Published 12:00 am Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Limiting citizens’ rights isn’t answer to gun violence
More than 3,000 times each day and over 1 million times a year, the lives of potential kindergarteners and first-graders are destroyed in the United States. Yet there is no outrage. No special presidential commission is called. There is no demand for Planned Parenthood clinics to be registered. No one asks that vacuum suction devices or curettes be banned. No one argues that the mothers of these individuals should have their rights abridged. These women are not treated as pariahs but as reasonable adults, able to make thoughtful decisions on behalf of their bodies.
Yet, when 20 precious grammar-school children are murdered by a deranged teenager, there is an immediate hue and cry by the hypocritical proponents of our increasingly intrusive government to curtail the rights of honest, responsible, reasonable citizens. How can any informed person think that limiting access to firearms by honest Americans will keep a gun out of the grasp of a felon or an intelligent, motivated paranoid-schizophrenic?
Unfortunately, in a free country, in a culture calloused by violence in the media and when misguided government limits access to appropriate mental health, massacres such as occurred at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Columbine and Virginia Tech will continue.
How many times do we have to be told “it is the person, not the tool, that does the killing” before we believe it? Before we allow government to further curtail the rights of honest citizens, we need to remind the policymakers of their hypocrisy and redirect their attention to appropriate care for the mentally ill and a serious discussion regarding violence in the media.
— Dennis Hill, M.D.
Salisbury
Abolish the school board?
They should abolish the school board and turn all the things the board does over to the county commissioners. This would eliminate the conflict between the two of them. I’m sure commissioners could handle it.
— Glenn Deal
Rockwell