Letter: No more Cal Thomas, please
Why do you keep publishing articles by Cal Thomas? He is wrong so many times on both facts and logic. In his latest piece “A failure at several levels” he calls the 18-year-old killer “evil” when a better word would be deranged or disturbed. I look up evil and I find the definition “profoundly immoral and wicked” which implies sanity, not insanity. Surely, the gunman was not sane, or does Cal Thomas think he was?
In his second paragraph, Thomas seems to suggest that new laws should not be considered if we don’t know why existing laws were being ignored? He likely only included such muddled thinking so as to find a way to bash President Biden and Democrats? I have to ask: What is Thomas’ goal in writing this column?
Then Thomas turns to blaming law enforcement, blaming a girl in Los Angeles, blaming the Uvalde School District website and moaning that everything is not as good today as it was in the good old days of yore.
He is willing to blame anything, discuss anything or suggest anything so long as it doesn’t involve considering the elephant in the room, the method used by the killer to murder so many?
Cal Thomas rightly asks “OK, then tell us how to stop it?” Clearly this school and school district were as prepared as any in America to deal with a school shooting, and yet both failed. The laws and procedures that are in place clearly did not deter or prevent this shooting, or any others in the years since Columbine, and so they are clearly not working.
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We can solve this by preventing disturbed individuals in America getting their hands on guns. I think even Cal would agree that disturbed, deranged, drunken, drugged or exceedingly violent individuals should not have access to firearms and that, if we could magically ensure that they don’t, then we would all be much safer. This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment and everything to do with common sense.
As Thomas implies, we need change. That can happen fast, if we act as Australia did in 2018. The Aussie gun buy-back scheme dramatically helped reduce gun violence there. If done here we could get a win, win, win situation. If a U.S. buy-back scheme took in all the assault weapons and sent them, and the ammunition that comes with them, across to Ukraine to help arm the people’s army there, then we might get a more rapid end to this Russian war. Such a buyback would also put money into the hands of people in America who need it to survive these difficult economic times. It would also rapidly reduce gun violence and save a fortune in law enforcement, health care and education budgets. That would help reduce taxes and the deficits we face. All political parties should love that.
The best benefit of all is that we would start to live through love, opportunity and openness and not through Cal Thomas’ closeted world of fear, blinkers and suspicion.
Nicholas Fickling
Edwards
