To the Editor:
I, along with many others, am very disturbed about all these school massacres, and also about all the whirlwind commotions about gun control pleas from the public. I believe in the old saying that, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
The Constitution of the United States of America gives us the right to keep and bear arms. We need them for our own protection and to use to forage for food. We all need to remember that guns do not kill people; people kill people. I do agree that the sales of the type of weapons being used does need to be controlled.
Why anyone would need such a weapon in the first place should be questioned and verified by some official means before it is sold. Just the idea that someone would desire such a weapon should arouse suspicion that the person purchasing it has something devious on his mind. The big todo about the people in Florida suing the official law enforcement personnel is ridiculous. If all of them had been at the school that day they could not have prevented the shooting.
In my opinion, what needs to be done is use some sort of detection device (such as that used at the Veterans hospitals) to prevent the weapon and ammunition from being carried into the school, to begin with. It has been years since the first school shooting. It seems to me that our legislators and school officials should have started way back then to begin working on some plan to head off such events. After all they are also responsible for the safety and protection of our school children. They have had plenty of time to debate and come up with a measure of safety. So what if it would cost more money? Aren’t our children, who are the future of our country, worth it? Hue amounts of money are being spent on things that are not really essential to life (such as museums, parks, restoration of many old relic buildings, etc). Our school children’s lives are much more important than things like that and our children are very, very essential to our future.
A very worried great-grandparent of five precious souls who are students at public schools and grandparent to one public school teacher,
Ms. Winston Miles Hayes
Louisville, Mississippi
