Letters: To understand “open carry,” visit Boot Hill

Updated: I just read the letters in response to your editorial about gun control, and you have to admit the merchants of death in the gun lobby are skilled in the art of propaganda.

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I just read the letters in response to your editorial about gun control, and you have to admit the merchants of death in the gun lobby are skilled in the art of propaganda.

I am happy to say I haven’t seen more than half a dozen people openly carrying a gun in a public place here in Alabama during the past two years.

Our Republican sheriff gave a talk to our men’s club at church a few months ago and pointed out how foolish it is to openly carry a gun if one is concerned for his/her own safety. The killing of the deputy in Houston should have proven that. He was a skilled officer of the law, and yet the mentally deranged dude managed to get the drop on him.

If one wants to get a clear picture of the results of “open carry,” walk through the Boot Hill cemetery in Tombstone, Ariz., and note how many were killed during the 1880s.

So far as the “good guy with a gun,” we should keep in mind it only takes a couple of seconds for a good guy with a gun to become a bad guy with a gun.

And then there was the “execute them” deterrence argument. That would have really worked well for Timothy McVeigh, Jim Jones, David Koresh and countless other thugs who wanted to die rather than spend life in prison.

Carl Hess

Ozark, Ala.

Jesus and weapons


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Wow! Did you touch a “raw nerve” in your editorial suggesting ways to limit gun violence.

All you have to do is read the letter responses to know where too many “Baptist Christians” stand on guns, violence, Christian response to evil, etc.

I guess Jesus was naïve when he told his earliest disciples, “Put your sword (weapon) back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

But that was then—this is now!

Maybe the early Anabaptists got it—but they were peace fanatics! Right.

Joe E. Trull

Denton

If large churches would just tithe …

I appreciated the 2nd Opinion column about the “growing divide” among churches in denominations. It’s so true that smaller churches and associations depend upon denominational structures more than the larger ones.

What Ronnie Floyd missed is that if the larger churches did, in fact, contribute the 10 percent of their budgets, as many smaller churches do, then the International Mission Board wouldn’t be trying to buy out and lay off missionaries.

I’ve never pastored a “large” church; the largest was First Baptist Church in Los Alamos, N.M., and that was under 200. But I did focus on every church giving at least a tithe to the Cooperative Program and the local association, and sometimes to other mission efforts as well.

Bob Gillchrest

Honolulu


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