Editor:

At the risk of making this a debate between Mr. Calderone and myself, I feel the need to respond to his latest letter.
He seems to have an idyllic view of home life in the 1940s and ’50s. Parents were at home and children were controlled. If that were true, how did the children of those times turn into the rebellious youth of the 60’s?

The truth is, every generation has their issues. I am a child of the 50’s and 60’s and I came from a two parent home that was unstable, to say the least, especially during my teen years. I was blessed to have teachers, pastors, and friends with welcoming families in my life. It does truly take a village to raise a child.

Yes, schools need to provide discipline and stability, but they can not be the only source of that in a child’s life. We, the community, need to provide opportunities for this kind of influence, especially for those children who are most at risk. That takes effort and, yes, funding. Something that we are usually reluctant to give.
There are no easy answers, no single solution. It is something that must be an ongoing effort. As to the other point, I have no real knowledge of guns, but I had to laugh at his correlation of pressure cookers and fertilizer to assault weapons. We all understand that if someone truly wants to make a weapon, they can find a way. That is quite different than providing weapons that were created for the sole purpose of creating mass human casualties.

I take his word on the types of semi-automatic weapons. It underlines the need for banning large capacity magazines that could make other semi-automatic weapons lethal as “assault weapons.”
As I stated previously, I have no desire to eliminate all guns, just the ones designed for mass shootings. There was another school shooting last week. Two people were wounded, one of whom later died.
The shooter was killed when a School Resource Officer responded. This situation was a tragedy, as it has been in all the other shootings. The shooter had a handgun.

How much worse would it have been if he had carried an “assault” weapon, or a gun with a 20-30 round magazine?
How much harder would it have been for the officer responding to contain the situation, much less survive himself? Gun violence in America is a complicated issue and will not be solved by any single action.

Mr. Calderone ended his letter by saying “Society must take preventative measures before it’s too late.”
He was right. Weapons which were created for, and serve no other purpose than, inflicting mass casualties have no business on the open market.