Given the rush to pass more legislation from our nation’s capital following the latest terrorist attack, I am troubled by my legislators’ dismissal of our Fifth Amendment right of due process and of the Sixth Amendment right “to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation …to be confronted with the witness against ( you ).”

Denying someone who has not been convicted of a felony the right to own a firearm, a right guaranteed under the Second Amendment, because the government has put your name on a terrorist watch list, in a veil of secrecy, without due process for redress, shows a callous disregard of our constitutional individual rights.

I am all for severe punishment of terrorists, murderers and traitors. But it must be done within our legal system, in a court of law, following due process.

I urge all Americans and foremost to our senators, representatives and the president to read Maine Sen. Margaret Chase Smith’s speech of June 1, 1950, when she offered her “Declaration of Conscience” in response to that period’s communist witch hunt driven by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Smith penned, “I think it high time that we remembered that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.”

And within her five-point declaration she offered, “It is high time we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom.”

True words of 66 years past, those words should still guide America, its citizens as well as its elected officials.

Kendall N. Huggins

Concord Township