DEAR EDITOR:
As the Sandy Hook shooting continues to dominate the media with a gun control ideology in the forefront of every story on all the major news channels, one should hope that our Senators and House of Representatives would calmly and ethically look for reasonable solutions to our school security issues, rather than a one-size-fits-all restriction of rights on law-abiding citizens.
We are the last country that has such freedoms and if our elected representatives decide to impose additional regulations and restrictions on law-abiding citizens without any redress to the actual problem, then our nation will be no different than those in Europe and throughout the world. We as United States citizens have to realize that living in a free society comes with a price and sometimes that price is more than we want to pay.
We really have to evaluate what is happening here. We have more than 300 million people in our country, and out of that only a few mass gun attacks have occurred, which apparently were carried out by mentally unstable individuals. What percentage does this come out to with comparison to our entire population? Should the citizens trade their freedom for a false sense of security? No matter what laws our government enacts, or how well trained our policemen are, the government cannot control the acts of a person who is not sane or moral.
We, as citizens of these United States, should keep the right to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Trading freedom for security leaves us with neither; as an unknown writer put it "laws that forbid the carrying of arms, disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one.''
This is a question that I have not heard raised. Are gun-free zones safer than non-gun-free zones? Has anyone looked into the statistics of this? Where have several of these recent attacks happened?
Tim Santell
Kinsman