To the editor:

Regarding, “Lawmakers: Don’t blame youth suicide rates on guns” in Tuesday’s paper: The arguments of gun rights advocates, including those in our Legislature have become so absurd as to boggle the mind.

Lawmakers will not explore any measure to limit the easy access to guns by youth contemplating suicide!? The party line is guns are not to blame, it is video games, movies, lack of prayer in schools, and now, phones. Always, blame mental health issues. (A Republican-controlled Congress under President Trump in 2017 struck down a law restricting gun sales to those with diagnosed mental illnesses.)

Fine, blame all those things and more. But while sorting those out, we must keep deadly weapons out of the hands of children. As Wyatt Beckman pointed out, it is not an either/or proposition. We can do both. We must do something. Kansas now ranks 10th in youth suicide. When lawmakers rejected promoting keeping guns in lockboxes or even employing trigger guards, the hypocrisy and nonsense rose to the level of absolute absurdity!

Given inarguable and alarming facts, and given recommendations on courses of action, legislative progress on the issue was exactly nothing, just as it has been on issues of school shootings, mass killings and every issue relating to gun violence. This is how the gun lobby wishes it. If a child is hitting himself in the head with a hammer, the first thing parents will do is take away the hammer. Afterward, they can seek the cause for destructive behavior.

Mark Reaney,

Lawrence