published: Sunday, January 20, 2013

Don't pass laws on emotion but on facts

Editor:

I do not want any new gun laws passed on emotion. Get the facts, then act. And don't use 8-year-old kids as a backdrop. A thinking person would see through that charade. Where are the facts? Not, where is the emotion.

When I grew up in the '50s and '60s we had guns at school and a lot of them hung on the back windows of trucks. Why were there no school shootings then? Why were these guns not stolen? They were in plain view.

We could even order guns from magazines and sent to your house.

We have a culture problem not a firearm problem. Passing feel-good laws solves nothing. I want the facts on how many lives are saved by armed citizens to compare with how many are taken by the misuse of guns. I want facts on what is the deterrent effect of armed citizens.

We didn't lock our houses or cars back then. Police didn't wear bullet (proof) vests.

I want to fix our culture and not waste time on laws that won't fix the real problem - our broken culture. I never heard of "Road Rage" when I was growing up, another sign of a dysfunctional culture.

What if your doctor treated you for an illness and gave you medicine for an illness you don't have? You would not get better and your resources would be wasted. That is what all these new gun law proposals are, the wrong treatment for the real disease we have - a broken culture. Is Congress and the President going to be a bunch of quack doctors pushing agendas or doctors looking for the real illness?

Thomas Lanfier

Sebring