Letters: As the Senate Debates Gun Control

To the Editor:

Justin Cronin's love letter to responsible gun ownership ("Confessions of a Liberal Gun Owner," Op-Ed, Jan. 28) doesn't change this liberal's position one iota. I, too, grew up in the Northeast, where I learned to handle firearms for target and skeet shooting as a teenager in summer camp. The Army trained me to assemble and fire a military rifle and .45-caliber pistol responsibly. I know the satisfaction of competently handling and firing a deadly weapon.

Yet when I picture that dark movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and what might have happened had one or more legally armed people attempted to return that shooter's fire, I cannot endorse a society in which even responsible, licensed citizens among us routinely carry firearms.

Even highly trained, experienced police officers are challenged to make split-second, potentially deadly decisions when confronted with real-world shooters mixed in with civilians. It's only a matter of time before some innocents end up getting shot by a would-be vigilante. And please explain just how the police are expected to correctly determine which shooter is the perpetrator?

The pro-gun folks are right: Responsible gun ownership is legal and generally no more threatening to others than driving a car. Nevertheless, people do get drunk or high on drugs, fight with their partners or co-workers, or get depressed and suicidal. Every day, people do stupid things with their cars and their guns, sometimes injuring or killing others.

Our shamefully high incidence of gun deaths is clear evidence that we don't take this responsibility seriously enough. Gun ownership should require mandatory training, licensing, insurance and annual registration.

DEAN FOX
Foster City, Calif., Jan. 28, 2013

To the Editor:

After a month of hysterical hand-wringing, it is a relief to see a rational discussion of gun ownership, self-defense and social meltdown.

Compared with most of the world, the United States has been spared huge social upheaval caused by war or natural disaster. But when our luck finally runs out and society falls apart, self-defense will be central to individual survival, and all the current feel-good moralizing will seem fatally naïve. Helplessness is neither admirable nor moral.

LAURENCE FRANK
Hillsborough, Calif., Jan. 28, 2013

To the Editor:

The most striking fact of Justin Cronin's confession is the event that led him to purchase his first firearm. It was when nothing happened to him.

Yes, evacuation during Hurricane Rita must have been fraught with fear, anxiety, confusion, tension. But where was the violence? In the writer's imagination, in hindsight. He succumbed to the fear that something "could have" happened, even though nothing did.

The gun debate orbits around the fear of boogeymen, minorities, strangers. How ironic that most legal gun owners neither live in the most dangerous American cities nor have they been victims of crime. Only when Americans stop being afraid will we make any true progress.

SHAHRYAR MOTIA
Brooklyn, Jan. 28, 2013

To the Editor:

So let's get this straight. In their pious Jan. 30 Op-Ed essay, "Bipartisan Hunting Buddies," James A. Baker III and John D. Dingell say that one way to curb gun violence is for parents to yank their kids away from their video games and take them out to kill something small and defenseless? They also call for "common sense" in making gun laws. There seems to be a disconnect here.

TERRY SHAMES
Berkeley, Calif., Jan. 30, 2013

To the Editor:

Re "Selling a New Generation on Guns" ("Bearing Arms" series, front page, Jan. 27):

It comes as no surprise that the gun industry, like Big Tobacco at one time, deliberately targets children in order to groom a new generation of consumers.

As the reporting makes abundantly clear, the National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation are trade organizations whose only mission is to increase sales. Behind their meretricious arguments that firearm use somehow develops "life skills" or teaches responsibility is the real bottom line: profits.

PATRICK WALSH
Princeton, N.J., Jan. 27, 2013

The writer is a former infantry officer.

To the Editor:

Re "What We Don't Know Is Killing Us" (editorial, Jan. 27):

That the gun lobby has effectively shut down government-financed research on gun violence for 17 years exposes just how shaky its self-confidence is. Many of us are willing to accept gun ownership in exchange for sane public safety measures based on objective data. So if guns ultimately make us safer in and out of our homes, then why not give researchers a chance to prove it? Until the gun lobby is willing to face facts, it will be running scared, and with good reason.

ANDREW SOFER
Jamaica Plain, Mass., Jan. 28, 2013

To the Editor:

The Jan. 29 column by Joe Nocera, "And in Last Week's Gun News...," was brilliant. Listing both accidental and purposeful shootings day by day plainly reveals the depth and ordinariness of our gun culture.

Anger and the wish to kill will always be part of human life, but we do not have to make it so easy and commonplace to destroy the lives of neighbors, strangers and family members, instantaneously.

It is the gun culture that needs to be killed. And that will not be easy. The time to do it is now, while we still have the capacity to be appalled.

BOBBIE GOTTSCHALK
Co-founder, Seeds of Peace
Washington, Jan. 29, 2013

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