Letters: Making sense of gun control

Re “Gunning for good sense,” Opinion, Jan. 22

In ancient Greece, philosophers who misused logic and rhetoric to propose indefensible arguments were called sophists. Today, sophistry is the weapon anti-gun-control pundits use because they have no real arguments.

Jonah Goldberg writes that 40 years ago a government drug regulator denied approval to all drugs, thus keeping helpful medications off the market along with harmful ones. Therefore, Goldberg goes on, we shouldn’t act to reduce gun violence because such action would cause harm to the vast majority of people who are nonviolent.

Goldberg’s strawman drug regulator had no common sense, but here, neither does Goldberg. He holds his anti-regulatory principles dearer than the lives of the thousands of American victims of guns every year.

Let’s act now to reduce the carnage.

Bart Mills

Manhattan Beach

I largely agree with Goldberg that the many shouldn’t be held hostage by the acts of the few. But isn’t that the situation the GOP has found itself in since legislating slavishly toward the “tea party” and other small but vocal far-right groups?

Perhaps Goldberg should be preaching to his choir, not ours.

Eric Oxenberg

Los Angeles

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