These aren’t my words: they come from a
letter to the Los Angeles Times. But how
perfectly they sum up my attitude.
Even now, after the Florida school massacre, the gun problem
isn’t getting fixed. In spite of current outrage from students, parents,
teachers, and the public, few have doubled-down on the one-and-only viable
solution to mass killings: make automatic
and semi-automatic weapons—like the AR-15—illegal.
Nothing else can work. It will take time
to get weapons-of-war out of gun shops—even longer to retrieve them from
ordinary citizens. But once banned, AR-15s
will be used less often. Gun owners can rejoice over less-spectacular killings—down
to one-by-one.
Meanwhile, we’ve heard inane solutions
from our president: turn our schools into armed camps; raise the age for buyers
of war weapons; “fix” the mentally-ill (he doesn’t say how.) While listening to families of murdered
children, Trump’s remedies come out as though from the lips of NRA’s Wayne LaPierre . . . whose recent
speech was infuriating.
Two Times
letters are worth re-reading. From Terry Otsuki: “Our thoughts and prayers go
out to members of Congress who have sold their souls to the NRA. May they find
their humanity again and start taking action to prevent these mass
murders.”
And finally, Kim Eifert Krogstad says: “Other
countries have mentally ill people capable of harming others. Other countries
have young people who have been bullied or attacked by fellow students and are
filled with rage. Other countries have despondent people who have given-up on
life and want to go out in a blaze of glory. (Para.)
But other countries do not have the kind of school shootings that we have here
in the United States.
The difference is that in the United
States, we value our guns more than our
children.”
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