Monday Letters: Deluge of guns makes police wary

Now that so many states are allowing concealed and open carry of guns, police officers are ever more likely to assume that any person they are confronting is an imminent threat to their lives. Such a dangerous cocktail means that police officers are ever more likely to use their firearms. Confronting people of color only adds to this toxic mix.

Mary F. Warren, Wheaton

Get rid of concealed carry

It was a matter of state pride that the Land of Lincoln was the last of the 50 to legalize conceal carry. That pride was shattered when Illinois caved in to the the gun fanatics, the gun manufacturers and their lobbyists to end that distinction. Illinois can regain a measure of pride by being the first to rescind conceal carry. Guns have no legal or moral place on amateurs in the public square.

Walt Zlotow, Glen Ellyn

Wrong ideology

Michael Barone’s column today lamenting the Supreme Court upholding affirmative action in college admissions claims it results in “less well prepared” students being admitted to prestigious institutions in which they may struggle. Of course, what Barone does not mention is that they are often “less well prepared” because conservatives like him fight tooth and nail to keep city grammar schools and high schools — often in neighborhoods still suffering from the vestiges of slavery and segregation — from being funded equally with those in the suburbs where the descendants of privilege reside and whom he believes deserve all of the prestigious admissions.

Sorry, Mr. Barone, but the cure for the illness conservatives like to conserve has to start somewhere. It is your ideology that requires it to start at what might be a less reliably generative place.

Joel Ostrow, Deerfield

Keep this in mind

The articles on military families and veteran suicides caused me to wonder why most Republican members of Congress voted down 43 bills in the past seven years which would have provided services to veterans and their families. Voters should keep this in mind when they go to the polls in November.

Jay Massey, Glenview

Misled by leaders

The British just published an exhaustive report longer than the War and Peace critiquing Tony Blair’s disastrous involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And, of course they discovered that it was based on the same phony claims that Sadam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks (wrong). Further that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. …. poison gas or nuclear material (wrong). So, Tony Blair, frequently called Bush’s “lapdog” because he followed him into Iraq, used the same bogus claims to get the British into longest war in American history. And, we still have 8,400 troops their dodging bullets, mortar rounds and IEDs.

But, what is worse is that our involvement helped to upset the tenuous balance between the Kurds, Sunis and Shias that matastesized into ISIS. And, they have now gone global killing innocent civilians in the name of some warped versipn of radical Islam. If only we had not been misled by our leaders.

Tom Minnerick, Elgin