End the gun shows in Glendale

I have the deepest sorrow for the loss of 20 children and six adults who were gunned down Friday in Newtown, Conn.

The Glendale Civic Auditorium is a frequent venue for marketing and sale of firearms that many of us believe contributes to the cycle of deadly violence in our nation. After seeing the images of a small school where 20 young children lay dead, how can we ever sit idle and allow “business as usual” and profit from these gun shows?

It is clear that easy access to handguns and semiautomatic rifles is one of the main contributing factors in the number and severity of these unthinkable acts. We must stop pretending that guns don’t kill. I doubt that any of those parents who dropped off their kids at Sandy Hook Elementary School for the last time care whether the guns and the ammunition used in the massacre were bought legally from a gun shop or a gun show, permitted or not.

It is up to us to stand up for our own protection, our schools’ and community’s protection. If the Constitution of the United States provides us the right to bear arms, it also provides us the right to peacefully and intelligently protect our families and our communities. It provides the right to our elected officials to protect their constituency from potential harm these legal or illegal guns pose by reducing marketing and sales venues where potential for bloodshed is stacked and arranged neatly on shelves and shiny displays.

Ending the gun shows in Glendale is not an ultimate heroic act; rather, it is the least our city’s leaders can do to protect the people and honor those young lives that were taken from us on Friday.

I hope that through constructive dialogue we can end our city’s contributions to the gun proliferation.

Razmik Zargarian
Glendale