Though I have spent much of my career as a photojournalist, I must offer a perspective from my United States Air Force basic training in 1965. On a cold and misty morning at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, we marched out to the small arms range, where our range officer told us about the weapon we were about to "qualify" with: the M-16, strikingly similar to AR-15s so popular today, especially with mass murderers. This assault rifle was born in the early days of the war in Vietnam and was designed for two purposes: fighting in the dense jungles of Southeast Asia and for "efficient killing" at short range in the jungle foliage.

This extreme-velocity .223 round, within a short distance, would start to "tumble," causing internal organs to explode. And to add to the terror, this gun emits a shrill, ear-splitting bark, loud enough out in the open. But in an enclosed space, such as a classroom, this noise announces the worst of all possible outcomes, as experienced by 20 little children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary, and now, 19 children and two teachers at Uvalde's local elementary school.

So let that sink in.

These are not the single-shot muzzleloaders used by the Founding Fathers when the Second Amendment was written. While most "long guns" today are designed to bring home the bacon, as it were, the AR-15, like the M-16 I trained with, was singularly designed to kill people. Full stop. Period.

David Ohman

Durango