Letters: Peace through guns? Hardly

Re “NRA to oppose new gun limits,” Dec. 24, and “2 firefighters killed in N.Y. ambush,” Dec. 25

The National Rifle Assn.’s solution of more guns to assure peace has the potential of destroying our social fabric. When guns are seen as the best means of protection, the “other” is looked on as a threat, a potential enemy, someone to be avoided. Isolation becomes the norm, the very thing that characterizes a mass killer.

Civil society is possible when people trust one other and see the value of working together for the common good. Guns foster confrontation, whereas cooperation is always the better approach.

Peter O’Reilly
Claremont

When a man uses a gun to kill children in a school in Connecticut, the liberal media use the occasion to renew their call for gun control.

What are the chances that they will react to the shooting deaths of firefighters in upstate New York — by a man who had previously been convicted and sentenced for hammering his grandmother to death — by calling for an end to releasing murderers before their maximum terms are finished?

Jerry Freedman
Los Angeles

NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre has made clear that his organization favors gun ownership for every “good guy” in America. I suppose he believes that the good guys will forever remain so, and of course, he doesn’t favor allowing guns to be possessed by the “bad guys.”

He doesn’t address the fact that the bad guy in the Connecticut elementary school massacre stole the weapons he used from his mother, presumably a good guy. She was the first to be killed by her son.

Since no legislation can guarantee the absolute safety of anyone, and LaPierre agrees that is the case, why then would he declare that past legislation banning assault weapons didn’t work because the Columbine shooting occurred when the ban was in force? Is it possible that many other such incidents might have occurred if not for that ban?

Lawrence Berk
Ventura

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