When Tony Blair was still prime minister, a peaceful protest march surprised both media and government in England as it drew huge, sympathetic crowds of disenfranchised and disillusioned citizens. Most were there to express the sentiment displayed on their signs, the clearly felt loss of their basic right to self-defense as British citizens, owing to the country's restrictive gun-control laws, and in large part the loss of their unique English heritage, and along with it, the very culture of their people.

Plaxico Burress and Francis Lewis, two prominent residents of the state of New York, lived three centuries apart. Burress is a New York Giants football player, and he was the star of football's Superbowl XLII, catching the winning touchdown for the Giants against the New England Patriots last year. Lewis was one of our Founding Fathers, a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence and a congressional representative. In many ways the two men are very different in terms of character, heritage, circumstances, profession, and temperament. Yet both surprisingly share several common threads beyond somewhat unusual names.

The new and heavily liberal legislative bodies now ensconced in Washington and in many statehouses across the nation now pose a slow equivalent to the march on Lexington and Concord that sparked the American Revolution. Taxation, regulation, and government inroads into personal liberty, including gun control, are now proliferating.

No sane person wants innocent people victimized, maimed, or murdered, nor to see the perpetrators escape justice. This is true, whether the perpetrators use their hands or objects — like baseball bats, rocks, knives, vehicles, or a host of other readily available inanimate objects of endless variety — or a firearm. It is the intent and the will of the criminals, and not the inanimate objects they use, that are responsible for the criminal acts and the harm done to victims.