Readers React:  Fed up with Roseburg gun protesters

To the editor: I was utterly astounded last week when President Obama’s visit to Oregon to offer condolences and compassion to the victims and families of the Umpqua Community College shootings was met with protests. (“Today is about the families,” Oct. 10)

Where is the humanity of our fellow citizens who value hunks of metal over the lives of human beings? How can they discount a gesture of kindness to the wounded and saddened families?

This was not a them-versus-us situation but a time for sympathy and caring.

Carol Karas, Camarillo

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To the editor: I am fed up with the paranoid, angry, gun-toting knuckleheads who think they will be heroes. The people with the guns are the problem.

In your article, a protester in Roseburg, Ore., is quoted as saying, “I only wish a student had been armed. We could have stopped that murderer in his tracks.”

We? The protester, who drove from another town, fantasizes that he would have stopped the shooter.

Here’s the problem: A student was armed, and he shot an instructor and multiple classmates. The day before, some might have considered that student a good guy with a gun, but on that day, he became a bad guy with a gun.

Guns are not the answer.

Loren Lieb, Northridge

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