Winston-Salem Journal LTE SU 12/23/12

Hard to understand

I just want to say that I do hope that something is done about gun control. The tragedy in Newtown, Conn., has saddened me so. I don't know any of them personally, but that doesn't matter. How can anyone have a happy Christmas after this?

I can't get it out of my mind. I get so angry every time I see or hear anything that the pro-gun people say. None of their comments make sense. They think guns are for protection, but no human, with the exception of law enforcement and the military, needs an automatic weapon. Maybe a pistol for protection; I understand that. Maybe a gun for hunting; I can even understand that. But as long as there are mentally unstable people out there, and there always will be, unless something is changed, they will find a way to get their hands on a weapon that is capable of killing many innocent people.

Something has to be done. Enough really is enough.

SUSAN SANDIFER

Advance

Moving on

A chilly and rainy Sunday morning, coffee brewed and a little fire crackling in the kitchen woodstove, dogs snoozing at my feet — a perfect time for my Sunday ritual before church. Sunday paper, toast, grits and coffee. Sometimes I cheat and only glance at the front page before racing to the editorial page or the sports front. I read half of Lenox Rawlings’ column (“Time to move on; a new season beckons,” Dec. 16) and heaved a long, sad sigh that scared the dogs.

I’m an uneducated man. College wasn’t much of an option. Graduating from high school is murky. (I didn’t, but they’re proud of me so they say I did.) But I studied hard. Mainly, I studied Lenox Rawlings. His work was quiet, thoughtful, crisply incisive — and always remarkably subtle. I watched him like a hawk. My wife used to stumble into the kitchen, smelling the coffee, to find me dissecting Rawlings’ paragraphs, diagramming his sentence structures. Lenox Rawlings knew what he was doing and I didn’t have an inkling of what was up or down.

We weren’t close, mainly for the sake of my piddling little ego — and Rawlings’ gracious and affable demeanor was so different from my hot-headedness. But he could write. Lord, he could write, so clearly that I forgave him the cardinal sin of golfing.

I’ll echo Rawlings’ praise for helpful editors like Joe Goodman and the indomitably good-natured Terry Oberle.

See what it’s like downstream, Lenox. And tell us what you find.

GUY NEAL WILLIAMS

Winston-Salem

Explaining

On the eve of the recent school shooting in Connecticut I watched and listened to an on-site reporter of one of our corporate-owned television networks as he pondered how the parents of the children who didn't get shot were going to explain the massacre to them.

Don't tell them anything. Secure National Rifle Association memberships for all of those children and let those NRA rascals explain it to them.

KENNETH B. SCALF

Mocksville

Sum It Up

Has 2012 been a good year?

Correspondent of the week: Pursuing deeper solutions

Deb Phillips

In the wake of the horrific massacre of innocents in Newtown, Conn., our nation must pursue deeper solutions than simply further regulating firearms and ammunition.

Instead of striking a severe blow to the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, our nation must grapple with the glorification of violence and death in the entertainment industry, the alarming causes and effects of the breakup of families, the negligent or ineffectual treatment of the mentally ill and the culture’s increasing repudiation of spiritual and traditional values.

We must address mental-health and educational-privacy laws that interfere with the treatment and reporting of potentially violent mentally ill individuals. States must diligently submit pertinent mental illness and criminal records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

And because criminals do not obey gun laws, we must question the designation of “gun-free” zones — typically schools, shopping malls and theaters — which render innocent, unarmed people as convenient targets for criminals and the mentally deranged with death wishes.

Very importantly, we must ensure that no new gun-control measures will diminish the right of law-abiding citizens to adequately defend themselves in both public and private venues.

Individuals with ravaged hearts and minds wield guns or knives, stones or clubs, improvised explosive devices or suicide vests. Let us not — out of pain or politics — simply slap a “gun control” Band-Aid over our nation’s deeply wounded soul, while rendering even more innocent people defenseless through a knee-jerk assault on the Second Amendment.

DEB PHILLIPS

Lewisville