The right to vote is our salvation

The right to vote is our salvation

The Second Amendment will not save us from tyranny, the vote will. Every attempt at revolution to this date in the world has led to more tyranny, not less [see French or Russian Revolutions]. We can change our government at the ballet box. We don’t need to gun down anyone. We only need to vote them out of office.

So what we better start protecting is our right to vote, which is under attack in almost every Republican controlled state house. If we don’t see this as more of a threat to democracy than making us register our guns, then we are lost. Remember more than one freedom is given to us in the Constitution.

The framers put the most important of these in the First Amendment: Freedom of religion, speech, and the press, rights of assembly and petition.

These freedoms are under attack on all fronts. When people assemble to petition government they are pepper-sprayed with little or no outrage by anyone. When people report on government wrongdoing to the press they and the reporters are threatened with jail. Government officials openly advocate that their religion be imposed on everyone, without a loud cry from the public or the press. As for free speech, everything you say will be recorded and used against you. We better all start fighting — at the polls — for these rights or we will lose them. If these freedoms are lost, no amount of gun play will ever get them back.

Paul D Shanabarger, New Springfield