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Other weapons than guns kill

To the editor:

On April 23, a man drove a van along a Toronto sidewalk killing 10 people. Canadians didn’t protest with signs saying, “Ban the van.” Automobiles are never blamed for murders like guns are.

A recent letter said assault rifles are weapons of mass destruction and should be banned. What about bolt-action rifles? The world’s most successful sniper used one.

“The White Sniper” by Tapio Saarelainen tells about Simo, a Finnish sniper in the 1939-1940 Winter War when the outnumbered Finns fought the invading Red Army of the Soviet Union. Simo killed 542 enemy soldiers (40 in one day) with his bolt-action rifle, a record for snipers that still stands.

War is evil but sometimes necessary. The Winter War is a perfect example of a nation’s survival depending on its ability to fight a tyrant’s army.

If Finland had been conquered, Stalin planned to deport most Finns to Siberia and resettle their homeland with Russians.

Sims outlived the USSR. He was born in 1905 when Finland was in the Russian Empire. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution brought Communist tyranny to Russia, and Dec. 6 that year Finland declared it independence. Simo died in 2002, 11 years after the Soviet Union collapsed. He lived 85 of his 97 years in a free and independent Finland.

Rapid-firing guns aren’t the only ones that are deadly in the hands of a criminal or soldier. A dozen people are just as dead if all 12 are killed in one day by an assault rifle or one per day in a 12-day period by a bolt-action, lever-action or single-shot rifle.

Are you safer if the neighborhood nut doesn’t own an assault rifle? Maybe he will use a motor vehicle as a weapon.

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