Send gun violence medical bills to the National Rifle Association

Guns in America- opinion echo letter published in The Post and Courier, a Charleston South Carolina newspaper.

It’s a tragedy more than 23,800 Americans committed suicide, another 14,500 were murdered or killed accidentally, and 67,000 were injured by guns in 2015, according to the National Library of Medicine.

Maybe the National Rifle Association should pay the medical bills.

It’s a tragedy that, unlike our ability to make cars or anything else safer, we have been unwilling to legislate safer guns or safer laws for possessing guns or handling them. Prayer doesn’t seem to be working.

Blaming “mental health” is a red herring. The mentally ill are the ones committing suicide with guns, not shooting others.

America is a diverse nation of immigrants. By focusing our rhetoric on ethnicity or religion or whatever, we only cave in to our enemies’ efforts to divide and conquer us.

We need to change the language we use. “White supremacists” hate Americans who happen to be Latinos or other ethnicities. In their hatred, they deliberately kill Americans.

In my mind, if you hate any part of America enough to try to kill or injure any group of Americans, you are anti-American and certainly not a patriot.

Those who are anti-American are our enemy by definition. Perhaps “anti-American terrorist” or “enemy combatant” would be a more appropriate title. 

From Tom Balliet, Serenity Point Drive, Bluffton, South Carolina