Dear Editor:

Freedom. We love it. But can we consider ourselves truly free when we live under constant threat that it might be our school, church or workplace that will be in tomorrow’s headlines as bodies are brought out in the sight of grieving loved ones?

Yes, this is freedom all right; but not for the victims of this senseless and preventable gun violence. Ironically, they are the ones paying the price for the freedom of others to bear arms; not those who bravely declare that their guns will be “pried from their cold dead hands.” It is school children, co-workers, hapless bystanders, and, just recently, nine peaceful worshipers in their church sanctuary who are the martyrs paying the price of gun owners’ freedoms.

It is these martyrs whose freedoms and lives are sacrificed to satisfy a the powerful gun manufacturers lobby and the paranoid vocal minority who you will soon hear from in these pages denouncing this call for a reasonable discussion about how to prevent the next slaughter of innocents.

We are being killed in great numbers by this unbalanced and unreasoned fear of invoking the “well regulated” aspects of the Second Amendment. The safety of our children, the sanctity of our churches and our right to live free of fear and terror is not less than the the right to bear arms without reasonable and measured regulation of some kind.

Our rights and freedom to live peacefully are superior than anyone’s right to threaten that. Indiscriminate access to firearms is a greater threat to our freedom as we witness these senseless slaughters again and again.

It is time to assert our rights and freedom from this growing presence of terror in our midst. More Americans are killed every year by gun-related violence in this country than by terrorist attacks globally. Yet we spend trillions fighting terror abroad while ignoring this terror at home.

At home, Rep. Stephanie Hawke has co-sponsored LD 652 to irresponsibly eliminate the the permitting process for carrying concealed weapons. And so it goes on; the slaughter of innocents.

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay