Hundreds of millions of guns = hundreds of thousands of victims

The Trib's editorial 'And now, a massacre at Mercy Hospital' ends on this upbeat note: "The Mercy Hospital community will be a long time healing. Monday night, though, the lights of its windows were little beacons over Chicago’s South Side. There were patients to treat. There were lives to save." Please, Trib Editorial Board, no more meaningless, valueless editorials on Chicago's gun violence. If you cannot lead with an urgent demand for sane gun legislation to curb the most gun violent nation in the industrialized world, then say nothing at all. You have been AWOL in the gun availability issue, including machine gun assault weaponry and high capacity hand guns, from Day One of the gun control debate. Whether that's because it's largely a progressive Democratic issue or because of the capitalist mantra of unfettered free enterprise, regardless of innocents destroyed, or simple cluelessness is immaterial. Every day I enter Chicago I ponder if I'll hear gunfire and whether it will ensnare me. That is unacceptable to me and every citizen. When I visit my daughter in Germany I have no fear of gun violence because there are virtually no guns. It's that way in every other country I've visited in Europe and other places as well, including Cuba. If you cannot offer anything helpful on the unending crisis of hundreds of millions of guns, and billions of bullets, in the shooting gallery that is the United States of America, then please say nothing at all. Remember, some of those 'little beacons' you so charmingly mention at Mercy, shine in the rooms of Chicago's unending gunshot victims.