Letter to the editor — March 1, 2016

Dear editor,

Last Monday morning I awakened to read an overnight email, informing me that one of the people killed in Kalamazoo by the Uber driver was Barbara Hawthorne, a close high school friend. By the end of the week four people were dead and 14 injured in Hesston. The senseless killing is getting too close to home.

Yes, the slaughter is done by people, not guns safely locked in gun safes with no one to pull the trigger, but all humans are at times emotionally frail. Who has not had a moment when he or she has lost it? And of course some people are much less stable than others. But even these people are human, not the “monsters” the media likes to call them in an effort to separate them from the rest of us.

What has caused this national tragedy is the combination of flawed humanity and a proliferation of high-powered automatic weapons readily available to everyone. When Keith and I visited Italy last October several people told us they would not consider visiting the U.S. for fear of being shot. This is how the rest of the world sees us.

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