Letters: Connecticut shooting

I heard the news of the Connecticut school shooting [Friday] morning while I was leaving an elementary school. I felt horror and sorrow. And shame for our nation for not protecting our children better. A small, trivial gesture, but I will darken my Christmas lights [Friday] and Saturday as an outward expression of this shame. – Mark L. Stengel, La Mesa

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These dead children, and their devastated families, deserve a better memorial then mere words engraved in stone. They deserve words engraved in law.

The Second Amendment has been abused too long, and the NRA has been considered too powerful to oppose. [Is it] so powerful that we should just keep feeding [it] victims, like throwing virgins into a volcano? These dead kids were virgins. None of them had lived long enough to enjoy so much as a first kiss. Can we start the fight to give them some element of dignity and justice in their dying?

Crazed, heavily armed gunmen are not a militia. The Second Amendment does not protect the right of [an angry] son of a kindergarten teacher to first kill her, and then go after her class.

Gun control: It is time. It is needed. It is simply common sense. – Kate Baker Tilton, Poway

“Soft target” is FBI parlance for an undefended or defenseless site. It is hard to imagine a softer target than Sandy Hook Elementary. Is there anything softer than the bodies of small children? Anything more innocent than an elementary school?

And still, in the days after yet another senseless and preventable massacre, the hounds of the NRA and the Republican right are baying, “Second Amendment! Congress shall make no law … ” long and loud as sure as you are reading this. They will brook no law being made (even if that law is being made by a state or a municipality and not Congress) that infringes one iota on the right of anybody to own many, many weapons. Nor are they off-put by the idea of virtually anybody at all having high-powered weapons, which have but one useful purpose and one intention – to slaughter a lot of humans very, very fast.

The undeniable fact is that the framers of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, collectively known as the Bill of Rights, and Congress, which ratified them in 1791, were referring to the right of citizens to bear arms so as to be able to form militias against foreign invasion or occupation. Their minds were firmly fixed on a law passed by Britain that prohibited colonists in America from keeping weapons, the Redcoats being justifiably concerned about an uprising.

The men who wrote the Second Amendment were unable to imagine or predict many things about life in the 21st century. They could never have guessed at automobiles, and no need for them to do so. The Tenth Amendment directs that any function not specifically accorded to the federal government automatically devolves to the state or to the people. Therefore, automobile rules and regs are enforced by the states. Perhaps it’s time for us, the people, to insist that our states and municipalities make laws to protect law-abiding citizens from evildoers with big guns. After all, most of us are soft targets, too. – Sylvia Herman, La Mesa


