The gun-crazy U.S. - and all nations - should shoot down the trigger-happy insanity by banning the sale of handguns and rifles, except for police, protective agency and military use.
Forget mere, useless gun control.
Should we not all finally unite after the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre?
I know it's impossible to curb human nature, but perhaps with this one dramatic action we can exert a globe-shaking impact toward peace.
Gun lunacy has weighed on my mind since my newspaper career in Detroit in the 1950s. I had my fill as a police and court reporter after senseless shooting deaths over such trivialities as failure to give a buddy a drag on a cigarette or disputes over a winning poker hand.
What burns me now is this tragedy just a day after your banner story of Dec. 14 reporting how a house-partying young man in Kelowna set afire a drunken 18-year-old passed out on a kitchen floor. Is everything going crazier?
Newtown's daily newspaper captured the town's horrific shock in its front-page headline: "Shattered."
Why can't everyone campaign for worldwide uniformity in weapons registries and restrictions?
Nothing's impossible. To those who dream, there's no such word. Could not the United Nations promote this?
Couple this with worldwide action on mental-health issues in connection with the gun-violence epidemic.
Some critics argue sensational media coverage has projected attention-getting heroic images of the killers and spurred similar ideas in disturbed minds. But the free flow of guns pervades the U.S., where it's estimated citizens possess 300 million handguns, or more than one for each of  America's 200 million inhabitants.
Managing Editor Jon Manchester's editorial of Dec. 18 posed the challenging question: Can the U.S. quit its gun addiction?
Guns for all solve nothing - certainly didn't for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., nor Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln.
Consider all they accomplished - King's civil rights movement, producing America's 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, Gandhi's "soul force" movement toward India's independence from Britain, and Lincoln's emancipation proclamation freeing American slaves in 1865. And none carried a
pistol.
King emulated Gandhi's movement of  civil disobedience through "peaceful non-resistance." Oppressors were redeemed through an irresistible social weapon that ignited social justice by twinning love with peaceable force.
I once interviewed King, whom I esteem as the greatest American. He vowed to "do whatever it takes" to achieve full equality and opportunity for black Americans. That meant 65 imprisonments, more than any American.
Indeed, his life was modelled after his two foremost heroes, Jesus and Gandhi - and all three were slain for their beliefs by gun-firing madmen. So, too, JFK and brother Robert F. Kennedy.
Who needs guns in our allegedly enlightened civilization?
Wally Dennison,
Kelowna