Ending gun violence

I am writing in support of President Obama’s proposal to enact common-sense gun regulations in response to the terrorist threat. Obviously, we should block suspected terrorists from gun purchases. If the name is on a no-fly list, it should also be on a no-buy list.

This would require expanding our current screening system to include gun shows and online purchases. If 40 percent of guns are acquired without a background check, as they are now, we might as well not have any background checks at all. It’s time to get serious about screening gun purchases at least as well as we screen purchases of Sudafed.

Ninety percent of Iowans favor universal background checks on gun sales.

I also support the president’s proposal to make it more difficult to purchase military-style assault weapons that are capable of killing large numbers of people in very short order. No one needs such guns, or high-capacity magazines, for sport or home protection. They are weapons of mass killing and should be treated as such.

The Second Amendment calls for a well-regulated militia. This is how we regulate it.

Karen Nichols

Regardless of how Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad wishes to frame it, he has taken the right stance on keeping guns out of Iowa schools. Such arming in the presence of little ones teaches them that we adults have given up on the civilization that nihilistic terrorists are attempting to frighten us into destroying by rending asunder the societal fabric that differs mankind from the beasts of prey that lurked the primeval jungle willingly killing its own kind.

More guns and guns everywhere ensures that fear is but a trigger finger away, and the promotion of such is what terrorism is all about.

In place of spreading instruments of violence, our nation needs to institute gun control that is as effective as in lands that in an entire year do not suffer the ghastly number of gun tragedies that we in Iowa alone suffer in a matter of minute that daily gets reported on the nightly news — enough of this insanity is enough. Best have faith in law and order in place of being so into the grip of fear that everyone must go armed as a law unto one’s self. Faith in law and order finds root in nothing more than common valor in place of cowering fear of what might lurk under one’s own bed and that which surely sits on every bench in the public park. As Shakespeare noted long ago: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

Sam Osborne