I’ve often wondered how protesters keep their days and their specific protests in order. There seem to be so many different protests going on all the time.

Anti-war, global warming, many environmental issues, President Bush, anti-partial-birth-abortion bans, anti-nuclear energy, anti-wind turbines, starving polar bears, and on and on.

How do these people get involved in so many issues and still lead productive lives? It must be miserable to be against just about everything.

The latest attempt to exploit a tragedy, and another protest, the Virginia Tech shootings, was the stirring of the gun-control movement and their members.

Fortunately, there was no traction, and their protests fizzled before they even began. Simply put, it was a horrifically evil event caused by an evil person. Guns had nothing to do with this other than the fact that they were the weapons of choice to carry out this premeditated murderous act.

Students at the college began to worry about this person and reported him to their professors. His professors were also concerned and referred him to school counselors. Even though anti-social behavior was noticed and reported as far back as 2005, no one did anything about it. Had the Blacksburg mental-health clinic ordered him hospitalized, which the police had wanted at the time, none of this would have happened.

Virginia gun law said that involuntary hospitalization denies the committed individual the right to later buy any firearms. You are not going to be able to legislate out of existence evil people. We do not need more laws!

Instead of blaming everyone up the line who had some responsibility for not doing enough, who does the gun-control group look to blame? You got it, the National Rifle Association.

This "evil organization," with more than 4 million members, has the nerve to offer programs that teach Americans, young and old, about gun safety, education and responsibilities.

What a dangerous organization. Yes, it is a very powerful organization, a very effective gun-rights lobbying group, and this probably drives the gun-control groups crazy.

Tough. The right of all individuals to bear arms is fully entrenched in our Bill of Rights. I wonder why it was listed as second out of 10.

It simply 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." This was the second of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution that contained guarantees of essential individual rights and liberties that were originally omitted in the creation of the original document.

Many different organizations, especially the ACLU, have repeatedly tried to re-interpret what our founding fathers meant.

The ACLU claims that the Second Amendment applies only to the right of states to maintain a militia. The ACLU’s claim is that there is no right for an individual to bear arms. It also doesn’t believe that there is a prohibition against reasonable regulations of gun ownership. At the same time, the ACLU declares itself neutral on the issue of gun control. How about some quotes by people who were close to the issue:

"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms," Thomas Jefferson, 1776. Maybe the ACLU was confused about the term debarred.

"The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed, which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms," James Madison, The Federalist Papers, No. 46.

One more of many, many other quotes: This one comes from a Richard Henry Lee, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788: "Whereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. ..."

People will argue that gun owners shouldn’t worry about reasonable regulations against gun ownership. Gun-rights advocates shouldn’t worry about regulations that take only a few rights away, leading to a total ban on guns.

These people are probably the same ones who yelled and screamed about the chipping away of abortion "rights" when aspects of the partial-birth abortion ban were declared unconstitutional.

I can easily find the right to bear arms in our Constitution, but I am having trouble finding the part about abortion rights _ especially the right to drill a hole in a baby’s head and suck out its brains as it exits the mother’s birth canal.

Back to my original paragraph about protesters and their numerous protests. I was especially pleased with an article in The Daily Star a month or two ago about a bus trip to take protesters to a war-protest rally in Washington, D.C.

The trip was canceled "because not enough people signed up." Maybe even the protesters are tired of being negative about so many things.

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Tom Sears is a professor of accounting at Hartwick College in Oneonta. He can be reached at SearsT@hartwick.edu. His column appears every other week.