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In his June 9 letter in the Bangor Daily News, “Gun control not issue,” Leo H. Mazerall Jr. seems to decry the whole idea of gun control. He says that the Uvalde killer could have used a knife instead of a gun, that “It is not the weapon. It is the wielder of the weapon.”
This brought back memories for me. In the summer of 1964, there was a general discussion of revisions of the state criminal code in Illinois. As part of that discussion, a man introduced as a field secretary of the National Rifle Association appeared on television, and I heard him say that a rifle is no worse than a hammer, it just depends on what use you make of them. He said this less than one year after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald firing a rifle from a distance.
Sadly, there will always be some people who kill others. What must be done to reduce killing is to make it more difficult. Rapid-fire guns with large magazines make killing easy and should not be available to the public.
Karl K. Norton
Bangor