To the Editor: Letter writer generates fear about gun limitations

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Having been called out as an "internet troll" and "animal" by Doyle Phillips, I feel
compelled to respond. Mr. Phillips is angry because I called out the bile in his June 4 letter, in which
he personally attacked both Dr. William Feeman and Professor V.N. Krishnan for writing letters
criticizing America’s fetishized culture of guns and the undeniable wake of death it has been leaving.
Second Amendment extremists are a mounting terrorist threat in America, most dramatically reflected in
the murder of three individuals just outside Las Vegas over the weekend. Our politicians have been able
to do nothing, and insatiable gun extremists like Mr. Phillips grow more angry and unbalanced in their
protestations after every shooting, sowing fear in the rest of the population, which I believe is their
aim.
Dr. Feeman addressed the question as a public health concern, as is his right. Prof. Krishnan rightly
pointed out the embarrassing discrepancy between the rate of gun ownership and violence in the U.S. and
that of other countries in the developed world, the ones that are closest to us in culture, affluence,
and constitutional democracy. Mr. Phillips’ letter used a false equivalence between accidental medical
deaths and intentional gun slayings to claim that doctors are more dangerous than gun owners; he then
criticized Professor Krishnan non sequitur for not mentioning a developing country with a lot of
violence. He concluded by attacking the mayor as a tyrant and suggesting the letter writers were his
"court jesters."
There is much to say on the bind the city of Bowling Green found itself in when confronted by
discrepancies between state and local rules regarding Concealed-Carry in public parks. With his bullying
and abusive tone, Mr. Phillips has not helped the cause of his fellow gun enthusiasts.
As a concerned citizen who is informed on the issues and seeks to express his honest opinion, I am not a
troll. I am not a Marxist, I am not an extremist, and certainly not "loony." As a Yale
graduate and Berkeley PhD, I am not "intellectually disadvantaged." Mr. Phillips’ seething
contempt for higher education is more in keeping with talk radio than with reality.
I hope others will join me in condemning Mr. Phillips’ evident low character and inability to discuss a
controversial topic using the basic rules of decency, let alone rational discourse.
Christopher Williams
Sylvania, formerly of Bowling Green

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