Letters on gun control, Medicaid expansion, Socrates’ advice

Time for action on gun violence

Another mass shooting, this time at an Oregon community college. Our hearts ache for those killed and wounded.

A shocking aspect of this tragic news is that it was the 45th mass shooting at a school this year. When will we address this problem seriously and passionately?

In an emotional address after the shooting, President Obama declared, “Thoughts and prayers are not enough.” He’s right. It’s time for action.

Recently, a group of your fellow citizens formed an action group called Wichita Coalition Against Gun Violence. They have launched a statewide campaign to insist that the Legislature pass sensible legislation that will protect our families and friends from gun violence. The legislation will require each person who purchases a gun in Kansas to do two things: get a permit from the state and have adequate training to use a gun.

We require these same things for people to drive an automobile and engage in other activities that are dangerous. It’s only sensible to require them for gun owners.

You can be a powerful partici- pant by encouraging your professional, social and religious organizations to contact their legislators in massive numbers. We can get this done.

Deeper than guns

I am perplexed by public reactions of the president, media, activists and others to the senseless murders at Umpqua Community College. Those who use this tragedy as a forum for an agenda of gun control are either disingenuous or are not looking deep enough.

Guns are only the manifestation of a much larger issue, deeper than mental illness or psychopaths – one perhaps described best by social psychologist Emile Durkheim as “anomie,” or a detachment from society. There is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and alienation in America that is growing and is expressed benignly with the tea party or support of political outsiders like Donald Trump, and in calls for secession, religious radicalization and even heinous school massacres. The mechanism in Umpqua may be guns, but is just as often machetes, cars, firebombs and stones.

I certainly have no solution, but know we must look far deeper than the issue of guns or mental illness. We must look at what we do as a society that disaffects individuals and certain groups.

Gun-control activists seek greater governmental oversight in our lives, but avoid the greater dilemma. They want easy solutions that treat only the symptoms. New laws will fix nothing. Unless we look deeper, nothing will improve.

Right to defend

How many more of these senseless shootings do we have to endure before we get rid of the stupid “gun-free” zones?

We can’t keep bad people from getting guns, so the only thing to do is to give people the right to defend themselves at all times wherever they are. It is self-evident that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Had those innocent people in Oregon been able to defend themselves, some or all of them would be alive.

The chosen few?

Jeff Glendening, state director of Americans for Prosperity-Kansas, seems to forget that he has the majority of Kansas senators and representatives in his pocket, yet he now comes up with solutions to help those in poverty (“Wrong solution,” Oct. 1 Letters to the Editor). His elected friends in Topeka did nothing last session to improve health care for anyone.

I agree that it would be nice if government were totally out of the health care business, but one has to be practical and realize that we have people in poverty. One of the tasks of government is to provide ways for them to prosper.

Someone much wiser than me has said we will always have a few who are left in poverty. That said, it is in our basic ethic to care for them. Some boots were made without straps, and it is time everyone in our society recognized that.

Prosperity is not just for the chosen few who are members of AFP-Kansas.

Best advice

In light of the endless confusion in America from the Federal Reserve’s ambivalence on interest rates to the president’s lack of a consistent position on the Syrian civil war, I sat down and slowly reread Socrates’ dialogue with the noted statesman Gorgias concerning the important issues of the day. Socrates’ closing invitation to Gorgias reminded me why a liberal arts education is still important for each one of us – especially those who would rule over others:

“Follow me then, and I will lead you where you will be happy in life and after death, as the argument shows. And never mind if some one despises you as a fool, and insults you, if he has a mind; let him strike you, by Zeus, and do you be of good cheer, and do not mind the insulting blow, for you will never come to any harm in the practice of virtue, if you are a really good and true man. When we have practiced virtue together, we will apply ourselves to politics, if that seems desirable, or we will advise about whatever else may seem good to us, for we shall be better able to judge then. In our present condition we ought not to give ourselves airs, for even on the most important subjects we are always changing our minds; so utterly stupid are we!”

That’s still the best advice.

This story was originally published October 5, 2015 at 7:03 PM with the headline "Letters on gun control, Medicaid expansion, Socrates’ advice."