Common sense is no longer common. It still exists and many readers have it and use it. However, there are some highly educated people in our city who would want us to believe it other than the whole truth.
Mental health, or the neglect of treating it, is a nationwide problem. We just don’t put the money behind it, even statewide or countywide. It is indeed one of those things that will not just go away because we ignore it.
That said, Brenda Washington and C. Mark Warren are both intellectually smart enough to know that mental health issues alone did not cause a 66 prior event criminal to kill a good man. Meanness and a lack of God and accountability had a bigger part to play in it, but it did provide a good platform for both to preach from. Neither will ever understand that there is no such thing as gun crime, rather crimes that are committed with the use of a gun, or knife, or can of gasoline, or hammer, or brick, etc. Ms. Washington doesn’t believe this criminal should have been allowed to have a gun. Well, he wasn’t, but it didn’t stop him from getting one.
There are no laws that will mostly, not completely, stop bad people from having guns. Using an example of a soccer mom shooting another soccer mom is outright ludicrous. How about giving me just three examples of where this has happened in the past three years and I’ll give you over 109,000 examples where our nation had deaths due to Fentanyl, or 1,280 deaths in Tennessee by Fentanyl in 2022. Fentanyl is illegal for private use and possession, right? How is that working?
All I ask is that you guys use some common sense when writing letters to the editor, not having to point out 12 times in a five paragraph letter, mental health Mr. Warren, and then refer to all of our state representatives as spineless. Why have you not run for that office? Maybe because what you call spineless is the state representatives actually representing the majority of the people they are elected to represent. It’s really not that difficult of a concept to grasp.
J. Pat Williams