To the editor:

The oppressed of Europe sought sanctuary in the Americas over 500 years ago. Our forefathers that wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights had no knowledge as to what was to come 250 years later.

Little did our forefathers know that freedom of speech would include video games depicting the worst loss of respect for life and popular songs regaling in eliminating our protective forces.

The right to bear arms, back then, was a single-shot revolver or rifle/shotgun used to protect or game; not a multiple-shot weapon that could tear someone in half.

Our sanctuary – our America – has become a bastion for those who claim the right to kill and the right to speak about it.

Do we Americans want to throw away our right for sanctuary? There are no more continents to flee to once our freedoms and safeties are threatened.

Today, we are being held hostage by those who have exaggerated to the extreme the rights our founders granted under laws to protect us and to express ourselves.

If we want this sanctuary – this America – to be for our children and our children’s children a safe place to live and grow and pray and plan, then like those brave souls who risked life to cross the ocean to a new continent, we must take the risk again and cross the ocean of threat, hatred and the glory of killing to begin again the dialogue of what a free country – a sanctuary – should do to redefine freedom of speech and freedom to bear arms.

William H. Campbell,

Lawrence