Editor, Manteca Bulletin,
What I’m about to say here, about controlling gun violence and killings may sound a little extreme but I assure you that if it were done there would be no more gun violence and people killing people.
The goal here would be to remove all the guns off the face of the earth and melting them down and destroy the ability to manufacture them. But then we would still have the problem of people killing people, with knives, clubs, rocks, spears, bow and arrows and various other ways, as they have done since the beginning of mankind. If you look in the first book of the Bible it states there in that Cain slew Abel. This is the first record of man killing man. So you see to stop this killing, all mankind would have to be removed from the face of the earth. This sounds extreme and un-realistic.
Let’s think realistic: Can guns of any kind with their high capacity clips in by itself kill a person or anything? I’m 78 years old and I have yet to hear of a gun taking it upon itself to go and kill anything. The gun is just a piece of steel until it is in the hands of a person to load aim and fire it. Yes in the wrong hands the gun can be a vicious weapon for killing. There are many other ways to kill people besides the guns that are just as vicious. You can read in the papers just about every day the various ways these people kill.
Who are these people that do these vicious killings? They are the mentality deranged people, criminals, terrorists, gangs, serial killers, suicide bombers, and assassins, not the ordinary citizen. No amount of gun control and background check is going to stop them, they are totally committed to their crimes.
The question here is how to stop this senseless killing. It’s like a cancer we have to stop or control it somehow. How we do this without trumping on the rights and privileges of the ordinary citizen, is the greatest problem we face. In-spite of all the laws and regulations we have passed these killings continue to take place. We are looking at new proposed laws and regulations, but they seem to take away more rights and privileges from law-abiding citizens and don’t do a thing in the way of stopping these killers. These killers don’t answer to any laws, regulation, or background checks.
It seems like the citizen is penalized every time these people go on their killing spree. They not only kill our loved ones but then we have to pay their legal fees after they’re caught and then pay for their incarceration. We then run a gauntlet of gun laws, regulations and penalties. To make matters worse they get to go on living, while their victims will never achieve their potential in life.
The question here is how to stop the gun violence. A better question would be how to stop people from killing people whether they use a gun or by any other means. These killers were killing long before the gun came along. Gun violence only exits because of these killers. The answer to either of these questions has been sought after for many years. There seems to be no easy answers but we must keep trying.
T C Brown
Manteca
Feb. 10, 2013
