<p><strong>To the Editor:</strong></p><p>The Daily Journal recently ran another opinion piece encouraging the banning of weapons. This is an idea that has already been used with drugs.</p><p>We see that certain drugs have been declared illegal and that has completely removed them from the streets. Thanks to the law, drugs are no longer a threat to our children and they never reach into our schools. In addition, since drugs are illegal, few people are willing to buy them, so the street price of drugs has dropped so low it isn’t profitable to make them in Latin-American countries and smuggle them into the United States. Drug addiction and its associated crime has virtually disappeared. As an added benefit of this solution, the decline in illegal street activity has resulted in far fewer arrests and convictions for drug trafficking, reducing our need for so much prison capacity.</p><p>When we see how effective anti-drug laws are, it’s easy to believe that banning guns will also solve all of our shooting problems.</p><p>Unfortunately, guns are not the only way to harm people. Think explosives, poisons, other weapons. We keep concentrating on the tools used by shooters and not on the reasons people behave the way do.</p><p>The opinion writer mentioned an associated problem, mental illness. In the great majority of cases, shooters have displayed disturbing, anti-social behavior for years before their shooting event. A person who shoots children in a grade school is not normal.</p><p>I think a far more effective approach to the problem is to study why people behave this way and provide resources to curb that behavior. Newspaper accounts often mention social stresses in a shooter’s life, but then move on to other topics.</p><p>We concentrate a lot of effort to shelter people from views and speech that differs from their own. We want to protect people from “micro-aggressions.” One result of this is too many people grow up without the ability to cope with any emotional adversity and at some point they cross the line and think that the way they are being treated makes it OK for them to kill children and other adults. That way of thinking is not OK, regardless of what weapon they chose to use.</p><p><p><strong>Dennis Sherfy</strong></p><p><p><strong>Greenwood</strong></p>
