Grimm Fairy Tale

This column by Fred Grimm in the April 19 Miami Herald elicited my first-ever letter to a fellow columnist.

Here it is:

Dear Mr. Grimm,



This is a first for me at age 48. As a columnist myself, I refrain from hassling my colleagues. But your column today was simply astonishing.

You make the point, not by reasoning but as a casual assumption, that the Virginia Tech massacre reflected badly on the guns-at-work bill. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but even I can recognize when a conclusion is at exact odds with the evidence adduced.

A bunch of unarmed people are gunned down in their workplace by a madman and that is an argument against law-abiding people like college professors arming themselves at work? What am I missing here? Looks to me like a responsible legislature would immediately step in to make sure that armed citizens are in place to provide a bulwark against such atrocities.

I am not an NRA member but I respect them a great deal. They are a lobby of concerned citizens, essentially the same thing as a labor union, except they fight to keep people safe. I am 48, as I said, and I read the news with a fine-tooth comb ever since age 10. I do not recall a single instance where a major crime was committed by an NRA member. I do, however, recall many stories of rescues by NRA members.

This is a bad week for the NRA? Sad to say, crass as it sounds, nothing could be 'better' for the NRA.

Yours In Puzzlement,

Jay D. Homnick