To the editor:

I would like to respond to Shawn Beard’s letter stating that guns don’t cause violence. I agree. But I think that everyone in the country agrees that a gun can no more cause violence than a foam Nerf baseball bat can.

The problem is the ease with which a gun allows a person to kill.

Let me give my first example. I’m a killer and you are the person I would like to kill. I have in front of me a foam Nerf baseball bat and a gun. Which would you rather I have? In this example, I have shown that it is easier to kill with a gun.

Here’s another example. You and I are acquaintances and we stand beside a table with a Nerf bat and a gun. For some reason, you make me furious. In a fit of rage, I pick up the gun. Bang. You’re dead.

Let’s say instead I picked up the bat. After hitting you twenty times, I am physically exhausted and have regained my composure enough to see that what I am doing is stupid. You are fine because foam doesn’t hurt. With this second example I have shown that although I became physically aggressive, I was given enough time through the futility of the bat to use common logic and stop, and I physically “burned off” my rage.

How much rage do you think you can burn off by contracting your trigger finger?

According to Shawn Beard: “However, doesn’t the fact that he actually had the opportunity and was able to commit the act, hint at a deeper problem?”

The 6-year-old boy had the opportunity because the ratio of firearms to people in the United States is greater than that of any other nation in the world.

The boy was “able to commit the act” by aiming point blank and pulling the trigger. A simple action that I argue all boys his age can repeat.

Did you ever play with toy guns as a child? A 6-year-old hardly knows the difference. That’s why the boy isn’t being charged. I agree that there is a deeper problem, and guns do nothing but help manifest that problem in deadly ways.

“She was a gun owner and was able to protect her and her two daughters by killing the perpetrator.”

Wouldn’t a security system have protected her and her daughters without killing anyone? I assume the gun was loaded and close to the woman. If she had kept the gun locked in one room and the ammo locked in another (the proper procedure for a firearm in the home), she would not have been able to protect herself, right?

Let’s say a woman has a loaded gun under her mattress to protect her and her 6-year-old twin girls. What is the likelihood of someone actually breaking in? I would say less than 1 percent.

It is far more likely that the girls would find the gun and do something bad than it is to actually be able to use the gun for protection in the unlikelihood of a break-in.

In the hands of the untrained and emotional public, owning a gun will do more harm than it could ever make up for in good ways. For every person who was protected by a gun, the person on the smoking end of the barrel was not. And who wants to think of what has happened to the young innocents of this country that have had the bad fortune of finding a “family protecting, safely hidden” gun?

How many people in homes without guns lived through their childhoods? How many people in homes with guns did not? And how many people in this country would still be alive if there were no “protection guns” to be taken from homes and used in acts of violence?

Guns don’t kill people, but they sure do help.

Josh Kendrick

Sophomore

Sports and exercise science