With regard to gun violence, America is at a crossroads. Congress can either choose to address it or face seeing the nation utterly consumed and further debased by it. It is painfully apparent that gun violence is evolving in terms of its predictability and ferocity. In fact, the horrific murders of 19 innocent children and two beloved teachers at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the second deadliest school shooting on record, is now but one of more than 2,000 school shooting incidents in this country since 1970.

In total, over 600 lives have been needlessly lost. Just as tragically, however, the murder of school children and teachers or perhaps patrons going to a movie theater, concert, shopping mall, or grocery store is going to happen again. It only remains to be seen when and where that tragedy occurs. So, Congress, no stranger to violence itself, has a duty to act and enact sensible restrictions on what has become the unfettered access to guns, including some of the most lethal weapons conceived by man to annihilate other human beings. To do otherwise constitutes a grave dereliction of duty to the public and a disgraceful abandonment and misinterpretation of anything remotely contemplated by the Second Amendment.

Jack Welch

Gales Ferry