If you take Kathryn Mickle’s excellent letter to the editor ("Mental illness is problem, not guns") of Feb. 6 and fuse it with the Cleo the cat story and you have the answer to Kathryn’s question. Whoever tied a shoelace around the cat’s neck and attached it to a makeshift gallows framed with branches is your next killer. I only wish the police could follow up on the evil, sick excuse for a human being who did this. These are the people our government should be checking on.
As for the horror of Sandy Hook, I believe the mother of the killer is responsible for the killing of innocents. She’s the one who legally bought the guns, she’s the one who put them in her mentally ill son’s hands, brought him to a shooting range and taught him how to use a gun. She’s the one who kept these guns in her house without locking them up in a safe where only she knew the combination.
Who are these killers? All of the following: Evil, tortured, physically and verbally abused or influenced by their parents, family, peers, movies, videos, medication, lack of medication, religious beliefs and just plain mental illness. They will use a gun, a knife, a rock, fire, choking, a baseball bat -- even Obama’s drone.
So how do you stop the terrible mass killings? You can’t. Unless someone can check every abused person in the United States and determine when they are going to snap there is no way to stop them. Can a parent, teacher or neighbor warn the police about someone acting strange? Sure, but then what? Until they kill someone, you can’t lock them up. How many policemen would it take to watch thousands of demented people?
However, we can protect the innocent. We can have armed guards in schools. We can lock doors. We can have armed women in their homes to protect themselves and their children. Movies and malls can have detectors at all of their entrances. Our government better stop worrying about how many bullets a citizen can have for their guns and start worrying about the crazy person who is in that person’s home. Are they worried that the intruder will be killed? What about the innocent person in their own home?
To the Adams police -- try to find the person who did this terrible thing to Cleo. Because a true killer can use a gun or a shoelace. BEVERLY GIANOKAKIS