To the Editor:
Nicholas Kristof’s apologia for gun ownership doesn’t address one reason people like me want more gun control, not just more gun safety. Allowing people to walk around with guns infringes on my freedom: the freedom not to live in fear of gun-toting hotheads who turn a simple unpleasant encounter with another person into a deadly one, like a man shooting someone in a movie theater in Florida in 2014 because the young man threw what turned out to be popcorn at him.
Or another man shooting some children in a parking lot because their music was too loud. Or a neighborhood-watch volunteer fatally shooting a black teenager walking in his neighborhood at night, as in the Trayvon Martin case.
And it infringes on my freedom not to have gun-toting vigilantes take over my federal lands. Sound familiar? Here’s the true inconvenient fact: the gun craze erodes our freedom to live without fear in a way crime statistics will never capture.
SHELLY B. KULWIN
Chicago
Note from KBJ: If Shelly Kulwin is afraid of being killed with a gun, then she should want more, not fewer, law-abiding citizens with guns around her. Does she want only the criminals to have guns? Talk about irrational!
