This photo was taken by Wilhelm Brasse while working at Auschwitz, where some 1.5 million people, mostly Jewish, died by the hand of the German government. AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM/ASSOCIATED PRESS Visit the Photo Place

Don't be flip about gun rights; they may be needed

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Dave Ludeker

Date published: 3/29/2006

I was happy to see Dennis Hannick's comments in response to a misguided Ron Miller's take on our Second Amendment rights ["Firing back," March 12]. Mr. Hannick eloquently talked about our Second Amendment rights by supporting the ideas through the writings of our forefathers who wrote the amendments.

What I found to be most poignant about Mr. Hannick's comments was not just what he was saying, but the fact that elsewhere in the newspaper was an article about a photographer who was forced to take pictures for the Nazis at Auschwitz ["Photographer of Auschwitz"].

He took thousands of pictures of Auschwitz prisoners who were stripped of their dignity, tortured, used for human experiments, brutally beaten, and ultimately gassed or shot.

At the top of the page was a picture of a young Jewish girl with a bruise on her lip and fear in her eyes. As I look into her eyes, I cannot even imagine the pain she was going through.

This was and is reality, not some philosophical nonsense by some science-fiction writer.

If the Germans' forefathers had had half the insight ours had, that young girl might still be alive today, along with millions of her countrymen.

I've recently been to Afghanistan. I can say that the Taliban had no concern for the rights of the people in that country, just like in Nazi Germany and so many other countries in this world of ours.

Although we think that such atrocities cannot happen in America, and I would like to believe that, I am not willing to give up my Second Amendment rights.

I recommend that Ron Miller, before he trivializes our Second Amendment rights, get his head out of his science-fiction books and look at the reality of history, both past and present.

That young Jewish girl met her reality at the hands of unchecked power in the form of a brutal dictatorship.

Dave Ludeker

Spotsylvania

Date published: 3/29/2006