Dear Editor:

Somebody has to reply to Seth Bartee’s letter in the Oct. 10 issue of the East Tennessean. Bartee admits that he’s going out on a limb by saying that if the parents of the child victim were armed they “may” have protected their child. Bartee knows and admits that he’s stretching it.
Bartee is right when he says the killer is a terrorist. Even if we don’t know the goon’s politics or origin and can only guess a gender, the ‘beltway killer’ qualifies as a terrorist. No one has ever seen the ‘beltway killer’ well enough to get a decent description. It’s kind of hard to shoot someone you can’t see – as a guy named Osama bin Laden knows.
Shifting the target to Iraq is just plain shifty. I don’t buy the explanation that revealing the good evidence would compromise security. If we have real reason to be up in arms about Iraq, nothing of the sort could compromise a genuine war effort more than giving about a years warning.
If guns prevent crime, then why do the places with the most guns, weapons shops and shooting ranges always invest so heavily in security bars? Does anyone remember that the NRA itself practices gun control? According to their PR, you’d think that they’d insist everyone was armed to the teeth, for safety’s sake. Last summer someone got shot at a gun show anyway.
Does anyone remember that the U.S. congress has passed a strict and sweeping gun control law? The law is not for any of the states. It’s for Washington D.C.
It is very unusual for parents to follow their teenager to school. If Bartee has any reason to think that the victim’s parents were anywhere near close enough to the crime to witness it, let alone stop it, let’s hear that reason.
Bartee doesn’t give us a reason to believe he knows whether those parents own guns. For all we can tell from Bartee’s piece, the victim’s parents could own one of those gun shops where they have to brick up the windows, bar the door and armor the roof to keep people from breaking in. Rick Foster

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