Winston-Salem Journal LTE SA 12/29/12

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Our species has devised efficient ways of killing people: the hangman's noose, the guillotine, sawed-off shotguns, assault rifles, handguns.

But among the civilized nations, only America has made some of these devices so readily available as to be a public health problem and a threat to its children.

The NRA says we need more handguns to make schools safer. That would be funny if it weren't so tragically wrong.

ROBERT MERRITT

WINSTON-SALEM

Support for gun control

Right now there is support for some laws protecting citizens from gun violence. Presumably, background checks would be more thorough; gun owners required to have and renew permits attesting to their competence, mental health and lack of criminal records; and both semi-automatic weapons and large ammunition magazines would be banned from sale in stores, at gun shows or on the Internet.

At some point, however, there should be a serious discussion of the interpretation of the Second Amendment. Surely an individual does not make up 'a well-regulated militia.' At the time of the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the guns available were the muzzle-loaded musket and the flintlock pistol, long guns (c. 5') that fired a single lead ball, having been primed for each firing with gun powder dropped down the barrel. These were the weapons possessed by the people who participated in their local 'well-regulated militias.' The incongruence of applying the Second Amendment to the possession of the full range of weapons currently available would be ludicrous, were the dangers not so horrific and pathetic. There is no humor in this situation.

It is time that our thinking and our laws recognize that we live in the 21st century, not the 18th, and time for our legislators to enact law consistent with reality.

KATHERINE MCGINNIS WINSTON-SALEM

Collective insanity

Recent news conferences with House Speaker John Boehner and NRA President Wayne La Pierre made me cringe with anger, fear and sorrowful resignation.

Fear that the tea party Republican members of the House cannot even recognize when they have won a victory, sealing extraordinarily low tax rates for the wealthiest at the expense of 90 percent of all Americans, including most tea partiers. They're willing to derail the economic recovery on 'principle.' Anger that the NRA is so powerful and arrogant that it can actually propose setting up armed camps in our schools and are ready to start training and arming the school enforcers.

Sorrowful resignation because I am not surprised.

What else should I expect from a country with 300 million guns already in circulation? A country that foregoes universal performance driven medical coverage in favor of the costliest for-profit health care in the world; that spends more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined; that decided 30 years ago to stop taxing multimillionaires at the margin and let the wealthiest 1 percent double their share of America's wealth while the bottom 80 percent lost 20 percent; that allowed Wall Street to get too big to fail and quickly bailed it out when it did fail to save us all.

A country that now expects the 90 percent who have already lost their American dream to bear the brunt of paying back all the debt accumulated to the benefit of the very few.

RICHARD B. HILTON

ADVANCE

Guns don't kill people

Gun advocates say 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people.' They leave out the rest of that axiom, 'but people with guns kill more people than people without guns.' When I go to a theater or to the mall, is a deranged gunman going to appear and start shooting? What concerns me even more is the possibility of being caught in the crossfire between him and legal but poorly trained citizens who have gotten concealed gun permits. That would mean even more bullets whizzing through the air.

I'm not advocating the ban of all guns, but we need to look at what is out there. No one needs assault-type weapons. No one needs high-capacity magazines for their guns. What we do need is the strengthening of and more stringent enforcement of existing laws.

A member of Congress said that if the teachers in Sandy Hook Elementary School had been armed this tragedy could have been averted. This scares me. Is this the solution we seek, an America where we expect our teachers to become combatants in gun battles using inferior weapons against heavily armed and crazed assailants who ought not to have access to guns in the first place?

Let's sit down with logic, reason and common sense to reach a decision to further reduce the possibility of our children being harmed in the future. And let's do it now.

RICHARD SIMMONS

WINSTON-SALEM

Punishment

The disaster in Newtown, Conn., is the result of God punishing us for 'taking prayer out of schools?' It seems more likely that God would be punishing us for allowing guns on the streets.

BETHANY PARE

WINSTON-SALEM

Preventing horrors

Two thoughts about the tragedy in Newtown, Conn.: There is something fundamentally wrong with our society, which fosters these unspeakable atrocities. But we are also doing something right. For each of these horrors, many are being prevented; we just don't know it.

What was it that prevented other disturbed people from acting out? Was it a parent who noticed a change in a child and did something about it? Was it an astute teacher or school counselor who called in a child for a friendly chat? Was it a gun salesman who felt suspicious and denied the sale of a weapon? We have to find out what we are doing right and how to share that with others.

Here's what might work. Challenge our universities to do the best analysis in the world to discover how to prevent these horrors. Have the university create a Simpson-Bowles type map of what to look for and what to do about it. For example:

. Ban the purchase of assault weapons;

. Have trained mental-health professionals in each school;

. Have an armed law-enforcement officer at a desk near the main entrance to each school;

. Create a procedure for teachers and parents to act on and clearly identify each step.

These are just a few examples. The universities must do the research and analysis. We don't need our government in this process to bog it down. We can do this ourselves.

KEN JADOFF

WINSTON-SALEM

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