New York recently decided to restrict my Second Amendment rights to possess certain types of guns. Lawmakers then realized they needed a loophole to allow their Hollywood friends to be able to possess and glorify those same guns while filming here.
Today, we allow our children for hours, days and years to watch violent films and play video games where the more people you kill or wound, the more points you score. We train our children to kill. We teach them that everyone gets a trophy for showing up, and, every time they fail, it's someone else's fault for that failure.
Hitler, Stalin and Mao understood this very well. If you take a young, impressionable mind and indoctrinate it with a message long enough and hard enough, some will believe the message, no matter how violent.
Like the "Manchurian Candidate," is it any surprise that some of these children when, later in life, are confronted with failure or a situation they can't understand or handle, respond in the way they have been trained — by shooting anything in their way?
If these mass shootings have taught us anything, it is that the troubled people who do them have problems dealing with what life hands them, and they respond the only way they have been trained.
ERNEST BURGER
East Durham