I literally screamed at the television this weekend when reading the president’s tweet regarding the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. I admit to making fun of the man at times, in reaction to his constant pathetic tweeting, but this was too much. This was beyond the scope of human decency.
We have to stop letting our president and Congress deflect gun violence discussions to other issues that won’t jeopardize their financial support from the NRA or from voters who do not represent a large majority of Americans who do support some kind of gun control.
Don’t let the president tweet solely about the FBI’s obvious failure in Parkland, and tie it to Russian collusion, when he should be talking about and leading the effort to control violence in our schools and the country as a whole. It is our children and other innocents who are suffering the results of our inaction in the face of the overwhelming disaster of gun violence.
So do something.
Support the student movement being created now. Not with words but with action. Do your children want to go to Washington to march? Drive them there. Do you want Congress and our state and local governments to act? Write to them, visit them, vote against those who do nothing to counteract the violence that is sweeping across our country or, worse, who create laws that weaken efforts to curb gun violence. Tell them that unless they do something serious and effective you will never vote for them again. In fact, tell them you will actively campaign against them.
Do you support the position of candidates who are working toward solutions to gun violence? Yes? Then work for them, vote for them, and support them financially and physically. Because Florida, Nevada, Virginia, Texas, South Carolina, Illinois, New Mexico, Connecticut, Colorado and others can be New Hampshire and Vermont in the future.
I’m tired of cringing or screaming at the television. I will get involved in whatever way I can and I urge you to do the same. Do something. Do something.
Jon Stearns
Lebanon
It appears the young gunman in Florida fell through several societal safeguard “cracks.”
Fortunately, gun-makers, gun-sellers and NRA members were there to catch him.
Joan H. Davies
Claremont
It seems like there has been a school shooting every other day so far this year. When will our legislators, locally and nationally, decide that enough of our children have been gunned down?
I have had enough, as have most Americans. We are tired of the useless “thoughts and prayers.” We’re tired of the false equivalencies: What about the number of people killed in car accidents? If we got rid of guns, they’d use knives or acid, etc. And there already was an armed “school resource deputy” at the Florida high school, who did not encounter the gunman.
No American outside of the military needs an automatic weapon or a “bump stock.” There is no need for guns to be taken to school. It is time we vote out every legislator who takes NRA money. It is time we take back our right not to be victimized by this. #Enough.
Susan Donnelly
West Lebanon
In the wake of yet another horrendous shooting, and the inevitable wringing of hands and sending of thoughts and prayers, there are still those who loudly and incessantly talk of their “Second Amendment rights” or claim to support “Second Amendment rights.”
Those who do so seem to believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an unfettered right to an unlimited type and number of weapons. They should take a lesson in the history and interpretation of the Second Amendment. Even Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, that conservative icon, recognized that rights under the Second Amendment are neither unfettered nor unlimited.
I would ask that journalists, reporters and any others who speak publicly on the issue, not use the phrase “Second Amendment supporter” or similar phrases as shorthand to describe those who hold such beliefs. What those people support is not the Second Amendment as its appears in the Constitution, but rather the distorted fantasy version of the Second Amendment that has been promulgated by the NRA and the gun manufacturers.
If political candidates describe themselves as Second Amendment supporters, they should be asked: what exactly do they mean, what do they support, and on what basis?
It is long past time to hold our representatives accountable for their failure to take action.
Susan Mattson
Grantham
The reality of guns in our society is that, regardless of the level of pressure or future voting results wrought over gun control issues, our country will never allow enough gun-control measures to pass to save unprotected students from the potential violence of one unstable or pernicious individual.
Anyone who believes that this is not so is living in a world of fantasy. I challenge someone to come up with a plan, short of total gun confiscation (which will never and, in my opinion, should never pass), that will change that reality.
In the interim, it seems to me that the gun-control enthusiasts are sacrificing people on the altar of either fantasy or political expediency.
We are not Sweden, Norway, Austria, Great Britain or any other country that these “enthusiasts” tout as having better gun control and that we should emulate. We are who we are, a conglomeration of peoples, states and histories that make us as unique as each of these other countries.
We need to take all of this into account when considering how to deal with our own realities.
Our reality is that our local, state and education officials should be taking action on plans to train people in every school who could take down anyone who enters and tries to violate the lives of the most precious people in our society. To not be doing so violates the innocent trust that these young people have in us.
Peter Rucci
New London
Each school shooting is followed by the same sad ritual of grief and prayer. In each case, we mourn awhile, then let it pass. No other developed nation on Earth permits this degree of madness. It is hard to contemplate the ongoing slaughter in public places and schools that is now commonplace in our country, especially when those who die are children. Before we stop it, how can we explain it?
No nation has brought more firepower into the world than the United States of America. By producing these weapons, including the atomic and hydrogen bombs, delivering them to targets, and selling many of them to the rest of the world, we’ve added more items to the bloody catalog.
D.H. Lawrence once described the “essential American soul” as “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Readers of this letter can decide for themselves if he was right.
But for all our nation’s virtues — and there are many, well worth loving — there is something in our national mentality, a dark conditioned reflex that insists that the best way to settle our differences is out of the barrel of a gun. It expresses itself in our popular entertainment, the heedless accumulation of world-killing weapons, and innocent blood shed in schools. We stoop to plan the end of life on Earth for reasons of state and the sacrifice of children to a grudge. It is all one piece, lodged in the same bleak pit.
A stark and simple choice lies before us. Either we break this habit, or it will break us.
John Raby
New London