Trump and the NRA

Re: This promise is simple, not rhetorical, Rex Murphy, Jan. 21 I agree with Rex Murphy that Donald Trump is no orator, but there was a curiously oracular flourish that, to me, rang with irony: the line “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” This strongest of all words, “carnage” was applied to the sad realities of “inner- city mothers and children trapped in poverty,” “rusted- out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and “the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives.”

Yet, unless workers deprived of their jobs are unsupported, get depressed and decide to kill themselves or, even worse, their families, the word “carnage” is a bit much. Might I ask if the incoming president is aware that, since the 1980s, the American gun epidemic has cost more American lives than all of the fallen U. S. soldiers in the wars of the nation’s history, even if one includes the incredibly bloody Civil War? To talk back plainly to Mr. Trump: l ose your unholy ties to the NRA, and recover the former version of yourself that once pushed a ban on assault rifles in New York. Might this mercurial new president come to his senses on guns, or will he push through the rogue NRA’s priority of ending gun- free zones in schools and at sporting events? If he does the latter, his presidency will be a total disaster to those who fall in pointless gun violence, as well as to their families and friends, their fellow Americans. Ron Charach, Toronto