Letter: It’s not a gun-control problem

As expected, liberals and Democrats are continuing their call for greater gun control in the wake of recent shootings.

Jeremy Brigham ('The many facets of gun violence,” July 10) is blaming the states surrounding Illinois for providing firearms to the murderous gangbangers in Chicago. Yet to call for greater gun control is to avoid the roots of the problem of the vast majority of violence in America - gang wars over illegal drugs, money and territory in America's largest cities.

The most violent cities in the United States have been run by Democrats for generations. In fact, if one were to remove the 10 most violent Democrat-controlled cities from U.S. murder statistics, the United States would have one of the lowest murder rates in the world. While this information should be an uncomfortable truth for them, they don't appear to care about their abject failure of political and moral leadership - particularly in the black community. Democrats always mean well, even when President Barack Obama and Eric Holder ran guns into Mexico under their Fast and Furious project (which ultimately was used to provide a justification for greater gun control here in the U.S.). However, their plan backfired and ended up killing at least 200 Mexican citizens.

Wayne Swanson

Cedar Rapids