As Bob Dylan wrote years ago, “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.”
Well, certainly the answer is not blowing into Congress. Only thoughts and prayers are, as they always are, after each one of the horrific shooting events.
I had thought that, after Sandy Hook, when 20 5- and 6-year-old children perished, that at last something would be done. How dumb I was!
The Second Amendment contains the phrase “a well-regulated militia.” None of those murderers belonged to one. The national background checks are so faulty that anyone, including terrorists who are on a “no fly” list, can purchase as many weapons as they can afford.
Why are military-style weapons and armor piecing bullets available? Are the deer getting better defenses? No other advanced country allows such practices and, as a result, they have but a fraction of the deaths related to firearms. Yet they all allow hunting.
This is not the America that my refugee parents came to from Europe, and it is not the country that I grew up in. I no longer feel safe here, as I suspect many others also do not. I have worked in several war zones, and I have to admit that I never had this feeling there.
Stephen Sokol, Lewiston
Send questions/comments to the editors.
