To the teeth.

Editor,

Right-wingers have no problem limiting speech that in their opinion endangers the impressionable mind of a hypothetical child who might inadvertently be exposed to it.

But suggest limiting the ubiquity of highly lethal weapons to prevent an otherwise unnoticed and previously undiagnosed crazy person from getting his hands on some and mowing a bunch of people down and they go crazy.

People who are known to have mental issues are already covered by gun laws that perhaps need to be strengthened or enforced more effectively.

But fingering "mentally ill people" as our problem when it is obviously that 300,000,000 guns are floating around in the USA, many in the hands of crazy people who seem quite normal to their equally crazy, heavily armed friends, is scapegoating pure and simple.

There are a lot of people out there who are creepily fascinated by weaponry, entertain themselves by dressing like commandos and watching things explode, and conceptualize violence in an oddly, nonnegotiable, matter-of-fact way.

Psychotic individuals who sit on the sidewalk all day and sleep in the bushes at night are being hurt a thousand times more by us than we will ever be hurt by them.

But gun nuts full of fantasies of "tyranny" and "peril" are a clear and present danger to us all, and they are armed to the teeth.

Re: "Focus on Mental Health Laws to Curb Violence Is Unfair, Some Say" (2/1/2013)