Monday letters: Weaker laws lead to more Chicago shootings

The real reason Chicago had more shootings last year than Los Angeles and New York combined is that those cities have much stricter gun laws than we do. They have been strengthening their laws while we have been doing exactly the opposite. In just the past few years, Chicago went from having an absolute ban on possession of handguns, mandatory registration of firearms, and a prohibition on carrying concealed weapons to having none of these protections. We have normalized the ownership of guns. It should be no surprise that a lot more people are getting shot and killed than when we considered carrying a handgun to be anti-social behavior that only criminals engaged in, and when we punished it accordingly.

When Illinois legalized carrying concealed guns three and a half years ago, the gun industry promised that the ready availability of guns would lead to a dramatic decrease in crime, including violent crime. That promise was not kept. Fortunately, in the years since we made the mistake of legalizing the carrying of guns in public, we have learned from other states how we can undo our error. Other states, including New York and California, have enacted laws that restrict gun ownership and carrying far more severely than Illinois now does. Their experience has proved that those laws work. Every time the NRA challenged those laws, the courts upheld the laws. We now know that we can reenact many of the restrictions we had that used to keep us safe, and we can add further restrictions that will make us even safer. We no longer need to fear that a court might interfere with our legislature’s attempts to restore public safety.

Since making it legal for people to carry guns, thousands of Chicagoans have been shot and killed. There is no reason why we should not, having learned a terribly costly lesson, follow the example of other cities and correct our mistakes.

Lee Goodman, Northbrook

Why climate education matters

I was pleased to see the Sun-Times raise the issue of global warming at a precarious time in our history (“Editorial: Climate change a growing challenge for a new president” — Jan. 19). In the face of clear signals that the new administration will abruptly reverse direction on energy and climate, you appeal to President Donald Trump to reconsider.

But with presidents, and even more so with our elected senators and representatives, it is the popular will that really determines the future. A powerful network of contrarian think tanks and lobbying firms have successfully created doubt about the nature of global warming in the public mind. The most insidious falsehood they have propagated is that climate scientists are still unsure of the human influence on earth’s climate, and there is a so-called “robust debate” over that role.

This is a bald-faced lie.

Anyone working in the fields of climatology or related disciplines knows very well that only a handful of scientists with clear ideological or financial motivation claim some mysterious natural forces are causing global warming. You correctly noted that 2016 continued the decades-old trend of rising global temperatures. More than 19 out of every 20 scientists worldwide are convinced that this is due entirely to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning.

At Yale University, there is a group that studies public perception of climate change. Their research shows that the most potent determinant of a person’s view on global warming is whether or not they believe scientists mostly agree.

Educating the public about the scientific consensus is one of the most pressing tasks of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a worldwide non-partisan non-profit that works for legislative solutions to the climate crisis. As we often remind our volunteers, politicians do not create political will; citizens do. Politicians respond to it.

That’s why we thank the Sun-Times for highlighting climate change, and urge you to continue doing so.

Rick Knight, Illinois state co-coordinator,

Citizens’ Climate Lobby

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