Problem people, not guns

Dear Mr. Stern:

Your February 21st editorial “Guns don’t add up” was disingenuous at best and grossly deceptive at worse. Your statistic that 3 percent of Americans are gun owners was taken out-of-context and was perverted to represent the number of gun owners in America, and that is just plain wrong. The percentage of gun owners in our country is 42 percent, not 3 percent.

Tell me this, how come the car is not at fault when a drunk driver kills someone? Or how come the bomb is not at fault when a terrorist blows up innocent people? In your mind the gun is at fault whenever evil kills someone. (The exception being of course is when a white member of law enforcement shoots a minority in self-defense or shots a minority that is engaged in the commitment of a felony. Then according to liberals promoting their progressive agenda, it most assuredly is the shooter’s fault.)

If you really want to reduce mass killings then the need is to address mental disorders, not guns. There will be acts of terror committed by sick people. But the problem is not guns, it’s people.

Taking guns away from lawful citizens to prevent mass shootings is akin to taking cars away from lawful drivers in order to reduce drunk driving. Instead of a federal gun ban, why don’t we just try gun control in a large urban area like Chicago and see how it goes?

William Ginn

La Conner

[“the three percent of seriously confused people who own a collective 133 million guns. That number is from The Guardian,” of the 357 million total guns owned. The url: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/15/the-gun-numbers-just-3-of-american-adults-own-a-collective-133m-firearms - Editor]