- The Washington Times - Friday, April 5, 2013

A video of a 15-year-old Maryland girl who effectively argued for the Second Amendment and against gun control to state lawmakers in three succinct minutes — and who holds political aspirations — has gone viral.

More than 1.5 million have clicked on it on YouTube in just a week’s time. In the video, Sarah Merkle told lawmakers that she had been shooting for years and is now proficient enough to one day seek scholarships to universities for her firearms abilities.

Strict gun control laws, however, could put a halt to that, she said.

Sarah Merkle, on the video: “Because of [my gun background] I have become eligible for various shooting scholarships around the country to a wide array of even the most prestigious colleges that have shooting teams,” she said in the video. “Achieving stricter gun control laws would obliterate any opportunity I could have had to attend a decent college on a shooting scholarship.”

And she added: People are the problems, not guns.

“Chicago, Illinois has had some of the strictest gun control laws in America enacted in the last few years, and it is currently more as twice as likely for you to be killed in Chicago than in the Afghani war,” she said, adding that of the 3,371 killed in Chicago in 11 years, only 37 — or 1 percent — were killed by rifle.


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“So creating gun control legislation that targets ’assault rifles’ has statistically proven to only weed out less than 1 percent of the problem if you’re lucky,” she said.

Fox News reported on Friday that Ms. Merkle hopes to one day become a congresswoman.

• Cheryl K. Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com.

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