Wider gun availability won’t save lives

Re "Open border, tight gun control" (Letters, Jan. 9): Letter writer Will Carpentier seems to be under the impression that open borders and tight gun control laws allowed the assault on the Charlie Hebdo office in France to succeed.

Since it appears that the alleged terrorists were born and raised in France, I think that undermines the argument that open borders contributed to the attack.

As for gun control laws being a contributory factor, I suppose that the strict gun control laws in Texas combined with a lack of armed guards were responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

Even had every single journalist been armed because of loose gun restrictions, the terrorists probably would have taken that possibility into account and simply used another technique such as a truck bomb like that used by Timothy McVeigh.

Don’t loosen gun laws

Letter writer Will Carpentier seems to suggest that looser gun control laws might have prevented the horrific attacks in France. He may be right. However, I would venture to guess that most the French populace would take their gun-related death rates, which are less than a third of U.S. rates) over ours, even when faced with the deadly violence of these recent attacks.

How save are we?

Letter writer Will Carpentier suggests a connection between tight gun control, which the writer thinks left the cartoonists helpless, and France's open border. The implication of the letter is that American are in danger becasue we have open borders and if we had gun control it would be even more dangerous. The Kouachi brothers were born in France of Algerian parents. The cartoonists had an armed guard present. France does not have open borders unless you mean their borders are not completely sealed. By the reasoning of this letter, we are obviously the safest country in the world and our 30,000 gun deaths per year merely a meaningless statistic.

Don’t politicize Charlie Hebdo

When politicizing a tragedy like the Charlie Hebdo shooting one might want to at least get some basic facts correct unlike letter writer Will Capentier. Attributing the attack to open borders makes absolutely no sense when the two killers were born in France and were French citizens. Further attributing the attack to France's tight gun control laws ignores the fact that France has a gun homicide rate over 14 times lower than that of the US and considerably fewer mass public shootings.