Shelter Island Reporter Letters to the Editor: May 26, 2023

It’s the guns, stupid

To the Editor:

As a follow-up to the excellent, well written essay by Nancy Green on guns and children (May 11), as a veteran and physician from a level one trauma hospital in Chicago, I make the following proposal:

The problem is the guns — so it should be made illegal in the U.S. to own or manufacture semi-automatic weapons that load from beneath the frame. This would exclude the use of high capacity ammunition clips, AR-15s, AK-47s, etc., which are the favorite weapons of mass killers, and would also ban Glock, Sig-Sauer, Beretta and similar handguns, the instruments used in most homicides and suicides.

None of these are for “sport” shooting; they are engineered to kill humans. Not Bambi or mallard ducks. 

Deer rifles, shotguns and Smith and Wesson 38 mm “detective revolvers” could be exempted for those living in rural areas. It will be much cheaper in the long term to fund a national buy-back of all these weapons than to pay the annual recurring health and funeral costs due to the current endemic of gun violence.

Anything less than this is akin to trying to stop a major arterial hemorrhage with Band-Aids. To paraphrase President Clinton speaking about the economy: “It’s the guns stupid, it’s the guns.”

Let us not wait to act. We do not want Uvalde to be replicated on Shelter Island or some nearby town on the North Fork.

JIM WEBSTER, MD, Shelter Island

Press review

To the Editor:

Last week’s paper was fun. I tuned into Channel 22 for Town Hall meeting, to double check the CHB’s, WAC, ADU’s information. Seems the meetings are becoming quite entertaining!

I don’t get the large house moratorium at 5,999 square-feet. Why not 6,000 square-feet? Am I missing something here? I suppose so.

Then the front page with a fabulous photo by Eleanor. And I’m happy the [school] budget passed and my candidates were elected. However the $1 million dollar differential with what we voted on? Someone please explain. And kudos to the board to take care of their own septic business — sounds like a splendid idea.

And then the wonderful column giving our library an extension boost. It brought back many childhood memories of the Sayville library. Google the history of that library. My connection was with St Ann’s Episcopal Church, who decided Sayville needed a library. I had an uncle on the library board in the 1950s. It could almost be called, “The Little Library that Grew.”

I must comment on the letter regarding Taylor’s Island. P.A.T. Hunt should be canonized.

If anyone tells me they were bored last weekend, I guess I tell them they should have read our weekly Reporter.

Be kind to one another.

GEORGIANA KETCHAM, Shelter Island