Froman (NRA President) hails free speech, gun rights
Date: Feb 13, 2007 12:35 PM
It takes a lot of backbone to go into a college campus in the
PC environment of today and talk about gun rights and freedom.

http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/2/13/fromanHailsFreeSpeechGunRights

Froman hails free speech, gun rights

Second female NRA president argues for the right to bear arms, citing personal experience
February 13, 2007
By Patrick K. Fitzgerald
Twenty-six years ago, Sandra Froman heard a strange sound coming from her front door in the middle of the night. She looked through the peephole to find a large man attempting to break her lock and enter her house. Petrified, Froman screamed to make it clear that someone was home. But her effort to scare the would-be intruder off was to no avail.

?I was terrified he knew someone was here,? Froman ?71, said last night during a talk in Kresge Auditorium sponsored by the ASSU Speakers Bureau. ?Why was he still trying to get in??
Froman called the police, who told her to lock herself in an upstairs bedroom. Having no lock on her bedroom door she panicked, finding relief only when the police found the would-be intruder gone when they arrived minutes later.

?I realized I was out of options,? she told the crowd. ?I decided then and there I was never going to be that helpless again.?

Froman, a self-described 5-foot-2 Jewish woman, bought a gun the next day. She is now president of the National Rife Association (NRA), the second woman president in the organization?s 136-year history.

On a night where news broke of a gunman killing several people in a Utah shopping mall shooting spree, Froman spoke more on freedom of speech than on the national gun control debate. She lashed out at political correctness and moral relativism, which she argued eroded ?the freedom to think.?

?Pretty soon there will be no differences between right and wrong,? she said, offering a laundry list of famous personalities who fell out of favor for what she portrayed as slips of a tongue ? ranging from actor Mel Gibson to senators Trent Lott (R-MS), Joe Biden (D-DE) and former senator George Allen (R-VA).

?I?m not here to defend the freedom to tell a racist joke,? she said. ?In an open marketplace of ideas, you?re always going to get some crazy ideas.?

That open marketplace of ideas was responsible for such luminaries as Louis Pasteur and Albert Einstein, whose breakthroughs were not accepted by the scientific establishment at the time, she said.

?By seeking to silence those it doesn?t want to hear, society is also silencing those that it needs to hear,? she added.

Froman was equally passionate in her defense of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which states, ?A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.?

The text?s ambiguities and nuances have fueled both sides of the gun-control debate. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence reports that eight children die every day of firearm-related deaths, but many policy analysts say there is little connection between stricter gun control laws and a reduction in violence.

Froman made her position clear.

?The point,? she said, ?is that every responsible, peaceful, law-abiding American should have the right [to bear arms] if they want to.?

While Froman drew quiet applause from supporters ?mostly local community members ? throughout the talk, she deftly handled questions from the handful of students who exchanged in a sometimes tense, but always civil question-and-answer session.

?I?m so glad we?re giving everyone their opportunities,? she said with a smile after one particularly testing question.

Froman engaged audience members in discussion but did not stray far from her elucidation of the NRA platform: a wide interpretation of what arms citizens can bear, making firearms easily available to law-abiding citizens along with harsh sentences for gun criminals and limited regulation of gun-safety classes.

?We don?t have a literacy test before people can vote,? she said, in opposing state imposed mandatory gun-safety classes that span multiple days.

Despite Froman?s willingness to answer questions from the audience, several of the questioners said they found the debate lacking.

?The discussion about gun violence was all but missing,? said Theo Milonopoulos ?09, who raised the specter of recent violence in East Palo Alto. The city experienced a spate of three homicides and 15 shootings during the month of January, a statistic Milonopoulos deemed ?unacceptable.?

Others said they found the talk convincing in part.

?I feel that she did a good job of explaining why guns should be allowed at all,? said Christine Foster ?09. ?But not why they shouldn?t be regulated

The Second Amendment IS Homeland Security !