Letters to the Editor: Tone Deaf on Guns, Jam and Rifles

Tone-Deaf on Guns

I have been a subscriber since 1976 in order to connect with the local Jewish community. But the increasingly reactionary political messages in the AJT opinion pages have prompted me to reconsider.

Your greater prominence to articles in support of Donald Trump in 2016 was merely partisan. This week’s article on guns (“Our View: Vegas Massacre,” Oct. 6) is completely tone-deaf — shockingly so.

— Livvy Kazer Lipson, Atlanta

Jam and Rifles

A friend of mine who has Transportation Security Agency pre-screening status recently had to surrender a jar of rhubarb jam before boarding a flight to Texas, a pistol-packing state. Yet a guy in Nevada, like people elsewhere, can blithely carry machine guns up to his hotel room.

The so-called greatness of America is our guarantee of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I take it that my friend was deprived of her liberty to happily carry home a jar of rhubarb jam lest the lives of her fellow passengers be endangered. Apparently, that simple rationale does not apply to Second Amendment freaks.

North Koreans and Iranians must be snickering at our hypocrisy concerning their avowed national right to liberty and happiness to pack nuclear punch. After all, given our domestic idiocy, they must consider their lives more important than ours.

— Rabbi Scott B. Saulson, Atlanta

We Need Our Guns

Here we go again: gun control. Before the poor families could even gather the remains of their loved ones from the mass murder in Las Vegas, our Democratic politicians and others on the left turned this into another debate on our cherished Second Amendment. Oh, the ironies of life.

Our fellow Jewish citizens on the left blithely handed $150 billion and a smooth path to nuclear weapons to tens of thousands of modern-day Nazis in Iran — weapons that could eventually murder millions — but today they are stoked again about discussing the end of the Second Amendment and the right of good, law-abiding American men and women to own handguns. They are really charged up about bump stocks in America. If the focus and policy were not so foolish, they would be laughable.

A characteristic of the left is that you can rely on these people to do what feels good but does no good. No number or kind of bump-stock laws would have stopped this evil man in Nevada from wrecking the lives of hundreds. Repealing the Second Amendment would have done no good and in fact would exponentially increase the amount of evil we face.

Human evil is here to stay. It does feel good to yammer about legislation, but it will not stop the next mass murderer in a stadium, shopping mall, synagogue, church, bus, train, school or baseball field — whether he uses a gun, a truck, some fertilizer altered to make a bomb, some poisonous gas or whatever his devious mind may concoct.

What will ameliorate the evil is looking it in the face and approaching it with American liberalism, maturity and resolve — approaching it knowing that utopia will never come in this life of ours and burials for the innocent will never stop.

We need to remind ourselves what does some good. We need, for example, to embrace our great Second Amendment and encourage good people to learn to respect and safely use handguns and carry them where they can. We need to fight the deplorable lies and hatred directed at our police, the thin blue line between peace and a barbaric society.

We need to support mental health professionals, clergy, teachers and families trying to identify and help our depressed fellow citizens. We need to demand fathers be married to women they have children with and be there to raise their sons into good men. We need to stop trying to cleanse the public American space of Judeo-Christian values.

A good, mature, strong, self-reliant American possessing a gun knows he has a chance to quell one of the rare instances of evil that may come his way, directed toward himself and his family. With it, he knows, he sends a clear message to the politician that he should be careful not to cross the line into the mass evil of state-sponsored tyranny — a line crossed regularly throughout human history. He knows that the Las Vegases of life will always be with us. We are born into a fractured world. We can look at the world with clear, adult eyes or with the eyes of the child — the eyes of the American and Jewish left.

— Howard Sachs, Chevy Chase, Md.

Big Sugar and John Lewis

Congressman John Lewis (D-Atlanta) is in the pocket of the nation’s beet and cane sugar cartels.

Lewis continually votes to maintain the U.S. sugar program. Why? It is quite simple: Lewis has received well over $69,000 in political donations from the sugar cartels since coming to Washington in 1987.

Thanks to Lewis and others, the U.S. sugar program continues. The sugar program is a Soviet-style command-and-control scheme that restricts planting and imports and inflates the price of sugar in the United States to almost double the world price.

So when you go to the store to buy a snack cake or anything sweetened, you pay more. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the program means Americans pay $3.5 billion every year in increased grocery costs, or $58 per household.

In Lewis’ 30 years in office, he has repeatedly voted against sugar reforms, costing each Georgia family an additional $1,740 for groceries. You have to ask yourself: Is my congressman fighting to make life better, or is he just another politician in it for the campaign contributions?

It’s time for Lewis to step up and end this costly government giveaway to the cartels.

— Nicholas A. Pyle, president, Independent Bakers Association, Washington

From the Blogs

The community conversation is always active at blogs.timesofisrael.com/atlanta-jewish-times. Recent posts include Bonnie Levine’s argument for debating gun control now, while the passions over Las Vegas are burning (blogs.timesofisrael.com/yes-now-is-the-time-to-talk-about-gun-control). Visit the blogs page to sign up for your own blog or to add your comments to recent posts.

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