I simply have to respond to the letter published in last week’s News Transcript (“Gun-Free School Zones Do Not Deter Attackers,” May 2) advocating the end of “gun-free” school zones.
In the letter, the author-writer suggests that the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech might not have occurred if some of the teachers and students had the right to bear arms. She urges that it should be a teacher’s choice to have a loaded weapon with them in schools, and states that if a deranged shooter knew this it might deter him from his shooting rampage.
First, I have to say that when a person is as mentally ill as Seung-Hui Cho most certainly was, his thoughts are never about his own safety. It was clear that in Cho’s case, as in all the other school shootings on American soil, the shooter(s) plan was to die along with their victims.
The writer of the letter asks, “When was the last time a deranged lunatic broke into a police station and started shooting?” The answer, had she Googled it, is more times than you might imagine. Less than a year ago on May 9 in Falls Church, Va., a female officer was shot and killed and two others were shot and wounded in a police station.
Not much longer ago, two police officers were shot and wounded inside a Jersey City police station by a man they were filing a complaint against.
In fact, guns are used against their owners at a much higher rate than they are ever used to protect them. In one year, firearms killed zero children in Japan where there are strict gun laws. In that same year, 5,285 children were killed by firearms in the United States. In fact, eight children a day die in the United States from murders, suicides and accidents involving firearms.
Maybe it’s just me, but the thought of teachers, not to mention students carrying concealed, loaded weapons to schools is more horrifying and immoral than I can comprehend.
Nowhere in the Ten Com-mandments upon which so many of us base our morals is there a footnote to “Thou shalt not kill” “except under the following circumstances.” In my opinion there is never a good reason to take another’s most precious life, and our children’s lives are most precious of all.
Teja Anderson
Marlboro