LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Gun control won’t end shootings

9/23/2013

Your Sept. 19 editorial “Lessons from Oberlin” demonstrates the misguided belief that more gun control would prevent horrific shootings.

Despite your claim that gun control enjoys widespread public support, public opposition defeated an unprecedented demand for sweeping gun control from a sitting president. Public rejection unseated two elected gun-banning Colorado officials.

The number of people who seek concealed-carry training and licensing continually outpaces prior years.

Gun registration, the idea that we let the government know exactly who owns every firearm as some form of preventive safety, did nothing to prevent Sandy Hook or any other mass-casualty shooting.

In an effort to sensationalize the debate, you implied that an AR-15 rifle might have been used in the Navy Yard shootings, despite widespread reports that the weapon was a shotgun. The media’s obsession with demonizing one type of firearm as the cause of all mayhem demonstrates its ignorance of the topic.

Chicago has some of the most comprehensive gun control in the nation and had 500 homicides last year.

In those cities that implement gun control most agressively, the results are horrific numbers of homicides by firearm by the worst of our society.

JEFF GARVAS
President Ohioans For Concealed Carry Avon, Ohio

Colorado’s rains are God’s tears
If I were an Old Testament prophet, I would say that the excessive rains and flooding in Colorado were the tears of God, crying because the gun addicts of Colorado got two Democrats, who supported some gun control after the Aurora massacre, were removed from office by a recall election (“2 Colo. lawmakers ousted in gun control recalls,” Sept. 12).

How many people have to die because you get off on packing heat?

W.E. FEEMAN, JR.
Bowling Green

 

Working class needs better jobs
The dwindling working class needs jobs that pay above poverty level.

These are the only jobs by which people can sustain themselves and raise a family without government aid.

Jobs that pay below poverty level wages — which include those at minimum wage — don’t count.

The only people who make enough to live on from those jobs are greedy business owners and investors.

The rest of the working class subsidize those employees by paying for food stamps and government assistance to make up the difference.

I hope that we of the working class can start with an entirely new group of people running our country after the next election.

ROBERT GEIST
Bapst Avenue