Guns aren’t the problem
On Dec. 27, I started to read your editorial on Congressman Tim Murphy’s efforts to improve America’s mental health laws, and then you went off on a liberal rant about gun control, using the same incorrect talking points.
I have written a couple letters that you have published about guns and mental illness, which I presume you have forgotten. Recent violence at Ohio State University involved a vehicle and a butcher knife. Do you want to ban them, too? Do we need to register butcher knives? Assault weapons – machine guns and automatic rifles – were banned in the 1930s after the time of Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde. Semi-automatic rifles that look like military automatic rifles or assault weapons were banned by President Clinton in 1994, and that ban was rescinded 10 years later when more sensible people realized how silly the ban was. Please cite facts in your editorials and have some knowledge of your subject.
Most mass shootings occur in gun-free zones. Only law-aiding citizens leave their guns home. Chicago has the toughest gun laws, but the highest gun murder rate. Houston, Texas, a city with similar demographics, has the lowest gun murder rate, because law-abiding citizens carry guns. Most crooks, drug dealers or mentally ill people avoid them and go where no one will stop them.
There are hundreds of gun laws on the books already, but no one enforces them. Why don’t you lobby to enforce those laws we already have?
Finally, how could you refer to a person with a mental illness as “not quite right in the head”? Many people consider liberalism a mental illness. Are you “not quite right in the head,” too?
John Loughman
West Finley