Gun License Mathematics
V alley Advocate editor Tom Vannah complains about having to pay $16.67 a year for a gun license that he needs to renew once in 6 years (“A Gun Owner’s Resentment,” Aug. 28).
Here’s why that’s cheap: Guns kill 31,000, Americans every year, or more than 10 times as many Americans as died on Sept. 11, 2001. Of those 31,000 about 60 percent are suicides. Another 6 percent are accidental gun deaths. Of the remaining third, about half are acquaintance gun deaths, mostly domestic violence against women. The rest are stranger gun deaths, the crime that the National Rifle Association likes to focus on.
Vannah quotes a pro-gun rights Democrat, who says, “…violent crime…is mainly an urban phenomenon” and, “There are no drive-by shootings in the Hilltowns.” But there are suicides and domestic violence.
Perhaps $16.67 a year is too high a price for gun users to pay. But what about the 31,000 Americans that guns kill every year and the 6 educators and 20 six-year olds murdered in the gun massacre in Newtown? What price did they pay?
The Gun Tribe
In his letter to the editor last week, (“Hated Gun Owners,” Sept. 4) Pete Flanagan writes,
“They hate you because, as long as you have a gun in your hand, you are beholden to nobody.”
Really? Go walk into a police station with your gun in your hand and see who’s beholden to who.
The left doesn’t hate you because you’re a gun owner. They hate you because people like you are dismantling the rule of ethical law and replacing it with the rule of violence and threats of violence. Sensible gun laws like waiting periods, background checks, etc. are not gun seizures. If you are a rational, responsible person, nobody’s coming to take away your gun. So ramp down the hot-headed rhetoric and get a grip on reality.
According to your tribe’s rhetoric, Obama is out to grab your guns, throw you into a FEMA camp, microchip you, and install Sharia law. If you’re wondering why it hasn’t happened yet, maybe you should wake up and realize it’s because it’s all a feverish figment of your imagination.
Torturers Go Unpunished
Regarding Ted Rall’s column comparing the Richard Nixon’s crimes and misdemeanors to those of Barack Obama (“Sorry, Nixon,” Aug. 28): While I agree that the interrogation techniques sanctioned and defended by the Bush administration—and by Bush himself—were deplorable, I am not inclined to think that a satisfying investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators of such techniques could have been in the offing, precisely because of how widespread, entrenched and staunchly defended those techniques were. How many people would have been the subject of investigation and prosecution in such a quest for justice? How long would that take and at what cost?
I am appalled that such crimes could go unpunished, but certain that a deep probe into the matter would have required the prosecution of hundreds if not thousands of people—including a former president, and that it would have become the all-consuming issue of the Obama administration, all while dealing with the effects of the great recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all of the domestic issues pressing on our country today. I am not convinced that Obama’s decision not to pursue that line of policy is an impeachable offense.
