Hold gun industry accountable for all firearms violence

Regarding the gun conversation in Letters to the Editor, I have something to add: Repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

The law shields gun manufacturers and sellers from lawsuits and liability resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse of a firearm.

Gun advocates can have their Second Amendment all they want but give me the right to live in a safe community anywhere the way I want to without carrying a gun.

Give me my right to protection and retribution from a product that is deadly dangerous.

If I get hurt or killed by a gun product I want the right and I want my family to have the right to sue the manufacturer, the retailer, the owner or the parents of the minor who owned that gun.

I want the right to hold someone monetarily accountable for being a victim of a deadly dangerous product that should never inflict pain on me.

Give the American public that right.

This will tame the immorally out-of-control gun industry to become more responsible in selling its products.

It will also bankrupt gun

companies that put money over lives.

Guy Vigier, Novato

Deadlier than opioids

Given the research on it, why isn’t there more press coverage regarding deaths from alcohol use?

There are more alcohol-related deaths than drug overdoses,

including opioids. Why aren’t we looking at all the drug risks in our culture, especially the one that does the most damage — alcohol?

What cultural variables are motivating the demonization of some lethal drugs yet not the biggest killer on the block? Does the focus on opiates serve as a distraction from the ravaging effects of alcohol on Americans,

year after year, decade after decade?

What promotes the intense media coverage of what is an opioid crisis while the most serious public health threat from the world of drugs is not mentioned? And make no mistake, alcohol is a drug.

There were 106,000 deaths from drug overdoses in 2021, according to the Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention. But there was an average of 140,000 deaths a year from excessive alcohol use from 2015 through 2019, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

I’m just sayin’.

Who is woke?

The Republicans in the House under Speaker Kevin McCarthy are now targeting what they identify as “wokewaste” in the federal budget, but they refuse to provide a logically consistent definition of “woke.”

Whenever I ask someone on the right to define woke, I usually get one of three answers:

• Inserting race into every discussion — which makes White Supremacists woke.

• Participating in “cancel culture” — which makes anyone demanding that books about LGBTQ+ and other books be taken off library shelves woke.

• Virtue signaling — which makes every MAGA-supporter who flies an American flag from the bed of his pickup woke.

A little help here? Does woke simply mean politically correct but with fewer syllables that is easier to spell?

Stephanie Frey/Getty Images/iStockphoto The recent mass shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, among others, have readers searching everywhere they can in hopes of finding solutions to the deadly problem.