This is not a partisan issue. This is not a constitutional issue. This is a matter of life and death.
Assault rifles are weapons of war. No civilian should have them. Every single day that assault weapons and high-capacity magazines are legal, more and more Americans of all ages will die.
We can prevent most mass shootings and save countless lives. We can and we must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines immediately. When they are banned, every one of us will be safer.
Alexandra Petri’s satirical Oct. 29 op-ed, “‘The problem is the human heart,’” lamented the statement from new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that the cause of so many shootings is the human heart, not guns. I think Mr. Johnson might be right. If so, maybe he should help to pass some common-sense gun laws that would help protect all of us from those humans whose hearts inspire violence.
Bernard J. Wulff, Annapolis
Kate Woodsome’s beautiful Oct. 28 op-ed, “How Maine’s deep wounds can heal,” drew an endearing portrait of a devastated community reeling in the wake of horror. She was correct that the right response is for the wider community to now embrace the survivors and other victims’ families and help them to move forward under almost impossible circumstances.
But there is another “right response” to the horror on display to everyone these past few days in Maine, and that is to redouble efforts to convince everyone who supports the unfettered access to firearms of the cost that we all pay for their preference.
Included in all the coverage about this particular shooting is a repetition of two facts: first, that Maine has relatively weak gun laws, and, second, that Mainers have long thought their state was special and somehow immune to gun violence faced in other parts of the country.
All residents of Maine, including the governor, members of Congress and state legislators, need to see the picture of the 18 dead victims in Lewiston as the symbol and the cost of this flawed belief. Maine is no more immune to gun violence than any other part of the country, and the cost of the failure to act is clear in the pictures of those 18 victims.
Everyone in Maine who harbored the false and dangerous belief that tragedy will not come from loose gun laws must be moved by those pictures to support expanding background checks and banning assault weapons, two simple solutions with widespread support across the country. Passage of these two measures would reduce the likelihood that there will be 18 more pictures in the near future.
Marc Springer, Brookline, Mass.
