The gun-control nuts are howling like hounds again. As a group, they are illogical, unscientific, lacking in integrity, anti-democratic in intent and wrong.

First, you have a constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. The language of the Second Amendment is quite clear. It states, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t state the right of the states or the right of militias. It states the right of the people.

That is the only reading that is consistent with America history. James Madison wrote to a European that our country unlike those in Europe, was not afraid for its people to be armed.

This is extremely important. You cannot have a government of the people, by the people and for the people that is afraid of the people and wants to disarm them.

As an organization that calls itself Jews for the Preservation of Firearms has shown, there is a strong association between a disarmed population and genocide. In every totalitarian country in this century, the first step of government killers was to disarm the people. The group has pointed out and proven that the 1968 Gun Control Act was patterned after a Nazi gun-control act.

So, even if you personally have o desire to own a gun, you should fight to preserve your right to own one. The second Amendment is the canary of liberty. When it dies, it will be time to get real nervous about your future prospects as a free American.

What about crime? Crime is a people problem not a hardware problem. The belief that an inanimate object can cause animate objects to change drastically their behavior is a silly superstition. Furthermore, it is flat stupid to propose laws that only the law-abiding will obey as a crime-fighting measure.

When guns were most available and virtually unregulated - when you could buy them without question the way you could buy a lawn mower, when you could buy them through the mail or from catalogs - there was less violent crime not more.

Sociologists say you can’t prove a variable with a constant. The constants in American history are guns and teenagers. The variable is the crime rate. As guns have become more and more difficult to acquire and in some places actually banned, the crime rate has gone up. Obviously the causative factor is not guns.

In fact, it’s the drug war, for one. For another it’s the deterioration of the black family. The overall murder rate in the United States is about 10 per hundred thousand; for blacks age 15 to 19, it’s 105.6; for black men, 20 to 24, it’s 140.7. The homicide rate for the majority of Americans is comparable to that of Europe and Canada.

The frequently heard statement that people who keep a gun in their home are 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household than a criminal intruder is a piece of garbage research. The guys who did it included suicides, which were 85 percent of gunshot victims used in their study. Intruders frightened off or deterred were not counted. No attempt was made to make sure the studied groups were homogenous. The study, in effect, compares weeds and flowers.

Don’t forget that criminals, drug dealers, gang members and thugs also have “households” and guns. In fact, Chicago facts show that many murder victims and most of their killers have prior criminal records. Similar results have been found in other cities. For a detailed study of the methodological flaws in this and other gun-control studies, you can order the booklet, Firearms and Crime, by Daniel D. Polsby from The Independent Institute.

Finally, thanks to gun organizations such as the National Rifle Association, fatal gun accidents are at an all-time law. yet the president wants to mandate trigger locks that render firearms unusable for self-defense. He is, to put is mildly, insincere.