Echo - newspaper opinion letters to the editor: Stop Gun Violence

Echos - Journal Star in Peoria, Illinois and Kansas City Star in Missouri ~ "...they just want to get through their teen years without having to worry about being gunned down in the classroom or the school cafeteria." Melinda Henneberger

Peoria Illinois

Stop the Gun Violence! Journal Star - Illinois "Echo" ~ Peoria, Il

Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2108, for so many students in Parkland, Florida, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High Shool, involved running as fast as they could out of school so they weren’t killed by a nutcase shooter!

Those who escaped were the lucky ones. Many of their friends were being wheeled into ambulances as parents rushed to see if their child had been killed.

Every time there is a shooting of innocent children, we hear the cry that something needs to be done. And nothing is ever done!

Please don’t continue to say: Our prayers are with the families. Do something to stop this insanity! Bring back mental health facilities, tighten the control of gun sales, speak up if you know someone who is demonstrating uncontrolled rage.

Since we will never have the ability to take away guns, like a few countries have done, it is up to each one of us to contact our politicians to say we have had enough. It’s time for our children to be safe!

Mary O’Russa, Peoria IL 

Letter to the editor from Melinda Henneberger 

Child Soldiers are fighting the war on gunsDear Donald Trump, So...You want crowd size?

Don’t look now, Donald Trump, but marchers more numerous than all the pink hats ever knit and more impressive than all those sharp-looking tanks rolling down the Champs on Bastille Day are headed your way.

When America’s children march on Washington and in cities around the country next month, you who have refused to protect them from gun violence might want to take cover under a nice sturdy Resolute desk.

Or maybe instead of watching TV, as Nixon claimed to have done as somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 people marched outside his window against the war in Vietnam in November of 1969, you’ll slip off to a golf course where you can’t hear them at all.

No matter. Because even as you try to make the massacre of 17 Florida teenagers all about you.... (indeed)..you  (Trump) must know that these particular young demonstrators will be impossible to write off as partisans.

Our nations' kids are not political adversaries looking for any excuse to erase the Second Amendment. 

They are speaking truth to power.