Dec. 20, 2012: Our readers write

Law-abiding public must speak up

My heart goes out to all the people who lost loved ones in Connecticut. This is an awful thing to happen.

A few years ago I wrote about gun-free zones. Unfortunately, the prediction I made has come true. A lot of people are and have blamed the gun, but it was not the gun’s fault. A gun does not get up off the table and go and shoot people.

The problem is we have these places that try to restrict the carrying of guns. Schools especially are gun-free zones. The problem is, mad men will not pay attention to the signs. In fact, the only people who obey those signs are law-abiding people. Those who call for more gun control apparently do not realize that there are more than 20,000 gun control laws and they have not saved a single life.

You do not hear of mass murders in a police station or at gun ranges. Gun-free zones are an attraction to those who want to kill a lot of people. They know that there is a good chance that there will be no one who can stop them.

It is time to stop trying to stop evil by punishing the law abiding. It is time to rethink the gun-free zone. More than once, a person who had a gun in his car ran and got it and returned and confronted the shooter who surrendered.

It is time those who are in leadership positions in our schools be allowed to arm themselves if they want, so at least there is someone there who has a gun and the training to use it.

One of the things that most people don’t know is that firearms are used many more times to save lives than they are to murder people. I have the opportunity to read these stories in some of my magazines. Gary Kleck did a study in which he found that guns are used to stop crime more than 2 million times each year. The only time you hear about it is when they are used for bad. It is time for those of us who are law abiding to speak up.

Gary Givan
Elizabethtown

Guns and Bibles

Because enough people have already jumped on Bob Costas, I’ll address the remarks of black sports columnist Jason Whitlock who stated that “The NRA is the “new KKK.” I can see a liberal mob chanting this type of trash on the streets back in the day.

Why might he have said that? This presidential administration has always been anti-gun. Didn’t President Obama criticize people in Pennsylvania for “holding onto their guns and their Bibles?” The NRA responded with vigorous political opposition to Obama’s re-election and was predictably labeled as racist for doing so — a usual tactic by liberals freely using Obama’s skin color over the years as a shield to avoid dealing with the truth of any given issue. Obama’s skin color is the same as mine so I stay in his case.

What other logic could there have been for Whitlock? Left wing liberal elitists always pick fights for blacks who stick their hands in liberal pockets. I’ve been an NRA member since 1976 and; as a “mud person,” surely don’t qualify for membership in any white supremacist organization. In addition, there are more than enough other non-white NRA members at the general and leadership levels to make Jason Whitlock sound like another race-baiting idiot and a garden variety “Uncle Tom.”

The NRA believes in protecting the Second Amendment so all individual law-abiding American citizens have the option of to protect themselves against oppression and tyranny imposed by whomever.

Carl T. Rowan (1925-2000), editor of The Rowan Report, was a nationally known black columnist and talk show host in the Washington, D.C., area. Like Whitlock and Costas, he advocated tougher gun laws. Rowan was charged with but acquitted of assault charges when, in June 1988, he shot an intruder at his Washington, D.C., home with an unregistered handgun. Washington, D.C., had an ordinance that prohibited possession of any unregistered handguns since 1976. I guess that Rowan had his hand in the right liberal pockets.

If Jason Whitlock chooses not to own a firearm, that’s his decision. Due to these violent times, I won’t bet he isn’t a hypocrite like the late Carl T. Rowan was.

Harry M. Braxton Jr.
Elizabethtown