Test gun owners like teen car drivers

Test gun owners like teen car drivers

Both cars and guns in the wrong hands can become deadly weapons ["Town grieves, demands accountability," News, May 29]. We require 16-year-olds to prepare for and pass a permit test before they can even get behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. It requires months of driver education, then passing a road test that entitles them to a driver’s license. Only then can they legally drive. We should institute the same protocol for gun ownership, regardless of age, but make the minimum age 20 to get a permit and 21 for the license.

Additional training and licenses are required for driving trucks and other larger specialized vehicles. Apply the same logic for weapons beyond basic handguns and hunting rifles. This would make a difference. Deadly weapons are deadly weapons and deserve equal treatment.

Rich LePetri, Rockville Centre

The massacres of recent weeks and the past 30 years highlight the growing problem we have in our country among angry young males. What we have is a mental health issue coinciding with the dissolving nuclear family.

Most of the young males who have committed these heinous murders seem to have come from splintered families. They have been exposed to a culture that promotes masculinity through violent video games, violent Hollywood films, violent music lyrics and violent professional athletes. With no positive male figures in their lives, the role models for these young men have come from outside and sometimes fictional characters.

Guns are the ultimate tools used, the culmination of a dysfunctional mental state and fractured family life.

Why weren't there school massacres until the 1990s? Guns were widely available. It is naive to think that only stricter gun laws will stop this madness. Our children's lives depend on helping troubled youth.

Claude Kasman, Nesconset

The original intent of the Second Amendment was to ensure the right of "well regulated" militias to guard against federal overreach. National Rifle Association supporters zealously repeat the amendment's guaranteeing the right to bear arms. I think universal background checks, assault weapons bans, and creating a federal database to track all gun sales comfortably fall under the heading of “well regulated.” And the cherished amendment remains intact.

Paul Gott, East Setauket

What Emmett Till’s mother did in 1955 could help again today. She wanted the world to see his open casket, showing how her 14-year-old son was disfigured and murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi. Some things changed — for good.

The House, Senate and NRA need to see what guns can do. Flood them with forensic photos of every schoolchild killed since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. Make them see those 169 children murdered in American schools. After all, abortion opponents show pictures of dead fetuses.

Candace Burns, Brentwood

If all the police officers who responded to the Uvalde, Texas shooting were afraid to enter the classroom because the shooter had an automatic weapon, why didn't they knock the door down and use tear gas? And it is incredible that the back door was left open after the horrible slaughter in Buffalo. And did the door have an alarm if left open?

Jeffrey Myles Klein, Centereach

Stop the carnage! More children die from gun violence than anything else. More than two dozen shootings have occurred at schools this year — more than one a week. They traumatize families, and children have to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Federal and state assault weapons bans helped reduce fatalities and injuries from mass shootings. Making those rifles illegal would at least slow down killing. We have laws against murder, but murder happens. And laws against speeding, but people speed. Laws against drunken driving, but people drive drunk. Does anyone believe laws don’t deter those offenses?

Pass common-sense gun laws. Make AR-15s illegal and pass federal background checks and red flag laws. Make it harder to buy a gun than own a car. Don’t let teens buy guns. Don’t vote for legislators who take NRA money.

Clare Worthing, Wantagh

Some politicians are calling for raising the age to buy certain weapons to 21. They feel young people are too immature to purchase and own these weapons. Yet young men can be drafted to go to war at 18. Some of those same politicians, though, are proposing to lower the voting age from 18 to 16, indicating that these same young people can make mature decisions to elect our politicians. Go figure.

John Malesko, Shirley

The writer is an NRA member and Navy veteran.