GUNS, DRUGS, AND FREEDOM

After throwing $500 billion down a rat hole in the so-called war on
drugs, marijuana is more popular than ever and our administration's
answer to drug cartels is to try to take away our guns and give
Mexican president Felipe Calderon Black Hawk helicopters to escalate
this insanity further.

I have been a liberal Democrat since I was old enough to vote, but I
fear that my party sees this antiBush vote as a mandate for their own
brand of extremism. What they are going to accomplish by assaulting
the Second Amendment is to severely jeopardize a woman's right to
choose, equal rights for gay Americans and other truly important
progressive core issues and make Barak Obama into a one-term president.

Conversely, they will achieve nothing with their antigun legislation,
as criminals will not comply and, frankly, neither will many
otherwise law-abiding citizens who, like me, care deeply about the
aforementioned progressive values and even more deeply about their
ability to protect their families.

The so-called war on drugs which began under Nixon in 1969 is an
abject failure. I ask fellow Democrats to wake up to the reality that
many of even the most liberal among us will not surrender our right
to self defense under any circumstances and will not tolerate this
thinly veiled baloney as a political pretext to remove our most
fundamental freedom.

Larry Brown

Agoura Hills