Is gun control the issue, or Islamist extremism?
Your June 17 editorial “Demand gun reform before the next tragedy” linked the Orlando massacre with the gun control issue. No mention of the link to the Islamist extremism with which the shooter was infected. Has J. joined in President Obama’s denial of the obvious — the very real epidemic of Islamist extremism and terror?
Surely what we have here is a pernicious marriage of two insanities: the easy availability of assault weapons, which is rooted in a fundamentalist American obsession with the right to bear arms; and the barbaric ideologies which spring from extremist strains of fundamentalist Islam.
Malka Weitman | Berkeley
Defensive use of firearms can deter criminal acts
The failure of your June 17 editorial to mention the obvious issue of radical Islamist terrorism involved in the Orlando murders compromises your arguments on the serious national issue of mass shootings.
When someone opens fire, calls out “Allahu Akbar” and makes a 911 call to record his allegiance to the Islamic State, we are in an area with which the Jewish community is sadly all too familiar. In this case, Omar Mateen’s other pet hatreds were for African Americans and Jews. This omission would be stunning under any circumstances, but from a newspaper representing our community it is surreal.
It is most certainly imperative to review our efforts to keep firearms out of the wrong hands. It is also true that military assault weapons should not be in or available to the civilian community. However, we should not ignore the serious evidence of substantial defensive use of firearms by law-abiding citizens. The CDC’s 2013 “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence” states, “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals.” It then summarizes research data on annual defensive gun use as between 500,000 and 3 million, with an outlier low of 108,000. According to John Lott, a noted authority on gun use, in the vast majority of these cases the weapon is never discharged but rather serves to deter the aggressor.
Both mass shootings and terrorism are significant national problems with which we must deal. Hopefully the efforts will consider all the underlying issues in order to afford the greatest lawful protection to the general public.
Steve Astrachan | Pleasant Hill
LaborFest’s ‘perversion’ of Zionism, workers’ rights
I recently received a brochure of the schedule of events from an organization called LaborFest. I am deeply offended by the organization’s sponsoring of a forum in Oakland in July that is on the theme of Palestinian workers’ labor rights, but that instead promotes one of the big lies (along the lines of the “Elders of Zion”) that there was a “Zionist… collaboration with the Nazis,” as stated in the description of the event.
This perversion of the discussion of what could have been a legitimate topic is abhorrent to the core.
Kevin Levine | San Francisco
President’s twisted logic sounds mighty Islamophobic
I don’t question a person’s religious beliefs. At the height of the Orlando massacre, Omar Mateen allegedly described himself during a 911 call as an “Islamic soldier.” How dare we contradict that notion?
In his address to the nation following the massacre, President Obama told us that use of the term “radical Islam” may turn peaceable young Muslims into radicals and “make America less safe.” That sounds mighty Islamophobic to me.
If someone is afraid that the mere use of terminology is likely to cause normally peaceful people to take up weapons and murder their non-Muslim neighbors, that’s patently irrational. President Obama must believe that peaceable young Muslims are mentally unstable. If not, why would he think that the mere use of “radical Islam” would send them into a murderous rage?
If we have anything to fear, it would be Islamophobia itself, because it is, by definition, irrational. The president just helped us understand that.
Desmond Tuck | San Mateo