Is our country safer loaded with guns?

I find it telling that Mr. Malinski’s May 24 letter (“Stricter gun laws do not reduce crime”) left off a part of the Second Amendment.

The full text of the amendment reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.“ Perhaps in 1791, “well-regulated militias” were essential to our national security and defense, but in 2017, with the largest and best armed forces in the world, such a claim is patently absurd. The whole Second Amendment movement, in other words, is based on a logical fallacy.

Mr. Malinski’s claim about gun deaths being higher in cities with Democrat mayors, even if true, isn’t particularly meaningful because it ignores several extraneous factors – most notably that, not surprisingly, murder rates are higher in cities – and in neighborhoods within cities — with higher poverty and lower education.

Every developed nation outside the United States is, by comparison, a “gun-free zone.” In fact, The American Journal of Medicine reported in 2016 that Americans were 10 times more likely to be killed by guns than people in other developed nations, and the gun murder rate was 25 times higher. And in this very area, who can forget in 2014 when a Marysville-Pilchuck High School student took his father’s legally purchased gun to school and shot five of his classmates, killing four of them?

The NRA’s solution for gun violence is to turn this entire country into the equivalent of 19-century Dodge City. Everyone who thinks that our schools and workplaces will be made safer by having a loaded gun in every teacher’s desk and every office in the country, raise your hand.

– Robert Rosen