To the Editor:

Here is my wish list:

Peace on earth. Everyone loves everyone without exception. No crime. No poor people. Everyone possesses great integrity. Everyone gets whatever is good for them. Everyone loves God. There is no evil. And anything else that is positive but escapes me this moment.

Unfortunately, my list is unrealistic and an exercise in foolishness. And that is precisely what those like our governor, the Providence mayor, NEARI executive director Bob Walsh and NEA vice president Becky Pringle (“schools are not prisons” – what?) and others are doing when they ridicule and dismiss those who want to harden schools to thwart the evil miscreants who want to shoot up kids in our schools. These deviants are vicious but they are not stupid. Hey, no guns there to stop me from my own “human turkey shoot.”

Killings in schools would cease immediately if teachers who are military veterans and others who are qualified get training and have ready access to secured firearms in case of a mortal threat as happened recently in Florida. There would not have been 17 fatalities in the Florida killing if that brave physical education teacher had a firearm, and certainly not if there had been others to assist him in destroying that killer. (The police deputies stayed outside.)

Certainly, other prohibitions need attention as well, but the most immediate is hardening the schools. Action will be delayed and denied and more kids will be murdered because the political scorecard is really the all-important thing, isn’t it Democrats?

(My military training included qualifying with a weapon. Difficult as it is parents need to consider this, if I were the teacher of your teenage young son or daughter, is it not better to have me armed at that critical moment to protect your children – or not be armed and all go on “wishing” that schools just should not be “visited” by these killers?)

Sam Parente

Cranston