To the Editor:
As a college professor, I woke up in a cold sweat at 2 a.m., hours after our most recent mass school shooting at Umpqua Community College,imagining a young man with a big gun and a bad attitude standing at the door to my classroom. I asked myself what I would do: Flash a prearranged signal to Eric, an Army veteran who always sits in the front row, to try to take out the shooter, and hope that the class survives our attempt at heroics? Freeze in fear as the scene plays out in a hail of bullets? Get down on my knees and pray for mercy?
Tell me again that we live in a civilized country, even as such scenes have become numbingly familiar. Tell me that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. The truth is that people with guns kill people. Tell me I may someday be released from this fear.
BRUCE E. JOHANSEN
Omaha
Note from KBJ: What do you propose, Professor Johansen? If you ban guns, only the criminals will have guns, which puts us at greater risk than we are now. This isn't a slogan; it's a fact. Even if you could destroy every gun in this country (good luck with that), what's to prevent someone with evil intent from taking a bomb into your classroom, or simply locking the door and hacking everyone with a machete? By the way, if you don't like living in the United States, you are free to go to a "civilized" place.
