Letters to the Editor: Do Americans see how backward they look to the world on guns?

To the editor: I appreciated LZ Granderson’ op-ed column on this country’s gun worship.

I grew up in England, where gun violence was unheard of. I never once worried that someone might have a gun or that my life might be affected by gun violence.

Here in the United States, it’s impossible to find someone whose life hasn’t been impacted by gun violence. If Americans could see just how violent our society is, and how guns contribute to that violence, we might start to consider that our “rights” are meaningless if the cost is human life.

Gun violence is going to continue to get worse until people wake up from their stupor and realize that having more than 300 million firearms in circulation doesn’t make us safer. Rather, it makes us an outlier, the most violent and deadly society among the world’s modern and affluent countries.

David Tempest, Mar Vista

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To the editor: We shouldn’t let gun worship define American patriotism and, for the most part we don’t.

But we have just had a president who was the very definition of toxic masculinity, and gun worship is a part of toxic masculinity. So we’re stuck with these gun nuts who consider themselves patriots, even though most of us think they do not deserve to be called thus.

The scariest part of Granderson’s column is that his examples of what seem like thwarted mass shootings show our police and judges don’t take the dangers posed by people holed up in hotel rooms with small arsenals seriously.

Joan DaVanzo, Long Beach

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To the editor: With the sad increase in homicides, I was reminded of my dad’s words when my sister and I would argue. His plaintive plea: “Can’t we all just get along?”

Such a simplistic answer to a complicated problem, right?

Now, I want to shout in the same exasperated tone my father had, “People, we gotta be nicer to each other!”

Nora Barsuk, Glendale