UPDATE: An alert reader identified an incomplete sentence in this post. We’ve added material to fix the problem, and that material [appears in italics inside brackets below]. And while we’re on the subject, we correct mistakes in the blog by crossing out incorrect material and inserting new material thereafter. Why? Because we make mistakes like anyone else, and we think its proper to correct, not hide, those errors.

A couple of our regular correspondents, Goldy and Stan, have brought up the issue of assault rifles in the wake of the death of Metro Police Sgt. Henry Prendes. (Sgt. Prendes’ funeral was Tuesday at Henderson’s Central Christian Church. He was gunned down with a variant of the AK-47 7.62mm assault rifle wielded by a man who fired more than 60 rounds 40 rounds before being killed by police. Sgt. Prendes leaves a wife and two daughters.)

Goldy wonders whether his neighbors in residential areas should be allowed to have assault rifles. Stan made some kind of a joke (at least we think it was a joke) about the AK-47 being a hunting rifle. Which is true, if you’re hunting people, which is precisely what that weapon is designed to do.

We at Various Things & Stuff part company with most our liberal friends when it comes to gun control, mostly because we believe in the Second Amendment as strongly as we do the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth, which get a lot more attention and discussion on the blog. And for that reason, our view is this:

People in the United States are guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms (defined by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling as “weapons of military usefulness”) because a well-regulated militia (defined as the population of able-bodied citizens capable of rising to the defense of the nation, irrespective of their membership in the National Guard or active-duty armed forces) [is necessary to the security of a free state]. No law, no regulation and no policy of the government should be allowed to abridge that right.

Therefore, Goldy’s neighbors should be allowed to own AK-47s, regardless of where they live. People should be able to use them for hunting, or collecting, or target shooting, or whatever other legal purpose they wish.

That idea is distasteful to a lot of people, who choose to indulge in the fantasy that prohibiting guns by law makes people safer. It doesn’t, for reasons so manifest that we’ve no need to go into them here.

We at Various Things & Stuff have owned weapons for years: Handguns and a rifle variant of the AK-47 (ours is not fully automatic, as fully automatic weapons are available only to specially licensed citizens, which we think is wrong). We have never committed a crime with those weapons, and they are properly registered with Metro according to the law. (We also think registration is wrong, but that’s another discussion.) Should we have our weapons taken away because other people using those same pistols or rifles have committed crimes? Should any of our other civil liberties be suspended, because they’ve been abused elsewhere? Of course not.

Metro Police Sheriff Bill Young says that his officers need access to better, more powerful weapons. (The department issues the AR-15, the civilian variant of the military’s 5.56mm M-16A1, to some officers in special units.) He’s right; no cop should be outgunned on the streets. And let’s not forget how the man who shot Sgt. Prendes was killed: By a gang unit officer armed with an assault weapon.

If assault weapons were forbidden to citizens, would Sgt. Prendes have died? We’ll never know, and it’s useless to speculate. He could have been shot just as easily with a handgun, or attacked with a knife, or run over with a car. Or, just as possibly, he could have survived a gunshot wound with a pistol and returned to duty and to life with his family. We cannot say for certain, and the senselessness of the death of a fine and dedicated cop isn’t made any easier by the questions.

But the fact is, we not only shouldn’t ban assault weapons, we simply cannot, not if the Bill of Rights still has any meaning to us. This results in tragic situations: A person’s character is smeared by someone acting under the First Amendment; a criminal goes free because police didn’t follow the Fourth Amendment; and a brave cop dies protecting the rest of us, because a man owns a rifle protected under the Second Amendment. We wish such things were not so. Yet we should also pause to consider what our society would be like if there were no Bill of Rights.

And, most important of all today, we should keep the family of Sgt. Henry Prendes in our thoughts and prayers, knowing that however he died, he died a hero, and we are all in his debt.