Right to life

Is today finally the day we stop entrenching ourselves and shouting at each other around the issue of guns? Can the shock and grief of Newtown change the conversation to an impassioned and respectful discourse on a Bill of Responsibilities?

Let us unite as a people around parents’ rights to bear their children in their arms to their cradles not to their graves.

We cannot accept threadbare arguments on political positions. Let us insist our Governor-elect Pat McCrory and our North Carolina legislature engage in an open and vigorous conversation on solutions we all can live with, lest our children continue to die. Sound-bite fear rhetoric will not work, for we are burying our little children.

The time has come for the NRA to come to the table with real solutions for comprehensive, responsible gun laws that raise the level of gun ownership to professional standards, not unlike those for pharmacists, nurses and doctors. After all, a gun is the power of life and death.

Let us create a society where a kindergartner’s right to life is never subordinate to the Second Amendment.

Keith Sexton, Burlington