from one week in April seem to be clearly related to the uniquely American trend of barely regulated gun-carry laws dressed up as personal-defense rights.

We need to make some changes or else this plague of gun violence will continue to destroy our freedoms. Our freedoms to go to school, to play with a basketball, to drive around aimlessly with young friends, or to go get our young brothers when it's time for bed should not be trumped by some 18th-century, vaguely worded amendment about "well-regulated militias."

Peter Krause

Duluth