I certainly agree it's well past time for a serious national discussion about firearms in American life from a legal and enforcement perspective ("Why 20 children had to die," Dec. 16). But it also is necessary to discuss our attitudes toward killing and violence from a cultural perspective.
What is it that increasingly attracts troubled young men to the idea of going out in a blaze of murder-suicide "glory?" How has that even become thinkable?
We've had many generations of men who came back from wars in which they engaged in actual close-up killing (such as the Civil War and the two World Wars), and no doubt suffered shell-shock as a result, yet they did not act out in such evil and selfish ways. We need to examine both the glorification of killing and trivialization of death in our culture.
We have, for example, our casual acceptance of the remote killing of innocents in Afghanistan and elsewhere by pilots seated at computers in Syracuse. More obvious to all is the increasing centrality of killing and violence in our info-entertainment media.
The discussion about gun protection and safety should be part of a larger discussion about our cultural climate regarding killing and violence.
AL CANNISTRARO
Clifton Park