Thirteen months ago, after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, I wrote an opinion piece in this space. I observed that “our elected representatives have decided that such shootings are an acceptable price to pay for allowing just about anyone to own any number of guns and any kind of gun.”
Since that time we have seen many more killings in public places, from the very widely reported Parkland, Florida murder of 17 in a public high school on Feb. 14, to the hardly noticed mass shooting at a business in Middleton, Wisconsin on Sept. 19 that ended with the shooter dead and four of his coworkers injured (Wisconsin State Journal, Sept. 20, 2018).
Just in the last few weeks, thirteen were killed in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California on November 7; three were killed in a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida on Nov. 2; and 11 were killed in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 307 mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year (www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting). A mass shooting is defined an incident in which four or more individuals are shot or killed.
I still don’t agree that this is an acceptable price to pay so that just about anyone can own any number of guns and any kind of gun. We can protect the rights of sportsmen and sportswomen to hunt deer in Wisconsin woods while reducing the opportunity for killers to arm themselves with automatic weapons and make us unsafe in the places where we learn, earn our livings, recreate, and worship.
Sixty-one percent of respondents to a Gallup poll taken in the first 10 days of October of this year favor stricter laws governing the sale of firearms (news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx ). If you agree, don’t remain as unnoticed as your fellow Wisconsinites who were shot by their co-worker in that workplace in Middleton in September.
Instead, please make our 61 percent a vocal majority by making your position known to your Wisconsin legislators and your representatives in the U.S. Congress.
Donald Richgels
Waupaca