High School Rifle Team
Re “District’s Plan for School Rifle Team Draws Fire,” May 15:
I am amazed and appalled that the Bellflower school board would pursue this rifle squad. In this day and age of children killing children, why would anyone in his or her right mind give someone the tools to accomplish this? True, not everyone would look at it this way, but it only takes one disturbed child to do the damage.
I have been a volunteer in the performing arts department of Bellflower High School for six years and I am president of the performing arts boosters. We have theater seats that are so broken that it is an embarrassment whenever we have a performance. The whole school uses the theater. The teacher has tried for years to get this fixed. We even have to be careful what kind of prop weapons we use, because they are so strict about what you can use as a weapon during a play. But they want to give real guns to the children. Absolutely amazing. The scariest part is that we elected these people to decide the best way to educate our children.
LUCY BORUM
Bellflower
*
Hooray for the Bellflower school district and Rick Royse’s plans for a high school rifle shooting team and gun safety program. It is refreshing to see individuals with guts and vision stand up to the lunatic left. The twisted logic of those who wish to see this proposed program fail is that if we keep single-shot .22 rifles out of the hands of properly trained, responsible youth it will somehow prevent criminals from shooting innocent people. Hogwash.
ED LEE
Downey
*
Re “Giving Voice to the Silenced,” May 17: While the grief of the families who have lost loved ones to gun violence is understandable, their logic is not. Taking the shoes of a victim to the headquarters of a gun manufacturer (like Bryco Arms of Costa Mesa) is like taking the shoes of a drunk driver’s victim to the steps of General Motors or Ford: The car’s not to blame, it’s just an apparatus, a mechanism; the culprit is the driver, the operator of the apparatus. Likewise, the relationship between guns and their operators.
If The Times ran a story about families of drunk-driving victims putting shoes in front of a car company’s headquarters almost all your readers would say, “Gee, that’s goofy. Why blame the car?”
JAMES RUSH
Ojai