Letters: January 9

Posted 1/9/13

“Encouraged” by local thoughts on gun control

There is nothing like the editorial pages of a newspaper to showcase the sound conceptual thinking of its readers. Your Dec. 27 issue is a case …

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Letters: January 9

Posted

“Encouraged” by local thoughts on gun control

There is nothing like the editorial pages of a newspaper to showcase the sound conceptual thinking of its readers. Your Dec. 27 issue is a case in point.

Here we are offered the amazing fact that had Russell Byers packed heat on the night he was stabbed he would be with us now and his killer would have been in his grave long ago. I did not know this.

Having just returned from a country with stricter gun laws than our own, I was also unaware that these imposed on Londoners such bloodthirsty tyrants as Queen Elizabeth and David Cameron, both boon companions to the likes of Idi Amin. Live and Learn.

This writer suggests that about one person in for of us carries a gun for our personal protection, some 80 million of us. I feel much safer knowing that there are maybe 40 or 50 armed passengers on a run of the Chestnut Hill Local. Small wonder that we sit quietly in our seats awaiting Armageddon.

Another correspondent suggests that the way to prevent more massacres is to repeal the Second Amendment to the Constitution. This proposal is about as unlikely to be taken up as the likelihood of finding a cab at the South Pole.

Why tinker with the Constitution when we could ask our political class to pass a law making it illegal to shoot people? What? We have such laws on the books already? Well, then the answer is obviously to enforce them. That aught to do the trick.

Some say there are already about as many guns in our country as there are people – 300 million, give or take a few. Or is it only 80 million as another suggests? What happens then? Do we send them in with our income tax returns? Bury them in the backyard?

I can't say, but I'm encouraged to learn that my neighbors are working hard to answer these questions.

Edward Sargent

Chestnut Hill

 

Stop texting and drive safely

A message to those who feel they must steer their car with one hand and talk on their phone with the other: You are in charge of a large, potentially harmful machine. You are not in a telephone booth. What could be so important to talk about that you put us all at risk for an accident to happen? If you must use your phone while driving, please pull to the side of the road to do so.

Harriet H. Palmer

Chestnut Hill

 

A quick fix for kiosks

The thinking man's solution to the kiosk fiasco: sledgehammers!

William H. Pugh IV

Erdenheim

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