October 4, 2019

Letters to the Editor

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No letters were printed this week; here is the letter from three weeks ago:

Lumping National Rifle Association with abortion supporters is wrong, reader says

In a recent issue of The Criterion, a letter was published illustrating parallels between mass shootings and abortion.

I did actually agree with most of the letter, until the last paragraph, when the writer declared that the National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Rifle Association (NRA) had to be stopped in defending “their weapons of choice in assaults against our fellow human beings.” Such a statement is a snide misrepresentation of the facts.

The NRA is not an independently wealthy power broker that perverts Washington politics against the will of the people that current popular news cycles have also misrepresented it to be.

The NRA gets its money from ordinary citizens from all walks of life all over the country, and uses their money with the known and stated purpose of, among other things, protecting their Second Amendment rights in the various levels of government. It is very similar to how Priests for Life takes money from ordinary citizens to lobby for the end to abortion.

There is a vast difference between an organization that protects a long held constitutional right for a large number of law-abiding citizens, and another that fully supports the outright murder of the unborn.

To lump the NRA and its members in with abortionists, just like after every mass shooting to make them out to be as guilty as the shooter, is both unjust and malicious.

It will hardly create the environment of trust in each other’s concerns and best interests that is necessary to have the conversations needed to solve the problem of mass shootings.

- Ben Ramsey | Dillsboro

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