Denying Private Citizens AR-15s Common Sense, Not Control

Presidents’ Day. I keep thinking that when I was a lad growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, just across the Potomac, in Virginia, they also got to celebrate Jan. 19, or the closest Monday day to it, as Robert E. Lee’s Birthday. They got school off, which seemed like a great deal. It’s hard to imagine that would happen now. Or is it? It turns out that Lee’s birthday is still a state holiday in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi. In a real stunning statement of how America has changed, it’s sometimes combined with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday to make the holiday. Sometimes "Stonewall" Jackson’s birthday is tossed in there, too. What an amazingly flexible country this is.

And here’s something else as to which we need some change. It’s about guns.

Now, I’m a Second Amendment guy. I believe Americans who are sane and not criminals and pass a genuine background test should be allowed to own weapons for home protection and for target shooting and for self-defense. That makes perfect sense to me. How many of us are able to take on a strong young home intruder with our feeble old arms? But how much more fair the story is when you take the handiwork of Smith & Wesson out of your night stand?

So, owning a gun seems like a fairly good idea. And allowing grown men and women who pass strict tests to carry them either openly or in concealed carry makes sense, too. If you want to feel protected, you want to feel protected all of the time.

But for the life of me, I cannot see why any American civilians need an AR-15 or any other military-style semi-automatic rifle, so writes Ben Stein in The American Spectator.

Ben Stein is a writer, actor, and lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.