It seems that in the increasing hysteria to defend against all those forces intent on taking away our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and more arms, we have abandoned the common sense that would seem prerequisite to owning a lethal weapon.

A fresh example of such abandonment came to us Monday morning when Como Police Chief Earl Burdette told us about guns, mostly handguns, we assume, stolen from unlocked vehicles in Como and Senatobia. 

Think about it. We purchase large caliber, semi-automatic handguns capable of holding many bullets in their magazines. We keep them loaded and within quick reach in our vehicles to defend against carjackings and such. Then we go off and leave them in the unlocked vehicle? 

And where is a gun headed after it is stolen? Not to a good ending.

“Help me help you,” Burdette said, pleading for gun owners to secure their firearms in their vehicles and homes to keep them from falling into the hands of “knuckleheads” who’ll pass them along to Memphis or Clarksdale or Chicago in an arms shipment to help fight the War on Crime  — and not on the side of the good guys.

Or, the police chief continued, “You may find yourself facing your gun some day in a robbery.”

There was another example of abandonment of common sense this weekend, this one with an immediate tragic outcome. You have probably seen the report from LaPlace, Louisiana. A man who had retired from the military and settled with his family in that small town west of New Orleans was always punctilious about the proper handling of firearms, his neighbors told the TV reporters who swarmed to the scene. He had stepped into the shower, leaving his loaded handgun nearby but briefly unattended. From the shower he heard the shot and stepped out to find his five-year-old daughter dying from a wound to her chest she had accidentally inflicted on herself.

In the rush to exercise our right, we have overlooked the responsibility that comes with it. Tragedy, now or later, is bound to be the outcome.