Photo by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.

Another L.A. Times letter to the editor, because our voices matter:

Re “‘American Sniper’ killed at gun range,” Feb. 4

According to gun fanatics everywhere who want to put weapons in every school, the more guns and training you have, the safer you are.

Now we have Kyle, one of the best-trained experts on guns who, by the National Rifle Assn.‘s logic, was at one of the safest possible places — a shooting range. And he is shot and killed by a gun. Oh, I mean by a person.

Maybe it’s time to rethink that argument.

Marco Fuentes

Houston

Now your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin, who asks the same question I’ve been asking, “Why Does the Cry for Gun Control Become Impassioned Only When White Kids Are Shot?”

The Sandy Hook massacre was a horrifying result of the collateral damage that results when a gun industry combines with psychologically paranoid white guys to dominate politics at the federal and state level.   Like almost all mass shootings that ignite the national indignation, the perpetrator in Newtown was white as well as the victims. [...]

Remember, it’s not just the “crazies” or the “bad guys” that fire off their guns and kill people. [...]

More importantly, there is a side of the “the more guns, the safer we are” agenda that is generally ignored in terms of precipitating a call for taking on the gun lobby and gun industry, who value membership dues and profits over lives.

Because as the hometown of President Obama has evidenced over the last few decades, it is minority young people in urban areas who are caught in the crossfire and die or are wounded by gunfire in epidemic proportions … It’s both a by-product of the gun industry and gun store selling of hi-tech weapons to gang members without sufficient measures to stem the flow – and the social-political neglect that has left vast swaths of urban America economically decimated.  There’s always violence in destitute areas that provide only two job opportunities of any significance: selling drugs and being a police officer patrolling the economic wastelands like an occupying military force. [...]

The recent slaying of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton who appeared as a member of a band featured at Obama’s second inaugural, but was gunned down [...]

The highly respected “Chicago Reporter,” an investigative newsletter on issues relating to urban affairs and minorities, recently ran an article headlined, “Chicago’s homicide epidemic is a youth homicide epidemic.” [...]

Her death is one single tragedy, but it’s part of a larger story about gun violence in Chicago. Young people are the No. 1 target when it comes to the city’s sky-high homicide rate.

From 2008 through 2012, nearly half of Chicago’s 2,389 homicide victims were killed before their 25th birthday [...]

The grief of a black or Latino Mom or Dad or sister or brother or friend is no less devastating than it is for a white parent. [...]

The blood that flows is red, and as a country, we must feel the loss with one grieving heart.

Only then will we overcome the toxic, deadly legacy of a gun-crazed pathology among white males and a pernicious, greed driven gun industry.

Please read the rest here.