Editor,

Felons are not the persons who are doing the mass-killings of children and others. We do not need to keep felons from getting guns in order to make our school children safer. Our targets should be elsewhere. The shootings in various gatherings have been done by young white males with no criminal records. They surely have brain defects. Perhaps we can pass laws and establish screenings to pinpoint such persons before they indulge in slaughter. Such programs would conform to the thesis of those who say that “guns do not kill people; people kill people.”

First, we must take the concrete and doable step, if we have the political and moral stamina, of making it very difficult or impossible for such murderers to obtain rapid-fire rifles - of whatever label - and magazines, clips and drums that hold dozens of bullets. Such items must be eliminated from this nation. People will still kill, but without these guns or clips, a killer might kill two or three or four before he is taken down while reloading, or kills himself, which he commonly does. The Newtown, Connecticut shooter used high-capacity guns legally purchased by his mother. Would she now wish that she had not been able to buy the gun that her son used to kill her and the twenty children?

Some want more guns for self-defense. Okay, so we could provide students with loaded pistols and teach them how to shoot. Or arm the teachers and train them to shoot. Then we could have the following scenario: A gunman with a semi-automatic and several high-capacity clips enters the school and starts shooting. The teachers rush to where they have guns safely locked safely away from the children. They shout to the shooter to wait until they get and load their guns to have a more fair fight.

Are lone psychopaths with military-type weapons “a well-regulated militia?” Do the parents of the lost children believe that lone murderers are to be protected by the second amendment?

The gun that killed the children in Connecticut was not an assault rifle, according to the legal definition of assault rifles. Care to guess who writes such definitions? Did we elect some of them?

Arland MeadeBartow