Editor,

As I listen to yet another description of an American school shooting, I am awestruck that the country I love and live in is unable to appreciate the fact that our “gun culture” is making us the industrialized nation most victimized by gun violence in the world.

Equally puzzling is our inability to realize that an amendment to our constitution written in far different times is of little or no relevance to today’s society and needs extensive revision to make it applicable.

There are two main arguments used by gun advocates to justify the presence of so many deadly weapons in the hands of questionably qualified citizens:

1. Everyone should have the right to protect their families and property with a firearm.

This is a no-win situation since in order for a gun to be effective deterrence it must be loaded and available — an indefensible risk to children and any other residents of the house.

To increase safety the gun must be locked in a secret location separated from any ammunition making it useless as protection.

2. If everyone carried concealed weapons, innocents would be protected and the bad guys wouldn’t know who was safe to attack.

This patently ridculous attitude means that whenever any yahoo on his or her way home feels threatened or disrespected we could have the “gunfight at the OK Corral” with inexcusable collateral injuries.

It seems clearly intuitive that fewer guns and bullets and more restrictive access to these deadly materials would decrease this inexcusable danger to innocent Americans.

Hopefully the atrocity in Connecticut will finally awaken my fellow citizens and their leadership to do something definitive to correct this situation.

Ronald M. Cope

Oak Harbor