Jan 15, 2015 2 min read

You may have opinions, whether the majority of your readers agree with them or not, but you cannot state falsehoods as facts.

I take issue with your Jan. 6 editorial about the lawsuit filed against the manufacturer of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle by families of those killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. It sounds like something from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun organization Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense.

I don’t know what polls you read, but a large majority of Americans support the Second Amendment. They are disappointed dozens of gun laws are on the books and are not enforced. Many have large fines or mandatory jail time.

The National Rifle Association supports removing guns from criminals, the mentally ill and from other citizens if they purchased the guns illegally.

Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the country and the highest rate of murder by illegal guns. Houston, of similar size, has reasonable gun laws for law-abiding citizens and a low illegal-gun murder rate.

Studies show the only effective prevention of mass murders is armed citizens present in schools, theaters and malls

And, lastly, a semi-automatic rifle that looks like an automatic military rifle is not a machine gun. Military assault rifles have a switch which permits them to be fired in either mode. Civilian Bushmasters or others do not have this switch. Many rifles are sold in military style or traditional hunting style and, except for differences in appearance, function identically. But the gun grabbers want to ban the ones that look like military guns and not the ones that have looked like deer rifles for about a century now.

If I saw a Hummer parked in the Observer Publishing Company parking lot, should I think it has a machine gun, a rocket launcher, bulletproof glass and armor plate, and should be banned from ownership by an employee, even though they want to ban my gun because it looks like a battlefield gun or has the same name?

John Loughman

West Finley