Editor, Times-Union: On the front page of the June 8 paper, we find that the Mayor of Philadelphia is going to "come down" on gun manufacturers.
My first suspicion is that the mayor is, perhaps, motivated by politics or is very uninformed about firearms.
A gun, either long or handgun, will do absolutely NOTHING at all on its own except rust and many of today's guns won't even do that. Gun makers and gun dealers, generally speaking, would not sell a gun to a known criminal. I rather doubt that most criminals would try to buy a gun from a dealer. Guns will always be available to criminals, regardless of laws or the lack thereof.
I dare say every gun owner abhors gun violence along with any other violence. If we want to reduce gun violence, then let's drop the "bleeding heart mentality" and use fire to fight fire. People who take lives by committing criminal acts with a firearm should be given a fair trial and if found guilty beyond reasonable doubt should be executed within a matter of months, not years. Is that violent? Maybe, but they might think twice before taking someone else's life.
Who DO we sue when someone is killed with a rock, a tree limb or is pushed into a river or a lake, etc. etc. - God?
Thousands of people are killed daily by cars, trucks, boats, trains, buses and airplanes and the like, but NO ONE proposes that they be banned and the manufacturers foot the bill, including mopping up the blood. We recently had a very violent double murder by means of a knife. Was there ONE WORD about banning knives and suing knife manufacturers? Not that I heard. Oops, I forgot, if we had bad-mouthed knives we might have hurt the murderer's feelings and we could have been sued out of our eye teeth.
People have killed people since the beginning of time and will continue until the end of time. Today, we are sooo sophisticated and intellectual that we must treat the symptom rather than the disease because that will put money in our pockets.
"Automatic" is a word often misused. Firearms that will fire numerous times with a continuous pull of the trigger are truly automatic and can be classed assault weapons. We have had strict laws controlling such weapons for many years and rightfully so. The "assault weapons" so often referred to are simply auto-loading and require one pull of the trigger for each round fired. Such guns have been with us since about the turn of the century in the form of rifles, shotguns and pistols.
Coddling criminals and pouring sympathy all over them only to have many of them come out of jail to do it all over again, in one case to get out of jail for A DAY and commit murder, has simply got to stop. Come on, Americans - wake up.
How did I get so smart? I don't know, but if you really think about it, you might agree.
Robert S. Cord Warsaw
Potpourri
Editor, Times-Union: I would also like to respond to your Potpourri column on May 30. My husband is the co-owner of Caff Italiano. Many families, including my own, were affected by our decision to close. I find it difficult to believe a newspaper we have supported for many years stopped supporting the small, independent business owners of this community. We could have opened our restaurant in any city in America, but chose to bring some food variety to our hometown. Instead of writing a nice article expressing a heartfelt loss for this community, I felt you cheered our demise.
