Let me see if I can offend a lot of people I know by talking about guns. We are all in tears over the loss of young life this last week and that grief, which we all feel, has again caused us to take leave of our senses. Needless, senseless death of the young does that to us.

If you look at any chart showing school shooting over the last 100 years you will see that we have always had some. But over the last 20 years the chart shoots up like a hockey stick.

In the 1960s when I was in school, many of us took rifles and shotguns to school. No one thought much about it. We kept them in cars in the high school parking lot. I did not have a car and went to school by bus. But my friends had cars and if we were going    shooting or hunting after school, I got my friends to carry my gun for me.

According to the data there were not a lot of school shootings in those days. And if there were, the numbers were low because the shootings were usually about specific fights.   Shooters then did not just shoot any random kid walking down the hall.

So what has changed? Something has happened in the heads and hearts of our children. Many of them are very, very different than the kids of my own day. Bad parents or no parents, drugs, exposure to constant movie, video and picture violence.  Selfishness tops my list. These influences are the result of left wing liberal world views, not the more traditional ways of my days. Our children are reaping the harvest of the sowing of my own generation. They do not watch Roy Rogers.

Everyone is focused on the type guns like the black AR15 and the new handguns. Many people think these are new but they are not. We have had semiautomatic rifles and handguns for at least 100 years, in wide in circulation among the people. Since I was about 12 years old I have had these type guns. True, the magazines were not 30 rounds but a magazine change is just one to two seconds. The size of the magazine is not a major impediment to rapid fire.

Besides, the best weapon for mass, close, murderous work is not used and those type guns are widely distributed throughout the population. My grandfather had one and yours probably had one too. Pump shotguns were so good at mass killing that they were prohibited in war.

Newt Gingrich is right. If we want to protect our children in school we have to fence, secure, screen and have immediate, deadly, armed response to our own new young mass killers of the innocent. 

Gary Pichon

Marble Hill