Your letters for Dec. 20, 2024

By NewsPress Now

Your letters for Dec. 20, 2024

Shooting school students

in Madison, Wisconsin

I’ve seen no evidence that Western European countries have fewer mentally disturbed people than we do in the United States. Yet these countries have virtually no mass shootings or attacks on schools.

The difference in them and us was demonstrated again in Madison, Wisconsin when a 15-year-old student, who obviously had serious mental problems, illegally took a gun to school. When she arrived, she proceeded to kill a fellow student, and a teacher and wound six other students, two of them seriously. Then she killed herself.

Had she lived England or anywhere in Western Europe, she would have found it virtually impossible to get a gun. Despite her mental anguish no one would have died. It is a powerful argument for effective gun laws.

The police say they are trying to establish a motive for the crime. But what difference does this make? The Wisconsin shooting was similar to most of the other killings we citizens suffer through. A teenager or an adult, angry or mentally challenged, or both, takes a gun and uses it to do irredeemable and unspeakable harm.

If prayers and deep sympathy could end these nightmares they would have ended long ago. Our legislators, state and national, find it easier to do the will of the gun lobby than to do the right thing. Maybe the craziest, most mentally challenged people who need our help and counseling, are the ones who haunt the halls of Congress and hide behind a false interpretation of the second amendment.

Keith Evans

St. Joseph



Democratic leadership

The progressives and the woke are destroying the Democratic Party! They legally got Joe Biden elected in 2020, but they destroyed Kamala Harris’s chances in 2024.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

That is the Democratic Party that I grew up with. What happened to them?

John Byrne

St. Joseph