Writer responds to column on gun control
(Response to the guest column by Kevin Krajewski in the Aug. 1 edition of The News-Sentinel.)
Mr. Krajewski, I would like to respond to your recent comments about the Aurora shootings. Fort Wayne is especially barraged with gun-control rhetoric every time we hear of such a tragedy, especially since our former mayor has been lavishly paid for years to promote gun control. There are always people who hear of the cruel actions of evil people and fantasize about a world without guns.
Perhaps you should take a little trip like I did recently to Armenia, a small Christian country located between Iran and Turkey. There you can catch a glimpse of a place where bullets are replaced with daisies and that evil old National Rifle Association is banished. In 1915 the Armenian government passed some “reasonable” gun-control laws.
Within months of Armenia’s disarmament the gentle folks of neighboring Turkey learned that they no longer had guns. The Turks came over swiftly. They gathered up the preachers and politicians, lined them up, and executed them.
In all more than 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Muslims, and Turkey took 80 percent of the land that had been Armenian for centuries, including Mount Ararat. (Remember Noah’s Ark?) When you go to Armenia, be sure to visit the Genocide Museum. It’s not quite the Magic Kingdom, but it is educational.
Mr. Krajewski, are you aware of the statistic that for every crime committed with a gun there are at least four crimes prevented because the intended victim or someone on the scene had a weapon?
Was James Holmes a member of the NRA? Was Nidal Hassan a Rush Limbaugh fan? Was Seung-Hui Cho shouting, “Hooray for the tea party” when he murdered 32 innocent people at Virginia Tech five years ago?
I am not a member of the NRA, but your letter reminds me that I should probably join, because every time there is such a tragedy the Chicken Littles of the world unite in a shrill cry to stop the proliferation of those awful guns.
There is one thing that Virginia Tech, Fort Hood and the Aurora theater had in common. They were gun-free zones. Murderers know that organizations that openly advertise that the good guys are unarmed provide the safest places for them to do evil. Notice that the cities with the strictest gun-control laws in America have the highest gun-crime rate.
No one in that theater in Aurora had a gun except the bad guy, and he’s now living comfortably at our expense. How many lives could have been saved if just three or four patrons in that theater had their handguns with them instead of locked away in their cars?
How much money will Americans have to spend for this guy’s lawyers and living expenses because no one had a chance for a clean head shot?
As long as there are people like James Holmes in the world, America needs to stand with those brave men and women of the NRA.
Ernest Weaver
Give us a break on the grisly shooting details
Could the media please give us a break (from the) endless grisly accounts of the Aurora killings? I understand it was a tragedy, and our sympathies lie with the 70 innocent victims.
But we also need to appreciate that 86 Americans are killed by firearms every day, and nearly 4,000 are killed prematurely by chronic diseases linked with consumption of animal products and lack of exercise.
So, let’s replace the vacuous hand-wringing over the Aurora tragedy with constructive personal steps to lessen the greater tragedies facing us every day.
Kim Teague
