Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Letter to the editor:

Damage from guns is immeasurable

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We agonize over several thousand of our brave soldiers lost forever in Iraq and Afghanistan during the past decade. We’ve already spent millions of dollars and untold man-hours of congressional time investigating the deaths in Benghazi, Libya. This is a massive effort to prevent this from re-occurring.

What is it that differentiates these occurrences from what happens in our country every year? ABC News reported that over the past 24 months, 57,000 Americans, 5,000 of them children, were killed here by guns, and yet there are no solutions. Looking beyond the personal tragedy and misery that guns in the hands of civilians create, what comes to mind is the loss of all these people to society. We lose their skills and their future contributions, maybe even another Lincoln, an Einstein or a Martin Luther King Jr. Then there is the financial cost to society for their education and the cost to locate, prosecute and incarcerate criminals.

I have come to the following realizations:

• Guns don’t kill people; people with guns kill people.

• When few people have guns, few people die from gun shots.

• When many have guns, many die from gun shots.

• Insane and inhumane people left to fend for themselves cannot be controlled, and laws likely will not restrict them.

• Semi-automatic weapons will kill and injure more people at a far faster rate than weapons that are not semi-automatic .

• America, with a population of 320 million people and a civilian arsenal of 280 million guns, means only our youngest children are now potentially deprived of gun access.

Aldus Huxley was right; it’s a “brave new world” out there. Experience it, if you feel that you can safely venture out into America’s wild, wild west, that is.

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