Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • March 27, 2013 a threat to democracy. Riflemen were seen as the defenders of democracy -- so much so that Napoleon, who staged his own military takeover of France, banned the rifle from his army. Friedrich Schiller wrote “Wilhelm Tell” the same year Napoleon declared himself emperor. Schiller has Tell, his Swiss freedom fighter, assassinate the Austrian tyrant Hermann Gessler with a crossbow -- the rifle of its era and a symbol of Switzerland ever since. Attempts to assassinate a subsequent Austrian tyrant foundered because the would-be assassins, often men of real conscience and courage, tried to use concealed bombs. They had limited access to handguns. The tyrant lived. The victims died by the millions. Similarly, the early United States was allergic to promoting sea captains to the rank of admiral, because that title had overtones of seizing power. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and Commodore Matthew Perry stayed captains and were sometimes called commodores -- an honorific title -- throughout their naval careers. The first official U.S. admiral was David Farragut -- and he did not become an admiral until the Civil War ended. The Founding Fathers knew that responsible armed citizens would protect their human rights and that large professional armies, especially those full of drunken ne’erdo-wells who were blindly loyal only to their commanders and needed the government for subsistence, were the single greatest threat to liberty. General George Washington became a genuine American hero when he refused the offer by his own soldiers to make him King of America. Washington opposed large standing armies, political parties, and entangling alliance. Now look... Guns do not kill people lying around in desk drawers or locked in steel cabinets or even in shoulder holsters. They kill people in the hands of psychopaths. Look at a few of the recent outrages and see a pattern. The two kids who murdered their peers and teachers at Columbine were members of some sort of diabolical cult who had been sending out violence-laden e-mails for quite some time. Nobody did anything -- notably including their parents and the school authorities. During their rampage, they killed a white girl and an Asian girl simply because both girls said they believed in God. In the aftermath, the community planted trees for the murder victims. Somebody planted two trees for the killers. Somebody else cut those trees down. I feel sorry for the trees. The Korean guy who murdered the students at Virginia Tech had shown extreme symptoms of literary violence, focused mostly on his step-father, before he broke loose and murdered 38 people. Should somebody have said something. Nobody did. Then there is the case of the Muslim U.S. Army psychiatrist who started shooting people when he found out he was being deployed to Iraq. Giving a Muslim an officer’s commission during a war with a Muslim country may be very PC but it is also very dangerous to his fellow soldiers. Telling him he was about to participate in a war against Muslims among Muslims compounded the issue. I have Muslim friends and I know that Islam is a religion, not a race. Conversely, the white guy who murdered the people at the Sikh Temple was so dumb he thought that Sikhs were Muslims. The U.S. Army, hard-pressed as it is, let this guy slide after one hitch because they did not want him in uniform. I have to wonder why. The killer of Sikhs was a member of a racist rock group who obviously substituted hate for talent. Would this man have qualified for a firearms ID if he had applied for one? I hope not. Even the Army did not want him. Good call! The teenaged killer in Connecticut had diagnosed mental disabilities, yet his mother took him to shooting ranges for target practice, kept high-tech weapons at home within his reach, and encouraged him to use firearms as a form of therapy. The final catalyst came, supposedly, when this walking time bomb was finally told that he was going away for special help -- far too late. Somebody failed this kid. That will not help his victims or their families. In the end, nobody is ever responsible for anything if they tell their sob story to the right audience. Just remember that the single largest outrage in 21st century America took place with the use of airliners and box cutters -- not guns. Had somebody on the airliners shot the terrorists, the death toll would have been in the low hundreds unless someone regained control of the aircraft. Genuine American heroes tried to tackle them hand-to-hand. The situation was too far gone by then, but they saved the White House. The recent resolutions, while redundant in New Jersey, could actually do the United States a world of good if they were adopted nationally. They will not be. I wish the best of luck to anyone who tries to toughen gun control in other states, unless he or she calls for total confiscation. I would support the concept of a background check for ownership of handguns, and for rifles with a large magazine capacity -- though these are not “assault rifles” unless they are fully automatic. I would not support any tinkering with the U.S. Constitution to deprive people who are not criminals, insane, or criminally insane of the right to own personal firearms for home protection. I would also support the right to carry concealed weapons for people who can pass a psychiatric scan and police checkup and have lived to be, let us say, 25 to 30 years old without committing a felony, getting involved in drugs or organized crime, or being under psychiatric care. I am getting too old to spar with muggers, yet they should not mug me. When they see how little money I have, they might kill me out of sheer spite and my grandchildren might miss me. Mass killers flourish in a society where most people are defenseless. How long would any of these cowardly mass killers lasted if they tried their rampages in Dodge City or Tombstone? Many people are urging lawmakers to take whatever means necessary to make sure that gun violence, in schools in particular, will not happen anymore. The intention is noble and decent and worthy, but the tactics seem a bit askew based, perhaps, on a lack of knowledge rather than any firm intention to overthrow the U.S. Constitution. The people who advocate this latest wave of local response may or may not understand this, but the means of preventing gun violence they want to see legislated are already on the books. New Jersey already has laws that require anyone who wants a long arm to obtain a firearms ID card with a background check by the local police. The purchase of a handgun requires an even more extensive background check, and owning a genuine assault rifle -which means a fully automatic weapon, not simply a rifle with a large magazine -- requires a federal license with an even more extensive background check, as does ownership of any fully automatic weapon. An automatic weapon is one that keeps firing as long as you hold the trigger, in other words a machine gun or a submachine gun, which is a hand-held machine gun that uses pistol cartridges. Hollywood can get these weapons for movie productions. You and I cannot. You cannot just walk into a sporting goods store in New Jersey and buy an assault rifle, a handgun, or any modern weapon whatsoever. Unless the resolutions being adopted extend to the entire nation, as opposed to New Jersey, the resolutions are a complete waste of time. The United States Constitution states: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” This has been willfully read by some anti-gun advocates as meaning that the National Guard has the right to bear arms, but private citizens do not have that right. In colonial America, virtually every citizen owned a musket -- rather like a shotgun in practical terms -- and most people on the frontier owned a rifle. When the British regulars gunned down the American militia on Lexington Green, it was the farmers and tradesmen, not the organized militia, who shot the regulars to pieces on the way back to Boston. The organizers of the United States did not want to take muskets and rifles away from private citizens. They wanted to prevent the growth of a large professional army which, as the history of the Roman Republic and the English monarchy had shown, was the greatest threat to a republican form of government or a democratic political process. The Founding Fathers passed this tradition down so thoroughly that the early United States was averse to forming cavalry regiments. The cavalry, always the most aristocratic arm of the European army, was seen as the seed-ground of a military takeover. Oliver Cromwell, the self-made dictator of England, was not the commander of the Parliamentarian Army against King Charles I. He was the commander of the Parliamentarian cavalry. The early U.S. Cavalry regiments were called “mounted rifles” or “dragoons” because saber-wielding young dandies from rich families joined hussar units and were seen as Fighting gun violence Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: On behalf of our dedicated Ramsey Farmers Market volunteers, outstanding farmers, and food purveyors, I wish to thank all who traveled from near and far to visit our indoor winter market. Each Sunday from December through March, scores of followers came to the Eric Smith School in Ramsey to purchase seasonal farm produce and products. Buying fresh and local products, getting to know who is growing or making the foods you give your families, and experiencing this friendly community event each Sunday, were only some of the reasons people returned each week. Market success! If you enjoyed the indoor market, imagine what we’ll have in store for you at our outdoor market, which will resume on Sundays from June through November at the Ramsey Main Street train station from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Visit www.ramseyfarmersmarket.org for more information or call (201) 675-6866. The non-profit Ramsey Farmers Market is sponsored by the Ramsey Historical Association with the support of the Borough of Ramsey. Nancy Boone, Manager Ramsey Farmers Market